“I always say the first step to making any kind of change in your life is being aware. So, you must become extremely aware of the things that are holding you back from feeling confident.”

Without a doubt, one of the biggest reasons women choose to hire me as their life & mindset coach is to help them cultivate their confidence.

When they describe to me what it feels like now NOT to have the confidence they want (either in all areas of life or within a few specific areas), they say they’re experiencing things like…

• Being unsure of their decision and abilities
• Having a hard time making decisions
• Not standing up for themselves
• Avoiding conflict/putting up with crap they KNOW they shouldn’t be putting up with
• Worrying/caring what other people think
• Worrying in general, but especially about things from the past and future
• Feeling stuck
• Holding back
• Not expressing thoughts and feelings
• Feeling FEAR
• Having anxiety and/or bouts of depression
• People pleasing
• Doubting & criticizing themselves
• Not feeling comfortable in their skin
• Procrastinating or avoiding things they know they need to handle

As a former unconfident woman, it KILLS me that women are experiencing these feelings. I remember the days of not applying for the job, asking for the raise, going after the promotion, tackling the hard conversation with someone, worrying endlessly about such POINTLESS things out of fear or not get precisely what I wanted out of life because I didn’t feel confident enough to make it happen.

Now that I’m on the “other side” and living (most days) as a confident woman, I will tell you life is SO MUCH EASIER when you’re confident. My day-to-day life flows with ease, I get what I want more and more (and when I don’t, I let it go easily), I TRUST MYSELF and my abilities, I LOVE myself despite my imperfections, and I feel like I’m always moving forward toward my next goal or dream.

I want you to experience this kind of life too.

I want you to feel what it’s like to be glowing with confidence from the deepest inner part of your core all the way to the tips of your fingertips.

It feels incredible.

(And, I ESPECIALLY want to help you to cultivate your confidence if you’re around kids. Children FEED off adults’ confidence levels. When you become a more confident version of yourself, you’re creating more confident children which means they’ll create more confident children too!)

So, be sure to tune into today’s Become An Unstoppable Woman podcast episode as I share my 3-step proven process on how to cultivate confidence in your life so you can finally become the women you were meant to be in ALL areas of your life.

This “confidence cultivating” 3-step process is the one I take my clients through as they work with me. It helps them transform their confidence levels within just a few weeks!

(It’s pretty cool what you can change once you know HOW to change it.)

Listen to the episode via the link at the top of this page!

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

→ Apply to coach with me

→ Continue the conversation in my free online community

→ Get The 4-Day Accomplish Your Dreams Free Training 

Full Transcript:

Episode 18: CULTIVATING CONFIDENCE

This is the Become an Unstoppable Woman podcast with Lindsay Preston Episode 18, Cultivating Confidence.

[music]

Welcome to the Become an Unstoppable Woman podcast, the show for goal-getting, fear-facing women for kicking ass by creating change. I’m your host, Lindsay Preston. I’m a wife, mom of two, and a multi-certified life coach to women all over the world. I’ve lived through enough in life to know that easier doesn’t always equate to better. We can’t fear the fire, we must learn to become it. On this show, I’ll teach you how to do just that. Join me as I challenge you to become even more of the strong, resilient, and powerful woman you were meant to be. Let’s do this.

[music]

Hi there, my friend. Welcome to the Become An Unstoppable Woman podcast. I know I say it a lot in this intro, but I always am so grateful that you’re here. If this is your first episode, thanks for tuning in. If it’s not and you haven’t left a review for the show and you’re loving this, please go leave a review. I feel like it’s harder for me to get people to leave reviews than it is to pay me money. No joke. Those reviews really help me get some bigger guests on this show, because I know when somebody asks me to be on their show, that’s the first thing I look at. How many reviews do they have? Because it’s hard in the podcast world right now to really know numbers. Sure, we can share just generalized numbers, but those reviews are really a way for those guests to see, “Hey, how many people are tuning in and loving this show?” Especially if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, please take the time to just go and leave a quick review, a couple words about why you’re loving the show. I would be so appreciative. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

All right. Today, we’re talking about cultivating confidence. I am so fired up about this topic. I’ve noticed when I get really fired up about a topic, I talk really fast. Today, I’m going to be extremely mindful to slow it down. Take a couple of deep breaths in there because when I get fired up, oh my gosh. There’s just so many things that I want to tell you, but I need to make sure that I’m not talking so fast that you are not being able to digest this.

If you’re somebody who likes that fast content, you might want to speed me up today, but otherwise, I’m slowing it down. The other thing I want to say too, is I am not holding back on my language today. If you have little ones around, you should know by now to listen with headphones. I’m going to warn you now. All right, so cultivating confidence. Let me tell you why I want to do this episode. I have realized that a lot of clients are coming to me and I ask them the question, “What do you want to gain most from us working together in coaching to say this was worth your time and money, one of the best investments of your life?”

