"I'M NOT A CONFIDENT PERSON" — THOUGHTS MOMS PARENTING TEENS AND ADULT KIDS ARE ASHAMED THEY THINK | EP. 172
Welcome to the Almost Empty Nest Podcast, where we moms of teens and college kids reframe what letting go really means to feel more connected, confident, and at peace. I'm your host, Master Coach Jennifer Collins.
Welcome to Things Moms Are Ashamed They Think. If you've ever had a thought about your teen or adult kid that makes you feel like a terrible person, this series is for you.
In every episode, I'll be naming one of those honest but unspoken thoughts out loud, and I'll unpack what's really going on underneath. Because these thoughts don't make you a bad mom. They make you human.
And when you learn how to shift the way you relate to these thoughts inside your head, everything changes. Let's dive in.
Hello, my friend.
Yesterday, I was talking to one of my clients. She's a mom of two teens, and she, like most of us, is always trying to do the right thing, particularly when it comes to the way she approaches raising her kids. So she was telling me about her son the other day.
He's going to be a senior, and so she's really hoping that he would use this summer to decide where he wants to apply to college and also prepare for the SAT one last time. He's told her he wants to apply to college, but she doesn't see any evidence that he's making any progress, and summer's already halfway through. When she tries to bring it up with him, he rolls his eyes at her and tells her, I've got it, mom.
But right after that, he'll leave and go out with his friends. So she found herself stuck, trying to figure out what she needed to say so maybe this time he'd listen. She definitely didn't want to be a nag, but there's also a part of her that worries that he'll regret not being more proactive over the summer.
But she also wonders if her son doesn't take her seriously enough because she always backs down. Then she said to me, I don't know, I'm just not a confident person. I've actually had this exact same conversation with quite a few of my clients.
They tell me a story about an interaction with their kid or how they're approaching their life, and they'll say, well, I've just never been confident, to explain why they didn't speak up or to take a step they intellectually wanted to take. It's almost like this phrase, I'm not confident, is like this blanket explanation we use to explain ourselves. Like, of course I didn't follow through or take that big step.
This is just who I am. I'm not confident. You think it when your teen challenges you or doesn't listen when you ask them to do something and you're not sure how to respond.
Or you might think it when you try to set a boundary, but then don't follow through with consequences. Or maybe you think it as you contemplate how you want to be spending your time now. You have more space in your life with your teen being more independent and headed to college.
So you start thinking about your options and then immediately feel overwhelmed. Like, how am I ever going to figure this out? Then you find yourself thinking, I haven't worked. I don't have the skills.
I don't have the energy. And ultimately, I just don't have the confidence that I can do this. But here's something I want to invite you to consider.
What if that thought, I'm not a confident person, isn't actually the truth? What if it's just a story your brain has practiced so many times it just feels like a fact? I think we tend to think that confidence is something you either have or you don't. Like it's something that you're born with or you're not. You look at other people and you think to yourself, oh, she's just confident.
Like it's some fixed part of her personality. But the truth is you see what you interpret as confidence on the outside, but you don't see the doubt or second guessing in her mind. You just assume what you see means something about who she is.
The real truth is that confidence isn't a personality trait. It's a feeling. Just like happiness or sadness or fear.
And my friend, all of us are capable of feeling the full spectrum of human emotions if you really think about it. If you're capable of feeling happy or sad, you are absolutely capable of feeling confident. So the question isn't whether or not you can be confident.
The real question is why aren't you? I talk a lot on this podcast about how your perspective about your life and who you are shapes your emotional experience. And this perspective isn't right or wrong. It's simply the lens that you've created over the course of your life to interpret the world around you and your relationship to it.
But this perspective is just your individual reality. You don't typically stop to question it. You just believe that your perspective is true.
On top of this, your brain is designed by default to interpret the world in a way that keeps you safe, comfortable, and keeping things as easy and efficient as possible. This motivational triad is your brain's default wiring. It's what kept our ancestors alive.
But in modern life, this automatic and often subconscious way of interpreting our world often works against us. So, for example, when something feels uncomfortable or uncertain, your brain says, no, let's not do that. Or on the other hand, when you're facing something that feels easy or comfortable, like backing down or not doing the thing that feels hard, your instinct is going to take that easy way.
And my friend, this isn't because there's something wrong with you. This is literally how our brains were designed. So when you're in a situation that's uncertain or uncomfortable, it is completely normal that you feel an urge to avoid that discomfort.
