Earlier this year I attended a training event on public speaking, as part of a women in business networking group.
The people who were there wanted tips on how to put together a great presentation, how to engage your audience, and, above all, how to handle nerves.
One woman talked about the struggles she faced when it came to giving presentations. She was a small business owner, and as she grew, she knew that this was a skill she needed to have as she began pitching to investors, and spreading awareness of her services. But every time she prepared to go on stage she felt overcome by nerves - she shook, she sweated and her mind emptied of all the excellent information she had filled it with.
“I’ve tried to change my mindset so many times. I’ve tried to convince myself that I’m confident.” she said. “But it never works, I still end up feeling petrified and dreading the whole thing.”
This is exactly why I take an embodied approach to building self-trust and confidence.
Because, more often than not, when people say that they want to be confident, they’re talking about the feeling in their body. And when we learn how to work with both the body and the mind, we become unstoppable.
Your mindset shapes the world you live in
Your mindset is a collection of beliefs that shape how you make sense of the world and yourself. Often these beliefs lie deep within us, and we may not even realise they are there until we spend time reflecting on how we interact with the world.
Someone who believes that “things never work out for me” is less likely to go after the things they really want, and will miss opportunities that are right in front of their eyes. They gather more and more evidence that their deeper belief is true until their life becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The thoughts that we think are a powerful window into the deeper beliefs which shape our world view.
The person who believes that things never work out them likely experiences thoughts like
“There’s no point even trying.”
“Life is so unfair.”
“Why do other people have it so much easier?”
Some mindset practices encourage us to challenge these thoughts and actively think different thoughts that are more in line with the kind of mindset that would create the life we really desire.
Sometimes this can be very powerful. By bringing more conscious awareness to our thought patterns each day we get a much better insight into how we’re really living our lives, which can create great motivation for change.
But the main reason I hear that people have struggled with this mindset approach is because when they have attempted to shift their thoughts, the feelings they had in their body seemed to be at odds with the new mindset they were trying to cultivate.
Some ways that this can show up:
When they challenge critical thoughts about themselves, and choose more positive self-talk they feel like they are lying to themselves and just trying to convince themselves to believe a falsehood.
When they want to adopt a more optimistic outlook on life they feel fear and anxiety that this could lead them to miss problems when they arise, and be unprepared for challenges.
When they tell themselves that they can achieve the things they want in life, this can spark feelings of disappointment when things don’t work out the way they want them to right away. It feels safer to believe that the things they want aren’t possible, because then that doesn’t risk disappointment.
When they tell themselves that they are confident, they still feel nervous, shy and uncertain of their skills when they get ready to do the hard thing. Because the feelings of confidence haven’t followed their thought pattern, they suddenly feel less confident than ever.
This is the point when a lot of people give up. They decide that nothing can change in their life, or that maybe they’re doomed to keep doing things the way they always have. Or they double down on the mindset work and get into daily arguments with themselves, until they feel split and hopeless.
The reason I’m so passionate about embodiment work is that when you learn how to work with your body, you discover that this isn’t the moment to give up, or to fight with your thinking mind - this is the moment when your body is handing you the keys to your success. And all you need to do is listen to the guidance it is providing you with.
Working with your body = working with your subconscious mind
The body has been described as a physical manifestation of your subconscious mind.
The subconscious is basically a collection of the automatic systems that we’ve created which allow us to interact with life without using our conscious brain, and therefore save brain power and energy.
Your subconscious is why you’re able to drive your car or ride a bike without consciously thinking about it. It’s why you walk home, while lost in thought, and arrive at your front door before you’ve even noticed your surroundings. It’s why you tend to follow particular routines and patterns everyday, and why adding new things to your routine can be difficult.
Your subconscious also holds the lessons from the memories and experiences that you’ve collected as you grew up, and made your way through life.
Some of these can be very helpful to us - chances are you automatically look left and right before you cross the road because experience taught you that road safety is important.
But some experiences can limit us in later life if we allow them to continue to operate in our subconscious, without bringing them into line with new experiences and desires. For example, that tight knot in your stomach when you get up to give a presentation could have been first created when you gave a talk in school and some of the kids in your class laughed at you. Even though your logical mind knows that you’re now an adult and much more able to handle situations like this, the experience of your childhood self is still stored in your subconscious, and in your body.
The good news is that we are highly flexible and adaptable beings. We can make changes to our subconscious operating system when we become aware of what’s happening - we make the subconscious, conscious and we gain the power to choose a new response.
Your body guides you to your confidence
Here are a few reasons why working with your body is so valuable:
Our body gives us access to what is happening in our subconscious so that we can gain awareness of it. It communicates this through physical sensations, emotions, energies and an inner knowing. Becoming more sensitive to what’s happening in your body, lets you understand this better and more quickly.
We cannot ‘logic’ our way into changing our impulses. If we hold an experience in our body, particularly if it’s one we experienced in childhood, we need to revisit the experience as our adult self.* That means not just thinking about it, but feeling the emotions, and meeting them as who we are now, so that we can process them and release them.
When we are growing and evolving as a person, our body will teach us what we need in order to get to the next level. Just like teenagers get really hungry during a growth spurt, so that they take in more energy needed to grow, our emotions also reveal to us what we need to become the person we are on the path to being. For example, the intense nerves that someone experiences before going on stage may be revealing that they need even more compassion, even more patience and even more reassurance of their own innate worth than usual. The nerves aren’t standing in the way of building confidence - they are pointing out our emotional needs so that we can meet them.
Sometimes our subconscious develops strategies to help us to avoid certain feelings or emotions that were too overwhelming to us when we first experienced them. Often our first feelings of rejection were deeply painful, and we may have learned to adopt behaviours which minimise our chances of feeling this again. When we learn how to inhabit our bodies fully we expand our ability to hold uncomfortable sensations, without running from them. This means that we may need to re-teach our subconscious that we are now able to feel hard feelings, and don’t need to avoid them anymore. This could mean consciously choosing to do things which risks us being rejected, and feeling it over and over again, until our body learns that this feeling isn’t something to fear anymore. Just like this person did!
* If you are revisiting traumatic experiences, you need to proceed carefully, with great compassion and care, and you may need the support of a trauma therapist to do so. If you revisit these experiences without a firm foundation of stability and safety, you can inadvertently re-traumatise yourself.
If you’ve tried mindset work, but haven’t had the results you were hoping for, then there’s a good chance that the missing piece of the puzzle was bringing your body into the equation.
Why not book a 1:1 embodiment coaching deep dive, and let’s discover the guidance that body has been trying to tell you all along. You’ll be amazed by how much easier it gets to become the person you’ve always wanted to be, when you stop fighting yourself and learn how to truly work with yourself.
Comments