So many women are telling me, “I want to increase my confidence levels.” What will happen then is if we end up working together, we develop a goal around their confidence levels. I will ask them specifically, “Okay, where are you right now on a 1 to 10 scale with your confidence, 10 being highest?” A lot of them will tell me around a 5 to a 5. Then I will ask them specifically, “What does a 3 to a 4 or 5, what does that mean to you?” They will describe it as this. I’m going to give you this description because I want to see if you can relate to any of these things.

They’re saying they’re feeling unsure of their decisions and their abilities. They’re finding it hard to make decisions. They’re not standing up for themselves and even avoiding conflict altogether. They’re worrying or caring what others think. They’re feeling stuck because, again, it’s hard for them to make decisions. They’re holding back, not expressing emotions because, again, they’re caring what other people think. They have a lot of fear about where they’re going, what they’re doing, if they’re going to make mistakes, if they’re going to fail. Or if they succeed, can they handle it? Can they balance all the things in their life? It’s so many different fears, but there’s a lot of it there.

Because of that fear, they’re having some anxieties, even a little bit of depression here and there because, again, that stuck feeling does not feel good. They’re people-pleasing. They’re doubting and criticizing themselves a lot, especially with that negative inner voice. They find that even other people in their lives are criticizing them and they’re not standing up to that. They’re not feeling comfortable in their skin or just as themselves in some way. They’re procrastinating and/or avoiding things that they need to be doing or handling or tackling.

I will tell you, you may think, “Oh my gosh, well, Lindsay, I’m not there,” but you may be in that area of life in some space. Let me give you an example. I had a client recently who came to me and is a rock star in her professional life. She’s a VP at a startup and the startup is rocking it. You can tell that this woman just knows herself in the business world. I asked her, “What is it that you want coaching to help you with?” She wants to grow another area of her life. I said, “Well, what’s holding you back from doing that?” She said confidence.

Again, you can be a rock star in one area of your life, but there may be one, two, three or more other areas of life where you want to grow and you’re experiencing some of this lack of confidence because of that. Even when we start new things, I know I’m raising my hand here, I feel the same way of, “Oh my gosh, I don’t know what I’m doing.” Those negative doubts and criticism comes up for me. It’s just hard sometimes.

Today, I want to give you three steps, a step-by-step process for you to increase your confidence level so you can get more of what you want. Because I am so tired of hearing women that they’re not going after the jobs that they want because they don’t feel as qualified. Men, it’s been shown, are applying for those jobs even when they don’t have all the qualifications, and women aren’t. Same with asking for pay raises. Men do it more. They do it more often. Women aren’t. That’s part of why most women aren’t making what men are making in a similar role with a similar background, because they just don’t have that confidence.

We’ve got to change this, ladies. We cannot be at this place anymore, where you’re starting to get too much awareness with these stats out there that men are asking for more and doing it better. I really think that goes back to confidence. Men just have that natural ability to do this more. They’ve been conditioned for it more. They also have testosterone on their side, which I know helps. We live in a culture where it really promotes men being able to go after that stuff more than women, and it’s time to change that stuff. Again, today, I want to give you these three steps so you can boost that confidence and just really get what you want.

All right. Step one to building your confidence is what I’m going to call self-awareness. I always say the first step to making any kind of change in your life is being aware. Aware of your pitfalls, aware of the things that are holding you back. So many people out there are walking around like flipping zombies. In fact, I had a strength soirée this past weekend with a group where I didn’t know anybody in the room. I was brought in to essentially what we call a cold audience. I was talking to them about their strengths and about their negative inner voice. You could just tell so many people in the room were not ready for that kind of content. They just looked at me with those zombie eyes of, “I’m not ready to wake up yet,” and that’s totally cool.

I lived in that space for a very long time, especially in my former marriage. I didn’t want to wake up to the fact that life wasn’t as good as maybe it seemed on paper and pictures. We all go through those seasons. You’re listening to those podcasts today for a reason. You’re ready to wake up. Let’s get some self-awareness in there. How are you going to do that? Well, there’s a couple of different ways. The first is to know yourself, and I go back to the same assessment over and over again. I have a lot that I liked, but this one’s my favorite, and it’s the CliftonStrengths assessment formerly known as StrengthsFinder.

Why do I love this assessment so much? Because you’re going to get your top five strengths handed to you. That is going to give you a ticket to start to understand who you are as a unique individual. Yes, you can go take the Myers-Briggs or the Enneagram or the VIA and all these other assessments. That’s going to give you more generalized results of like, “Hey, you’re an Enneagram 3. That’s what this means”, or, “Hey, you’re an ENFP. That’s what this means.” Those are great. I love those assessments as well.

