Is Your Confidence Sabotaging Your Business?

As Women Business Owners, you are challenged on a daily basis to strengthen your self-confidence and build your courage muscle. This includes learning where to take risks, how to pick yourself up after making a bad decision, and how to strengthen and to harness your confidence. This can be a prevailing undercurrent you feel all the time, especially if you are in a male-dominated industry.

We all know that respect for the feminine is a big topic these days, and one that we are all being activated to pay attention to and do something about. It is time to take what we are seeing in our culture and bring it back to our own empowerment on an individual level. As a culture, women are typically brought up to be fundamentally insecure.

If we start with this framework, and we are then in a constant state of growth and learning how to navigate this ever-changing terrain, it can be exhausting. However, you do have a choice. You can reframe it and look at it as an opportunity to put practices in place that reprogram and build your inner confidence. Building confidence starts on the inside; it is creating safety, trust and support within yourself. No matter how confident you feel, there is always more space to expand confidence, pay it forward and grow even more into the confident creative power that you are.

How do we develop our confident creative power?

Here are 4 actions I implement:

• Hire a coach, a therapist, and/or join a women’s group to get support. Start growing yourself: I work with my coach to constantly improve my internal dialogue towards trusting myself, my intuition and my ability to be a powerful creator in my life and in my work.
• I build up other women and men any chance I get. When I hear people make a demeaning comment about someone or themselves, I ask them why they would say that and acknowledge them for who they really are. I speak to their inner spirit even if they don’t do that with themselves.
• I respect myself by being direct and saying what is true for me even if it makes the other person feel uncomfortable. It is not my job to care for another’s emotions; it is my job to honor my truth and express it with compassion and respect.
• I work on loving all the parts of myself all the time, especially when it shows up in my environment and relationships. Here is an example: I am gentle with myself instead of thinking negative thoughts about myself. This grows my confidence and allows me not to be triggered by external things. This mind shift creates an experience of more joy and ease, even in the midst of challenging situations when my fear shows up.

When we buy into the status quo and the negativity, when we don’t speak up, when we brush disrespectful behaviors and comments under the rug, we are supporting the cycle of dis-empowerment for everyone. My call to action is to take ownership of your own empowerment, stand up for your sisters and own all the parts of yourself that are scared and powerful: the inner bitch, the intellectual, the provocateur, the good girl, the pleaser, the scared child– all of YOU – because the world needs all of YOU. It is in recognizing and loving all of the parts of yourself and dropping the judgement of yourself and others that transforms your self-sabotaging behavior and beliefs into real confidence. By doing this, you expand your awareness and awaken to the confident leader that you are and impact your business, your team and all those you interact with in ways that promotes growth.