Click to download Day 1 worksheet.
Transcript:
Believing in others is something inherently engraved within us, it’s automatic, it’s subconscious, for whilst we know people mess up at times and make mistakes, we aren’t truly aware of how often that is. Yet we’ve been making mistakes our whole life, we know we get it wrong sometimes, this is how we learn, this is how everyone learns. Everyone makes mistakes. But we are much more aware of our own mistakes, big or small, they slowly chip away at our self belief, effecting our own confidence. We compare ourselves to others, not believing for a second they mess up as often as we do - I’ll let you in on a secret, we all make mistakes, we all make the same mistakes, our egos take a hit, we struggle and slowly build ourselves and the belief we have lost in ourselves, back up.
Have you ever listened to the podcast How To Fail with Elizabeth Day? It’s a deep dive into failure, vulnerability and ultimately that everyone has failed spectacularly in their time. Through recognising these failures, Elizabeth’s guests are able to look back in hindsight and recognise their bravery, spirit for life, resilience and self belief and confidence they have courageously grown by getting up, brushing themselves off and continuing on. Failures on the podcast include:
Failures at school
Failing to pass life altering exams such as the bar exam
Failing at parenthood
Failures in fixing others
Failures in love
Alcohol problems
Failures in careers and the list goes on and on.
Take a moment to think about a failure in your life, one will probably quickly pop into your head.
How does that failure make you feel right now?
Looking back, quickly jot down what caused that failure?
Now consider what you did to pull yourself out of that failure? How did you react? How did you carry on? Jot down the steps you took, whether that was with support or alone, to return to some sort of “normality”.
What characteristics of your personality and qualities helped you to overcome that failure?
Those things form part of the amazing human you are. Once we have finished today’s video, or in the coming days - whenever you have time, I’d like you to do this with 3 more “failures” using the worksheet you have received today. Once you have finished, jot down the qualities you have noticed within in yourself.
In order to grow our own belief and confidence we have to find evidence, we have to prove to ourselves that we are worthy, that we are able to overcome adversity just accepting it because other’s think it doesn’t cut it - as you know.
I don’t know if your school did this, but I remember at Primary School on our last day of being in Year 6, before we took the huge leap from being big fish in small ponds to tiny fish in the big scary sea in secondary school, we had a special assembly. An assembly which celebrated our individual achievements and accomplishments.
Most of us here are goal post movers, which means we rarely take time to recognise achieving our goals before moving the goal posts of the goal or getting onto the next thing we’d like to do.
Have a think about your achievements and accomplishments as an adult, big or small, from getting that job you so desperately wanted to managing to wash your hair at the end of a bloody awful day. Maybe you gave yourself some extra time one weekend for you, to rest and recharge. Maybe you make the best spag Bol in the street. Maybe you care for a family member or make someone smile every day.
Take a moment to jot down those achievements you’ve come up with. Your homework is to pop this in a place where you can read it once, twice or three times a day to remind yourself of all that you are.
Overnight successes - we live in a world where headlines declare overnight successes left, right and centre. We believe that from one day to the next someone can go from being a lowly, everyday person to someone absolutely incredible, in comparing ourselves to them we feel inadequate, our self belief waning. Yet, overnight successes don’t really exist. Think about something you are working on or towards at the moment, something that your own self belief and confidence is holding you back from giving into it completely.
What is it? What could happen if you gave caution to the wind and just went for it?
Now this is a biggie, a huge one if you will, we’re going to go deep. So take a deep breath in. What would your life look like if you could have anything, be anything and do anything? What is stopping you from achieving that? I believe you can do it. Why do you believe YOU specifically can’t do it when others can? How can you believe in yourself more? Take a moment to write down your responses.
Finally, I’d like you to contact 2 to 3 friends and ask them to honestly describe you in 5 words. I know how scary that is - I’ve done it! I hovered over sending the messages, unsure if I could do it. That self doubt kicked in. What if they couldn’t think of even one word? What if they don’t think I have any good things about me? Oh gosh, I don’t even want to know! It’s time for you to see how others see you, because you are an absolutely awesome human being.
Let’s recap on what we have soul dived into this evening:
Our failures, how we have overcome them and recognising the qualities within us that have helped us to do so
Our life achievements and accomplishments - big and small creating a list to look at as often as we can
How overnight successes do not exist and entertaining the idea of not allowing a lack of self belief to hold us back from what we’re working towards right now
The Big one - What our life would look like if we could have anything, be anything and do anything.
HOMEWORK: Contacting 2 to 3 soul friends and asking them to describe you in 5 words.