With the CliftonStrengths assessment, you are going to get results that only 1 in 33 million people have. That is just so unique and special. When you start to understand how to maximize those strengths, you can get into action really fast. It builds the confidence really fast. I just love that tool because, again, it creates really unique results and you can get into action with that very quickly.

A lot of times, you’ll just get those results and the Gallup company, who runs the CliftonStrengths, will tell you some information about those strengths, and that can be really helpful, but you can also come to me and get an even deeper dive of maybe taking my Solidifying Your Strengths course, where I spend an hour on each of those strengths and breaking it down for you of, “Hey, here’s where you can grow with that strength. Here’s what are going to be your pitfalls. Here’s probably patterns of behavior you’re doing, and this is a way to change it.” It’s just very eye-opening to start to understand yourself in that way.

When I learned my CliftonStrengths back in the day, it was so eye-opening to say, “Hey, here’s what’s right with me. Here are things that I do really well. Yes, there are some pitfalls with that, but now I know why they’re there. I know how to change them.” Before, again, I just had this thought of, “Well, I’m just some weirdo and I can’t get what I want, and I’m never going to make this happen. I want the secret to success.” I didn’t understand how people were getting their goals and I wasn’t.

Again, the CliftonStrengths assessment allowed me to start doing that. If you want to take on the assessment yet to get your top five, it’s only $19.99. You can go to Gallup’s website, you can google it, or I have a Bitly. It’s http://bit.ly/GetStrengths. You can go there as well. Now, I don’t make any money from these assessments. That’s not an affiliate link. I just love this tool. I think it’s amazing. If you do end up taking the CliftonStrengths assessment, send me your results. I would love to see them. I mean it. I really would. Send me an email. Let’s start talking about what makes you unique and special. I can just give you in a couple of sentences some free feedback of, “Oh my gosh, okay. Here’s where you’re going to do really well and here’s where you’re going to have pitfalls.” Because again, that just creates a momentum of starting to understand who you are.

I have so many clients that come to me and say, “I just hate conflict and I can’t deal with that.” That’s part of their confidence issues. Then we pull their CliftonStrengths and they have a strength called harmony high. They’re always wanting to have harmonious situations. That’s fine and great, but they realize some of the pitfalls of that is not standing up for themselves. What happens then just from that awareness, they’re starting to say, “Okay, this is my harmony. My harmony is going to feel uncomfortable when I have to stand up for myself, and that’s okay.” They start to understand that they can just talk to their inner harmony strength. I know it sounds weird, but it’s so cool. Talk to that inner harmony strength to calm her down a little bit when they’re going in. Just that one little tweak makes a big difference.

I have a client right now who’s in that same exact boat, high harmony, working on confidence. At work, she has started to thrive in just the past 90 days of us working together, and starting for her to balance that harmony strength. She is getting a promotion. People at work are noticing her more. People in her personal life are noticing her more. She made a very, very big decision in her life recently that was very hard for her. She now is just cultivating this confidence as she started to do that. It all went back to taking that CliftonStrengths assessment.

Now, eventually, if you continue to work with me, I’ll teach you more about yourself. I’ll teach you your way of thinking. I’ll teach you your values and your passions and your purpose, and I call it the puzzle of you. We sit down and we look at all that stuff. That’s where you really gain a confidence and really gain a momentum. Just know there’s more out there, especially what I do in my process. I always tell people, “Start with that CliftonStrengths assessment,” because again, individualized results so you can immediately start applying action steps into.

Another way that you can build self-awareness to increase your confidence is knowing about your negative inner voice. I’ve talked about it here on the podcast a lot. In the psychology world, they call it the ego. Some people call it the false self, the conditioned self, the shadow self, your inner child even. I called it the inner mean girl, just because that’s how I view it, as that Regina George type character from the movie Mean Girls in your head, putting you down. She’s criticizing you, doubting you, making you want to control things you know you can’t control and be angry and have anger outbursts. Making you avoid things and people please and have perfectionist tendencies and worry about these details and procrastinate and all that fun stuff. We all have that voice. It’s just part of our human DNA, which is just knowing that alone can be huge.

Before, I thought I was crazy. I would go to a counselor and I would say, “What is wrong with me? Why do I feel this way? Why do I beat myself up? Why do I put others down and have these huge reactions when I’m in fights? I don’t want to be that person, but I don’t know how to stop.” Never in a year of counseling was it ever brought up about this negative inner voice. Oh, gosh, it would have been so eye-opening. It wasn’t until I went to coaching and we tapped into this voice. It was like, “Oh, I’m not crazy. I’m not weird. I’m not different. I’m just human.” I hear that from so many of my clients all the time.

