Grounded Confidence: The Antidote to Overwhelm
Overwhelm happens when we have thoughts that we're not able to handle everything that's on our plate at the moment.
Our tendency towards overwhelm is about our capacity. So, how did we get ourselves into this predicament in the first place? We often feel that we can’t let people down, so we have no choice — we HAVE to either do or handle everything that's in front of us. But how realistic is this?
When we tell ourselves we have no choice, we put ourselves in a very difficult position. The real truth is that we always have a choice.
We may not like the consequences of our choices, but this is where we need to critically evaluate our thoughts that things will go very badly for us if we don’t do what we think we “should” do.
We needlessly place a lot of “shoulds” on ourselves. We think we should or need to do something because we’ve already paid for it or would disappoint someone if we didn’t. And then there are the “shoulds” that no one has asked us to do, but we have made up for ourselves because we think it would make us more likable and valuable.
Many of my clients overwork to the point of exhaustion and feel guilt for taking time away from their families, and yet no one has specifically asked them to do extra. There are also cases where people are asked to do more than the job they were hired to do without additional compensation or a title change.
In either case, the antidote to overwhelm is grounded in authenticity and confidence.
We've long been told that confidence is a helpful and desirable trait, both personally and professionally, but few of us have it. Brené Brown defines grounded confidence as a combination of curiosity and the willingness to embrace vulnerability and practice rather than armoring up, shutting down, or getting defensive.
When I was younger, my piano teacher would sign me up for piano festival competitions. I loved music but didn’t practice as much as I should, and sometimes, I got in trouble for not knowing a scale or a song. Between you and me, I would sometimes cancel my lessons at the last minute and pretend to be sick so that I didn’t have to face the disappointment of my teacher for not practicing.
When it came time to face a judge in the festival competitions, I would get so nervous that I would want to throw up. My hands would sweat, I would get tunnel vision, and when my name was called and it was my turn to play, I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience. If I had practiced enough, I would somehow make it to the end of the piece. If I didn’t, I would lose track of where I was and make mistakes. I competed for years, but the overwhelm didn’t feel like it was getting better.
I assumed that I was the only one who felt this way and that I deserved to feel this way because I was inconsistent with my practice. Even when people told me I did well, I couldn’t hear it because I didn’t believe it about myself.
Confidence seemed to be something you either had or didn’t, and I assumed everyone else had some but me.
The thing is, most of us weren’t taught how to have grounded confidence, and many of our past experiences have shaken our self-esteem and self-worth. We now know that grounded confidence is a combination of vulnerability, curiosity, and practice.
There are five mantras (two are from Brené Brown) that have helped me embrace my own sense of grounded confidence:
"Don’t shrink. Don’t puff up. Stand your sacred ground." Gifts of Imperfection.
"Be a learner, willing to get it right, rather than a knower, and being right." Dare to Lead.
I’m doing the best I can.
The result doesn’t define who I am.
Let go of the outcome.
Fortunately, I faced my fears often enough that I eventually had a few wins.
My confidence started to grow, and I could see that sometimes, my effort paid off. For a brief moment every year, when I got a rare first-place score at a piano competition, I'd begin to believe that I might be a good musician. Can you relate to this experience?
Authenticity helps us have grounded confidence, which helps us be authentic.
To live authentically means we're honest and aligned with our values, beliefs, and passions — no matter what. Even when it's hard.
At the heart of authenticity is our worthiness. When we make the decision to believe that we're worthy of love and belonging simply because we exist, simply because we were born, then we stop making other people’s opinions of us the only thing that matters. We start to only care about what a few hand-selected people think of us. We stop hustling for our worthiness and saying “yes” to things we don’t want to do. We start setting strong boundaries and truly taking care of ourselves, with the understanding that we are the only ones who actually can. When our time and energy are high priorities, we have all the time in the world for the things and people that make us happy, and we manage the uncomfortable feelings that result so that we can have more control and peace in our lives.
Here are some examples of how grounded confidence has helped me:
I wanted to get more comfortable with being questioned and not having it mean that people were disagreeing with me or trying to prove I was wrong.
Saying no to opportunities I don’t want to do without fear that opportunities will stop or that they're the only ones I'll ever get.
When I needed to have a conversation with a colleague who had started complaining to other staff about me.
The time I needed to challenge my thought that productivity equals self-worth because I was working too much, even on vacation and during evenings and weekends. I stopped sleeping because I had too much stress and wasn't taking enough downtime for myself or spending it with friends, and my health was declining because I wasn’t exercising.
Embracing all parts of yourself, the qualities and experiences that you love and the qualities and experiences that you don’t love, is a humbling and vulnerable process.
However, when you accept and even embrace all of who you are and cultivate massive gratitude and compassion for all of the pieces, then your worth isn't defined by what other people think. It's determined by what you think of yourself and what people who love you think.
You're not perfect, but you ARE consistently trying to learn, grow, and improve. Life is so much more fulfilling when you make peace with yourself because you're no longer trying to hide the parts you don’t want people to see. When we embrace grounded confidence, we cultivate authenticity, we handle tough situations better, and others feel safer working through hard things with us. This is the result of choosing courage over comfort.
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