Confidence: Starts With Safety Within

From a Mind-Body Coaching approach, we work with the assumption that we all developed certain patterns of behavior based on our inherent needs of Dignity, Safety, and Belonging. We shaped ourselves in a way that ensured that growing up, we would have those needs met, and today as adults we may be repeating these patterns still, although they may not be needed anymore.

When we talk about Confidence, we have to acknowledge its relation to a feeling of safety in the body, and we also need to take into consideration how was confidence shaped in ourselves. For example ponder these questions: what feels safe and what doesn’t? Where did you learn that? And what is your ability to self-regulate when you feel threatened?

In a Somatic(Soma = Body) approach, confidence is more than a mental state where you believe or not that you are confident, you can repeat many times “I’m confident” in the mirror, but you may need to dig a little deeper to make a change that lasts.

Confidence is directly related to our feeling of safety within our bodies.

To understand a little better what is going on within us when we talk about confidence and safety, we need to talk about how our autonomic nervous system works. Based on the Polyvagal Theory, we now know that there is a process called neuroception, through which our autonomic nervous system unconsciously scans our inner and outer experiences and categorizes them as safe, dangerous, or threatening.

There are three possible states (and often a combination of them too) we experience in our nervous system, and we are moving between them constantly: 1. A state of connection, safety, happiness, and engagement, 2. A state of fight or flight, more anxiety, tenseness, impulse to action, adrenaline surge, and 3. A state of collapse, dissociation, a feeling of fading, like not being present in the body, low energy, and hopelessness.

We all have a go-to pattern when faced with a stressful situation based on previous experiences, we may jump into fight or flight, or we may jump to dissociating or feeling frozen in our bodies. These patterns are the ones that may show up when we are trying to feel confident. An example of this is, if you are currently in a state of threat, where everyone around you feels dangerous you won’t be able to connect to others and so it will be harder to show up, speak up, express your ideas, etc. This may happen at work, and it’s not necessarily because your colleagues are “dangerous”, but because when faced with certain situations your nervous system has an automatic pattern of response that makes your body feel unsafe, and so that is what you will see around you.

So as you see, we need to understand what is our go-to automatic reaction, and why is that way in the first place. Once we build awareness of our patterns, we can move on to practicing self-regulation strategies to build a new path of response, one that is aligned with the way we want to show up and feel in the world.