What do you expect from a snake?
My favorite quote about confidence goes like this:
Confidence occurs when the insidious self-perception that you aren’t able is trumped by the stark reality of your achievements.
The Confidence Code by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman
The first time I read this quote I literally dropped the book. I had been trying to figure out how to say this for years. Notice the deliberate framing of confidence: What stands between us and owning our confidence is snakelike. It gets in all the crevices in our brains and tells us we aren’t worthy. BS.
Seriously. BS.
Listen. That voice was deliberately planted in your head by the foot soldiers of the patriarchy who insisted that that your lived experience wasn’t real and it certainly wasn’t the truth. They stole your best ideas, crediting other foot soldiers with them instead. They talked over you every time you opened your mouth. They refused to promote you when you had the best match of proven skills and achievements. They promised you, “You’ll get there one day.” As if.
Fact: You’ve been conditioned to accept this treatment from a young age. It started when you were told to be a good girl. It continued the first time you were told to smile when you didn’t want to. And it persisted when you were told “good” girls don’t act like that. It insisted that good girls don’t do things that upset the balance of power that is the patriarchy.
Lord have mercy.
How on earth were you ever supposed to own your magnificence?
Then, you entered the workforce, the ultimate, and least subtle, distillation of patriarchal ideas and attitudes. You worked hard. You produced powerful, exceptional work that you’re still proud of (even if you’ve forgotten). But you didn’t look like those foot soldiers or talk like them or move like them.
And your work was dismissed. In meetings, they appropriated your work and acted as if it was theirs. It continued until, eventually, you lost your agency. You lost your belief that you have a right to have control over your own career.
Girl. That was their whole agenda. It still is.
Don’t let them win!
Take back your agency, take back your work, take back your achievements, take back your power, and reclaim your confidence.
Okay. Okay. I hear you thinking “How do I even begin to recover any piece of my confidence?”
You do it with words. You do it with validation. You do it by reclaiming your hard won successes.
Words have power – like that insidious voice in your head and what it tells you.
Fight back against that lying voice in your head.
Do it by writing down the two projects you’re most proud of (do this work by hand so it’s sticky – the projects and work that you know are exemplary. Then jot down a couple of anecdotes about why you were committed to delivering an exceptional result and what you did to accomplish just that. Then write about how you feel about it now, today. Don’t skip this step!
This practice (and it is a practice, so keep doing it) automatically helps you recover your story, your agency, and your confidence.
The money move?
Share it with someone you trust so they can reflect your power back to you. And, be ready, because they will reflect your fabulousness back to you. This also helps the facts of your successes stick in your head while it starts extinguishing that insidious voice.
The reality is it’s easy to succumb to the seductive insidious voice because it’s hard to believe in your own greatness. It’s easy to succumb until someone you trust and who believes in you tells you it’s BS – and tells you why.
There’s a bonus.
When you invest time in physically reclaiming the power of your achievements, you are refreshing your memory and reloading the reality of those achievements into your frontal cortex. It becomes easier to recover, own, and talk about the power of your work because you took the time to write it out.
Try this at home.
Share what you write with your biggest supporters, in a group, or one at a time. Let them shine the light on you. Then get back to me and let me know how it went. Let me know what you’re feeling.
“Confidence occurs when the insidious self-perception that you aren’t able is trumped by the stark reality of your achievements.” – Katty Kay, Claire Shipman
I see you, girl. I’m here for you.
Never Settle,
Becky