28/07/2018
Of late, my wife Sandy has been running a series of workshops called “Living to Your FULL Potential”.
At the workshop last weekend she asked if I would speak.
The theme of the workshop was “Building Self Trust” so I decided to deliver one of my unpublished blog posts entitled...
“Why Confidence is the Polar Opposite of Panic and Lack of Self Trust”.
Panic is overwhelming fear. So overwhelming, that you almost completely surrender control. And when you are gripped with this much fear, trusting yourself feels impossible.
Big statement? Well let’s unpack a few things we know about panic...
Panic robs you of reality and distorts the truth, flooding you with feelings and emotions that amplify the situation.
It’s really difficult to arrest.
When you are in such high emotion, your thoughts become erratic. The stress causes you to search for the quick way out. Adrenalin rises and instinct tries to guide you, but without a previous pattern to follow, you make choices which are not thought through.
You could unwittingly put yourself into danger which further amplifies the stress.
You have to look at your current feelings and emotions from the outside and recognise that they are just feelings and emotions. And of course, if you are struggling to trust yourself, making decisions is very risky.
So to help with decision making you really need a concrete check list to remove the emotion.
I think that to bring about change, you need to use your logical brain and look beyond the current circumstances to a space where you were not in panic. You need to put your trust in that outside version of yourself and you need to channel that logical sense of control and override the overwhelm.
If you look at the circumstance logically, you can weigh up the mechanics of it and solve the problem. But logical and mechanical is devoid of emotions and as long as feelings and emotions are in play, you will struggle.
Look, I’m not saying that this is easy. It takes a strong mind to take control. Once you are in a hyper vigilant state you need to use your energy in a positive manner. If you go negative you will fall into a depression and usually you’ll swing there very quickly.
By using your energy positively, you can move to the side and stabilise yourself. A bit like when swimming in a rip, the only safe way out is sideways. This knowledge actually allows you to make a strategy for taking back control.
I don’t think this is a simple task though... and for someone who is in constant overwhelm and constantly suffering from high Adrenalin levels, coming back from there takes more than a mindset shift.
Trust in this case is skewed by long term stress and low self confidence is often the result.
I had a panic attack the other day and I found myself in an altered state.
I was not my usual self and had begun to forget things. The task I was doing should have taken about 3 hours but ended up taking 5. I kept repeating steps because I thought I had made mistakes or couldn’t believe the results I was getting. I was going over and over things, unable to make the right choices. I was confused and could not confidently decide what I should do. All of this caused me to have a churning sensation in my gut which kind of added to the panic.
This was new territory for me. I’ve only ever been this disoriented once before and surprisingly, even in the confusion the other day, I began recognising the signs from my previous experience. My memories began to underpin the feelings and validate them. It was like an anchor and I was building a learned response into a pattern.
This is not what I wanted to do. This pattern is negative. If I allow this to take control and I respond this way, every time I feel this way I become confused and despondent.
I believe this is what happens to all of us when we allow it to. We get discouraged and allow negative words spoken over us to lead us. Our self talk becomes someone else’s words.
It’s true, everything we learn from birth is by osmosis. It’s only when we get to school that we begin to change this pattern. But we never completely break out of it. It’s deep seated and probably divinely designed. We were created to be this way but the intent was most likely to learn in a positive, loving environment.
Our confidence is in those who breathed life into us and those who we are surrounded by. We take this confidence and apply it to our surroundings and the people in it and begin to form our knowledge through this filter.
If our upbringing has been harsh and deprived, that’s the baseline for our common view. We build on this with our own innate individuality, creating the self we feel most comfortable with.
We then gravitate to those around us who mirror or closely resemble ourselves, which bolsters our comfort within ourselves.
So through unpacking all of this I actually taught myself a lesson about confidence.
I discovered that confidence is actually a consequence of trust; trusting yourself, trusting your knowledge, trusting your skill and ability. If your knowledge, skill and ability is solid and true you will naturally be confident.
If you don’t trust yourself, you will constantly second guess yourself. This slows your productivity and wastes time. You cannot reach the outcome you are looking for and you keep going over and over looking for perfection.
And perfection is a pursuit in self torment. I have created things in the past which have been so micro managed that even now, when I look back at them, I see flaws. Nobody else see’s them, but I still think, “If I just tweak that bit...” This is a pattern which I have embedded into my way of doing things. It is a counterproductive pattern.
It was this pattern which started me thinking about confidence and it’s relationship with self trust and fear.
I am coming to the conclusion that fear is actually motivational and self trust is the evidence of it. The positive outworking of both of these is confidence. And on the negative, it is to stagnate and idle in an ever diminishing comfort zone until you become so irrelevant to your surroundings that you isolate yourself`.
PS. Sorry for the long post. FB in their wisdom have elected to make notes inaccessible on mobile devices.
