If you find yourself constantly questioning your abilities and feeling like you’re “not good enough”, that’s not healthy humility; it’s self-doubt holding you back. And you’re not alone. Low self-worth and self-esteem are incredibly common experiences that can significantly impact our lives.
Confidence is about believing in your abilities and worth. Building unshakeable self-belief can be a game-changer, influencing everything from your relationships to your career success. It’s a cornerstone of overall well-being, contributing to a fulfilling and meaningful life.
In this post, we’ll explore some common confidence issues and introduce you to Solution Focused Hypnotherapy, a therapeutic approach designed to help you build confidence and overcome self-doubt.
Common confidence challenges
Feeling unsure of yourself is a common human experience. Whether it’s doubting your abilities, fearing judgment, or struggling with self-worth, confidence issues can impact many areas of life. Here are some examples of how a lack of confidence can manifest:
- Low self-esteem: Feeling inadequate, making it difficult to believe in your own capabilities and worth.
- Fear of failure: Avoiding challenges due to the fear of not succeeding, it can hold you back from taking risks and pursuing your goals.
- Negative self-talk: Criticising yourself and focusing on shortcomings. It can create a self-fulfilling prophecy, reinforcing doubts and limiting beliefs.
- Social anxiety: Difficulty interacting with others due to fear of judgment can lead to isolation and missed opportunities.
- Imposter syndrome: Doubting your achievements and feeling like a fraud, even if you appear successful.
- Career confidence: Lack of belief in your professional abilities, even when everyone tells you how great you are.
- Relationship confidence: Struggling with self-worth can make it difficult to find, build, and maintain healthy relationships.
- Physical appearance confidence: Body image issues and self-consciousness can lead to social anxiety and avoidance of certain activities.
What causes us to lack confidence?
Put simply, a lack of confidence is an unkind story we’ve told ourselves so many times that we believe it’s true. To understand it better, we need to look at what’s going on in the brain:
- Every time we have a thought, the brain’s neurones form a connection. For example: “I didn’t do well in my test today.” In an ideal world, the thought would stop there. We’d simply do our best next time.
- However, if we ruminate over the negative thought, our brain repeats the connection over and over until it forms a pathway in our mind. This is where a thought can become a belief. “I’m not clever enough to pass the test.”
- Over time, if a negative belief goes unchallenged, its pathway becomes entrenched. The brain can travel down that connection more quickly and easily, leading to more harmful thoughts about ourselves and unhelpful behaviours that further intensify those negative beliefs. “I’m a failure… What’s the point in trying?”
You can see how a simple thought gone rogue, over time, can lead to a harmful belief about ourselves, one that has no basis in reality but can rock our confidence to the core.
It’s important to understand that when we’re lacking in confidence, we tend to operate from our primitive brain. The primitive brain evolved to keep us safe from perceived threats. It’s great at protecting us from sudden dangers, like a bicycle that swerves onto the pavement in our direction; the primitive brain is what makes us jump out of the way before we’ve even registered what’s coming at us. Unfortunately, it’s not so accurate at judging other threats, particularly in our modern world. It can’t tell the difference between a swerving cyclist and a test score.
Two things can happen here:
- When we constantly anticipate failure and engage in negative self-talk, we can’t perform at our best.
- The primitive brain tries to keep us safe by holding us back. It does so by engaging in avoidance behaviours and procrastination. We might then steer clear of challenges altogether.
These experiences can further feed into our low confidence. It’s a cycle can be difficult to break without new strategies to build resilience and self-belief.
How do we break the low-confidence cycle?
This is the clever bit: we use the same mechanism that caused us to lack in confidence in the first place. And we turn it on its head. Just as negative thoughts create negative pathways, positive thoughts and actions can create new, empowering neural connections.
In Solution Focused Hypnotherapy (SFH), we recognise the brain’s incredible ability to adapt and change, a concept known as neuroplasticity. By focusing on desired outcomes and identifying achievable steps, SFH helps you harness this power to build confidence.
Here’s how:
- Identifying desired outcomes: When we create a picture of your ideal confident state, this provides a clear target for your brain to work towards.
- Focusing on strengths and resources: By highlighting your existing strengths and resources, we reinforce positive neural pathways, building a foundation for confidence.
- Creating positive visualisations: Guided imagery techniques in trance help you create vivid mental pictures of success, strengthening neural connections associated with confidence.
- Challenging negative self-talk: In hypnosis, we can replace negative thought patterns with positive ones, creating new neural pathways.
- Setting achievable goals: Breaking down larger goals into smaller, manageable steps helps you experience success, reinforcing positive neural connections.
- Building self-efficacy: By focusing on past successes and capabilities, we enhance your belief in your ability to overcome challenges, strengthening the neural pathways associated with competence.
Alicia: a case study
When Alicia (not her real name) came in to see me, she looked crushed. Her self-esteem was at an all-time low. She’d spent a lifetime telling herself things like “I can’t do that” or “I’m not good enough.” Over the years, these beliefs became so entrenched that they coloured every aspect of her life: her family, her work, even the things she used to care about.
For example, Alicia loved volunteering in her community garden, spending time with people from the neighbourhood and tending to their shared green space. However, she felt that they could be doing more to bring people into the garden. She thought about joining the committee. But in the process, the old stories she told herself piped up. She experienced a surge of self-doubt, anxiety, and couldn’t go through with it.
This “failure” caused a lot of pain, it reinforced her sense of inadequacy, and she’d stepped back from volunteering.
In our sessions, we clearly identified Alicia’s goals and how she wanted to feel: confident, self-assured, and calm. We reflected together on her strengths: she’s well-liked and fantastic at organising events. We visualised what it would mean for her to be more involved in the community garden, the sense of achievement and fulfilment that she would enjoy. Next, we broke down her goal into smaller, manageable steps.
Within 8 weeks, Alicia had joined the committee to great applause. As it turned out, they’d been secretly hoping she’d apply for years. She had a date in the diary for a children’s festival in the summer. And her new-found confidence had spilled over into other areas of her life too. She had a long-overdue conversation with her partner, felt more assertive with the kids, set better boundaries with her manager at work — and even got her employer to fund a gazebo. By the time we finished our work together, she was standing tall and felt invincible.
I feel like a completely different person now. My confidence has soared, and I’m tackling challenges with a newfound sense of belief in myself.
Alicia
Low confidence can feel like an uphill battle, but it doesn’t have to be a permanent state. By understanding how the brain works and harnessing its incredible ability to change, you can overcome self-doubt and build unshakeable confidence. Solution Focused Hypnotherapy offers a powerful approach to reprogram your mind and create a more positive, empowered story for your life. The journey to confidence starts with a single step. Are you ready to take yours?