And this is everyone, my friend, not just you or me. All of our brains are designed to do this. But unfortunately for many of us, what happens is that we interpret this instinct as a personality trait.
We make this discomfort with uncertain or hard things mean that we're not confident. In fact, this is an example of a mindset trap called emotional reasoning. It's when your brain says, I feel this way, so it must be true.
So, for example, you feel anxious, and so you believe there's definitely something to fear here. Or you feel stuck and unsure of what to do, so you start to believe I'm not capable of change. In the same way, you can feel hesitant or afraid and then start to tell yourself, I must not be confident.
This mindset trap is your brain's way of trying to be efficient by taking a shortcut that interprets instinctual emotions as evidence. Really, what we're doing is making our emotional experience mean something more than simply, I'm experiencing an emotion. And the more we fall into this trap of emotional reasoning, the more this becomes a self-reinforcing reality for us.
Let's take the example of what often happens as we're parenting our kids. Let's say you want to talk to your kid about the effort they're putting into something, maybe their schoolwork, for example. When they were little, we kind of got to tell them what to do, right? We might not have always gotten our way or known exactly the right way to handle every situation.
But ultimately, we did our best, guiding our kids in the way that we thought best and important. But the older our kids get, they start to have opinions about what they think is the right way. And inevitably, we don't always agree.
So then you start getting into this dynamic with your kid where what you try doesn't work. You start experiencing these many failures in parenting. You try to engage your kid in a conversation, and they don't engage.
You ask them to unload the dishwasher, and they don't do it. Before long, you start saying to yourself, I don't know how to get them to engage or do what they need to do. And the more this happens, the more you start to internalize it.
It goes beyond uncertainty in terms of not knowing how to become a lack of confidence that you have what it takes, a lack of confidence in your ability to handle the stage of parenting. Notice how this spirals downward from disappointment in these many failures, essentially seeing that what you tried didn't work, to self-doubt and uncertainty, and then on to eventually feeling a lack of confidence in yourself and your parenting abilities. Or let's look at another example.
This time, let's look at what can happen when you start thinking about what's next for you as your kids get older and start to leave the nest. You start to find more space in your life, and you start seeing, okay, I probably need to figure out something for me again. And there's part of that that can feel really exciting.
Like, oh, wait, I get time for me? I get to decide what I want again? So you might look into volunteering or getting a part-time job, or maybe going back to something you used to love to do. Women might say to me, I've always wanted to start my own business, or I'm thinking about a passion project. On the one hand, it feels exciting to even be able to have the thought, I could create something new, a new chapter in my life, something big and meaningful.
But what can happen is this openness and possibility can start to feel overwhelming. Because you may not be sure what you really want beyond the simple idea of starting something new. Or you may be confused or unsure about how to go about moving forward.
What are the steps to take? Or maybe your first few attempts at getting that job or trying out that new class didn't go as well as you hoped. And then you start second-guessing yourself, wondering, am I even qualified? Or what if this doesn't work out? What if I invest all this time and money and it ends up being a waste? So again, uncertainty, this not knowing, then turns to self-doubt, which inevitably keeps you from taking steps to get started. Or you make a plan and you just don't stick to it.
And then you start to interpret your indecision or your inaction as evidence that you're not confident, even not capable, that you don't have what it takes to create something new. And here we have that cycle again. Uncertainty leads to self-doubt, which leads to a belief that you're just not capable.
Essentially, the feeling that you're not confident in your ability to figure it out. It's so fascinating to see how this spiral works, from many failures or disappointment, to uncertainty, to self-doubt, and eventually then telling yourself a story that you're just not confident or capable. How many times has this spiral played out for you in your life in the past, my friend? Maybe in social situations where you get invited to attend something with a new group of people, you go into it naturally wondering, will I fit in? And then you go to that event and things are awkward, and then your doubt becomes anxiety.
Maybe you start thinking, I'm just not confident in social settings. You might even tell yourself you have social anxiety in certain situations and avoid them altogether. Public speaking is another one.
If you've ever been asked to speak in front of any group of people, I think our natural instinct is to think, what if I mess this up? And this doubt about how it will go quickly turns to anxiety. You get that pit in your stomach and your hands start shaking. You immediately start thinking, clearly I'm not good at public speaking.
I'm not confident. And so many of us avoid these situations at all cost. We tell ourselves, I'm just not confident enough to do this, like it's a fact.
I can think of so many other examples of ways we let uncertainty and doubt and even fear turn into lack of confidence. Challenges with friendships or making new friends, not pursuing job opportunities, not getting started with that new workout class or that diet. It hasn't worked before, so why would it work now? Essentially, I'm not confident in my ability to be successful here.
