I want to start with what I think is kind of like a gateway. It’s a comfortable way to start approaching confidence. It never really dawned on me that this was such a pivotal piece of people changing their lives until I started making consumer videos. I was always teaching at the gym and teaching students live, one on one.
I saw this trend happening where people would say, “I started losing weight. I started feeling better about myself, and I started changing the way I viewed myself. Even though I still didn’t feel like I was a beautiful person, even after I lost 25 pounds I still felt like I had more to lose, I started to gain this confidence, and I started to ask more of people. I stopped allowing people to treat me a certain way.” I would get letters from people and they’d say, “I got out of a negative relationship, or a bad marriage. I ended toxic friendships, or, I established boundaries with my family and said, ‘You know what? You can’t call me those names anymore.'”
It’s interesting how for so many people, their confidence can start to grow by doing something physical. I don’t necessarily mean that you need to lose weight, but there’s something about a physical change that is less scary than changing your mindset. It’s like saying, “Okay, I’m going to commit to doing something tough physically. I don’t know if I can do something tough mentally yet. I don’t know if I can do something that scares me in terms of standing up for myself or having a voice where I’ve never felt like I’ve had one before, but I know I can do something physically. That’s less intimidating.”
It might surprise you to know that even though I’ve been a fitness professional for 25 year, just a year ago I started taking a new style of workout, meaning indoor cycling to the beat, that I’d never done before. It was scary, because the only other times I’d done it in the past, I kind of felt like a failure. I thought it was too hard. It just wasn’t my thing. I didn’t connect to it, so it didn’t help my confidence.
Then I found a style of indoor cycling where you’re moving to the beat, and I loved it. It was really, really hard. It was really hard, because I hadn’t developed those muscles. I hadn’t developed that type of endurance training and those fast intervals. Because of it, you might be surprised to hear that here was this new form of workout that just gave me this cool feeling of confidence. I want you to first think of what type of exercise do you feel like you would succeed at, because I don’t want you to pick a workout that makes you feel like you’re going to fail.
When we only focus on the negative then that’s what we attract more of, and that’s what we feel more of, and that’s where our brain goes. We get stuck in a rut. You’re going to start focusing on all the positives. If you feel soreness the next day, recognize soreness is change. This is my body changing. This is me becoming more courageously confident by doing something that’s scary.
Sometimes it starts by building up our inner confidence by doing something physical. Make a goal for yourself today. First I’m going to ask you to do something physical that you’ve not done before, that makes you a little nervous to try. Second, if you don’t have something like a workout, or something of that nature that scares you, then I want you to think about something physically that does. Maybe it is your fear of heights, or your fear of flying. Do something physically where you realize, “Okay, I didn’t die. I’m still alive, and I feel more confident.”
Want more great tips and resources on improving balance, energy, organization, health fitness, relationships, focus, faith and happiness? Each episode of my podcast, The Chalene Show is designed to give you strategies and simple steps you can implement today to become a better, more balanced, happier version of yourself. LISTEN NOW!
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Helpful Resources:
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