Self Regulation: A Path for Women to Building Confidence

Self-regulation is the ability to manage our reactions to our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors in response to changing internal or external circumstances.

Regulating yourself is important because it allows you to respond to challenging or stressful situations in a way that supports your goals and values. Your ability to show up and feel confident will not be consistent if you haven’t learned yet what is happening in your nervous system(read my previous Blog ), how that impacts your narratives and mental states, and how to regulate it.

When you lack self-regulation, you may be more prone to self-doubt, procrastination, negative self-talk, and avoidance of challenging situations. This can limit your potential and lead to missed opportunities for growth and development.

How Can You Start Practicing Self-Regulation?

The first step to self-regulation is self-awareness. Start by noticing what is going on in your body, and decide on one thing to focus on. For example, you can start to pay attention to what sensations, emotions and thoughts come up when you feel stressed at work. Or you can start to pay attention to what sensations are happening in your body when you feel very at ease and joyful.

No matter which you choose, the point here is to start practicing self-awareness, pausing, and noticing. In this step don’t worry about trying to change things, take everything as information, and welcome it with curiosity instead of judgment. Once you have gained some self-awareness and can identify the subtle changes in your body's sensations and the ebb and flow of your thoughts and emotions, you can start practicing some self-regulation techniques.

One that is available at all times is breathing. You can try practicing the square breathing technique: Inhale for 4 counts, hold your breath for 4 counts, exhale for 4 counts, hold for 4 counts, repeat. When to do this technique? When you start to notice the sensations in your body or the thoughts, or the emotions, that you have identified are present when you feel threatened/ unsafe/stressed/overwhelmed.

What Is the Purpose of the Self-Regulation Techniques?

This is a very important part: your breathing (or any other technique) is not for you to get rid/block/shut down what's coming up inside, but about being with it.

So often the act of regulation is confused as something that will help us move to a feeling of calmness and relaxation, and though it may come as an effect of regulating, it's not its intent. What you are practicing when regulating yourself is creating more capacity to hold your sensations, to hold your emotions, basically to be with what is going on inside. Doing this is usually very uncomfortable, and thus we have to practice again and again to be with it, to build up the muscle of holding space and not get hacked by old patterns.

Doing all of this is a living process, meaning that once you can hold a certain level of uncomfortable and feel like you can show up with confidence and not be hijacked by your nervous system, there will come another level of discomfort to discover and work on.

That is how we develop and grow through life, and that is how we move closer to what we are dreaming and yearning for.