Notice how all of these examples can follow the same model. Uncertainty or fear leads to anxiety, which feels like proof that you don't have the ability or the confidence, which then of course leads you to stop trying or avoid situations, which only reinforces the belief that you're not confident. This, my friend, is the mindset trap of emotional reasoning in action.
Your feelings of uncertainty and self-doubt become evidence that there's something lacking in you. But here's what's really important to know. Your feelings aren't facts.
I know they feel true, and this doesn't mean your feelings aren't valid. But consider that they're not evidence of objective reality. They're simply signals, really a sign about the way that you're relating to the circumstances of your life.
The value of seeing this is that you can start to decide, is this really the way I want to approach this situation? Is it helping me or hurting me? Let's go back to that public speaking example for a minute. Just think about standing in front of a large group of people and how natural it is to be afraid because you're thinking, I don't want to embarrass myself. I don't want to risk failure here.
I don't want to be humiliated. These types of thoughts naturally create a sense of fear and anxiety for us. But does that mean you're not confident? Or is your brain just signaling that you're in a situation that feels dangerous, and therefore, of course, you feel unsafe? The minute you start to interpret this as a lack of confidence, this is when you start to diminish your ability to show up to that situation in a way that builds your capacity to trust yourself to face that situation again.
The value of seeing this is that you can start to decide, how do I really want to approach this situation? Is this thought that I'm not confident helping me or hurting the way I perceive myself or my ability to engage in my life? The truth is, when you say, I'm not a confident person, that thought starts to shape how you engage in your life. So you start avoiding taking risks. Essentially, you're less likely to try new things, whether it's saying yes to something that scares you or going after what you really want.
It also means you shy away from difficult conversations with your kid or even setting a boundary that needs to be set. When you think I'm not confident, this also leads you to second guess your decisions. No matter what you do, you're always wondering, is this the right thing? Is this enough? What if I regret something? Your brain plays all of the scenarios hoping to figure out how to avoid failure.
You can also talk yourself out of what you really want. You have a goal in mind, but the more you see yourself not taking action, you believe that's just the reality of who you are. You basically tell yourself, what's the point? I'll never follow through.
Maybe it feels too big or too complicated. And there's a story in your mind that you don't have what it takes to overcome those obstacles. And all that effort definitely doesn't feel worth it if you've already decided ahead of time that you're not likely to be successful.
When you don't think you're confident, your brain is also going to look for proof to confirm your story. So instead of questioning this belief that you're just not confident, you start collecting evidence. So now every time you don't set a boundary or take action on your goals, it's just more proof that you don't know how or that you're not capable.
And the worst part of all of this is that you diminish yourself. You stop showing up fully in your relationships. You feel like you're disengaged from your big kid because you're not sure how to approach them.
You stop dreaming. Essentially, you stay safe. My friend, the real cost here is that this one thought, that I'm just not confident, shapes the story you tell yourself about what's possible for you in your life.
But why are you letting yourself be defined by one emotion that you're feeling? My friend, who you are is so much bigger than any one feeling. You're not just a sad person, although there may be times when you're sad. And you're also not always just a happy person, although of course I hope there are times when you're happy.
In the same way, you are not just a not confident person. We all experience self-doubt and fear in the face of situations that are uncertain. And my friend, this period of life I call the empty nest rattle, the stress of 10, maybe even 15 years of figuring out how to let go and launch your kids into their lives, this period of life is inherently uncertain.
But are you making this uncertainty mean something about you? My friend, you don't have to stay stuck in this spiral, letting your feelings of uncertainty mean that you're just not a confident person. The real question for you is, who do you want to be, both as a mom and a woman, in the face of all of this uncertainty? This is the work we do in my coaching program, Mom 2.0. This program is designed for moms navigating this uncertain road between motherhood and the empty nest. And it helps you break free from self-doubt and reconnect with a version of you who is confident in her ability to move forward.
My friend, what would be different for you in your life if you simply believed in your ability to take the next step? Just let that sink in. No matter what challenge you're facing, what if the uncertainty and the self-doubt you're facing isn't about you, but that it's simply a signal that you have an invitation to make a powerful next decision? What if that's all you have to do? You don't have to believe that you're confident to take that next step. What if all you need to believe is that you have what it takes to keep trying and figure it out? Until next time.
If you enjoyed this episode, I'd love for you to check out my next free masterclass. There's a link in the show notes. You have more power than you think, my friend.
