If Your Goal Is To Be More Confident As You Get Older, Say Goodbye To These 5 Habits
How to get your confidence and mojo back.
Nickolas Nikolic | Unsplash Do you seem to have lost your confidence somewhere — and want to be more confident as you get older? You can thank "Amy" for those confidence killers. Amy is your Amygdala.
This almond-shaped structure is part of your ancient limbic brain, and its sole purpose is to keep you safe. It's in charge of the fight, flight, or freeze response in your brain.
Your amygdala unconsciously alerts you to danger nearby. "Amy" just wants to protect you and keep you out of harm's way. This danger might be a snake in the grass, but it also might interpret your mean boss as a threat. Or a judgmental colleague, or a critical spouse — you get the idea.
All of this internal dialogue can easily keep you feeling stuck and not able to move forward with confidence. Left unchecked, "Amy" (i.e., your fears) will run you ragged and leave you filled with regret. But when you see how your fears are hurting your confidence, you'll be able to move past it.
If your goal is to be more confident as you get older, say goodbye to these habits:
1. Finding the negative in everything
"Nothing is ever quite right." "Something is always wrong."
Are you finding yourself always weighed down by a constant state of dissatisfaction and discontent that leaves you complaining about how you can’t do something right?
This habit of discontent can easily lead to a habit of busyness to avoid the dissatisfaction in your life, creating a vicious cycle. These negative thoughts and habits keep your body in a constant state of stress, as well.
Over time, this constant state of "dis-ease" can lead to disease in a host of different ways. Find the good things that are going right in your life and focus your thoughts there, instead. Even if it’s a little thing, gratitude is a powerful force.
It’s important to know that your positive thoughts create a release of happy chemicals in your body — dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. All of these have positive health benefits.
2. Ruminating and/or catastrophizing
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When "Amy" latches onto a negative idea, it makes your mind spin and spin and spin around that negative thought. Playing out all the worst-case scenarios of what could go wrong, leaving you with "what ifs" and "shoulds."
Instead of expecting the worst, focus on the good things that can happen and what that goodness can lead to. Spiral your thoughts upward in a positive direction, while focusing your mind on what is possible.
A 2021 study found that catastrophizing can significantly impact daily life by causing increased anxiety, avoidance behaviors, strained relationships, and decreased performance in various areas due to the constant anticipation of adverse outcomes. Mindfulness meditation can help individuals become more aware of their negative thoughts and develop skills to manage them.
3. Surrounding yourself with toxic people
If you’re surrounded by negative people in various places in your life, you must understand the impact they're having on your mind and body. The science of epigenetics has proven that a toxic environment of negative energy — whether that's mental, emotional, or physical — has a detrimental impact on your actual physiology, as well as your attitude.
In turn, it can change how effectively — or ineffectively — your body's 50 trillion cells function. Notice who is bringing you down or lifting you in your day-to-day relationships.
It might be time to purge some not-so-healthy relationships from your life or at least decrease the amount of time you’re spending with them so they don’t impact your well-being.
You can also surround yourself with visual reminders of things that lift you and make you happy, like fresh flowers or a favorite picture. These visual cues can have a calming effect to help bring your body back to a more relaxed state.
4. Focusing on failure
Failure is how you learn, but when you constantly focus on what you’re doing wrong, then it can pull you down the rabbit hole of "not-enough-ness," leading to deeply rooted self-doubt and fear about your abilities.
Learn what you need to learn from your mistakes and move on.
Apply that learning as you envision your successful next steps in your mind’s eye. This pre-paves your success in your mind as you continue to expand your expertise and confidence.
Each time you up-level your skills and have a win, big or small, be sure to celebrate! This releases the happy chemical, dopamine, in your brain and makes you feel good!
And the better you feel, the more you do it. And the more you do it, the better you feel!
Constantly focusing on failures can significantly harm self-esteem, hinder motivation, and impair performance by creating a negative self-image. This can lead to increased anxiety and a tendency to avoid challenges.
Research published in the Clinical Psychology Review showed that people often learn less from their failures than from successes due to the ego threat involved. However, a key aspect is learning to analyze failures constructively to extract valuable lessons and improve future attempts.
5. Believing you're not enough
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This highly popular limiting belief is the number one cause at the root of so many fears and dysfunctions. When you tell yourself regularly, "I am not ‘something’ enough," then you're creating negative neural pathways in your brain.
And each time "Amy' thinks there's a threat, this familiar pathway gets activated, keeping you stuck, holding you back, and crushing your confidence.
Say these three little words to yourself every day: "I am enough." Rinse. Repeat. The more you tell yourself you are enough, the more you will start to believe it.
Your brain loves repetition, and this repetition rewires new positive neural pathways in your brain, which become the new go-to pathway in times of stress.
Ultimately, helping you feel more confident in yourself and your abilities to conquer your fears and expand what’s possible both personally and professionally. And in the process, raising your energy, your outlook, your mood, and your circumstances.
If you’re finding that "Amy" is bringing you down, zapping you off your confidence, and triggering a bad case of imposter syndrome, then it’s time to reset your thinking. That’s when you know it’s time to rewire your brain for more confidence.
Michele Molitor, CPCC, CHt, is a certified coach, hypnotherapist, and co-author of the book I Am Perfectly Flawsome - How Embracing Imperfection Makes Us Better. She coaches high-achieving professionals in reducing their overwhelm and reclaiming their self-confidence, calm, and clarity to create a thriving life and career.