They come to me and they’re like, “Just learning about that negative inner voice, Lindsay, has been so life-changing for me.” The work that we do when we’re working together is we tap deeper into that voice. We even interview her, as crazy as that sounds. We really figure out what she’s saying, which can be so life-changing to understand because that negative inner mean girl voice tends to live in our unconscious mind. She’s whispering all these negative things in our ears all day long.

Now, sometimes we can hear it. That’s why I’ll get people that say, “Oh, I just criticize myself so much or doubt myself.” Well, that means that they’ve turned up the volume on that inner mean girl and they can hear it, but there’s still probably a lot of things she’s saying off the mic. She’s just whispering it and you don’t even know it. It’s really important you start to A, just know that voice is there and just know it’s human behavior. There’s nothing wrong with you, you’re just a human being. Two, start to know the script of what she’s telling you.

The big exercise I do with my clients is I have them start journaling, especially if they get emotionally triggered by something. I say, “Pull out a pen and paper and write I feel statements. I feel mad because, and then let it all out on paper. Then go to the next feeling. I feel sad because da, da, da. Google a feelings chart because that feelings chart is going to allow you to to understand what feelings you feel.” It’s so hard for us to understand our feelings sometimes. That feelings chart can just say, “Yes, I’m feeling disgust. That’s what it is. It’s not anger, it’s disgust,” but we just needed that word in that moment. Because when we’re in that emotional part of our brain, called the amygdala, our thinking brain isn’t as strong. It’s hard for us to pull those words. That feelings chart can help, so google it. Start to understand that script. Journaling can help. Get it out on paper, and you’ll start to get eye-opening results.

I have a client right now who I’ve had start to journal and she’s on week three of journaling. I don’t think she’s even doing it every day. I just talked to her a few days ago and she’s like, “Lindsey, oh my gosh, my world is changing. I’m seeing this voice even more, and I’m already starting to feel more confident.” Because that’s actually one of her goals, specifically is work on confidence. It can happen, I will tell you. You just have to make the space and time for it, and just believe me just enough to start doing it.

Now, the third way to start to know that inner negative voice, that inner mean girl, is to go in even deeper. Like I said, interview her like I do in my coaching process. Let’s start to reprogram that script because that script came from your past. Things that have happened in your past that hurt you, that brain of yours said, “We’re going to build a wire around this,” so that you don’t do that again and get hurt. Because if you’re listening to the show a lot, you know our brain is not wired for happiness. It’s wired for survival. When those bad things happen in our lives, even if it’s just something so little, like we give a presentation and maybe we sneeze in the middle of it and people start laughing. I don’t know. Then all of a sudden, our brain says, “Oh my goodness, we can’t go out and shine because it’s embarrassing.”

We program all these really silly things in our childhood. I see it with my daughter right now, especially she’s starting to go through puberty. She’s about to be nine, crazy. I know. I don’t know why she’s going to puberty so young. It kills me. I see it with her. Something will happen. All of a sudden, she just goes to extremes like, “You don’t love me. You don’t do this.” I’m like, “No, babe. I’m just telling you, I have a call right now. It’s not because I don’t love you. I just have a client call.” Again, our child brain, unfortunately, it’s just so emotional, too. We build all these really weird wires because we’re not in the thinking brain as much. It’s really important that we all go in there at some point and look at the script of that negative inner voice, so you can start to know what’s there, know what’s on you, reprogram, heal that stuff. My goodness, that’s when life starts to feel really flipping good. You feel really confident just from those two things alone. If you even just did the inner mean girl voice, woo, that’s big.

That’s really what we tap into in my Become An Unstoppable Woman program, is that negative inner voice, because that is really one of the biggest blocks holding you back. People say all the time it’s external stuff. “Oh, it’s because my husband travels so much and I’m with the kids all day.” Or, “I don’t have any money,” or, “I’m so busy at work.” I get it, external things can impact us, but at the end of the day, we are co-creators with God and the universe. We can make things happen if we really, really want it.

When I invested in coaching years ago, I was a single mom. I had no job. I had a little bit in savings and I invested that savings into coaching. Was it scary? Yes. It was absolutely scary. That was a choice that I made because I believed in it so much. Of course I had my doubts, but I believed in it enough to do that kind of stuff.

I just had a client sign up too, a single mom of four. She invested at a higher coaching level than people who I know are probably making more money than her, but she is so hungry right now and she has shown the F up to make things happen. I know she’s going to get incredible results. She’s going to be probably one of those top-tier rockstars because she’s putting so much in.

I encourage you, if you really want something, you’ll make it happen. You might not just be at the place yet where you’re really ready to tackle this stuff, and that’s totally cool. I get it, but don’t make flipping excuses. Don’t be like, “Oh, it’s because I don’t have money.” Again, I’m telling you, when I was a single mom, I invested when I did. Two, when I really wanted something, I sold crap around my house. I took on little odd things, odd jobs to make it happen because I wanted the mental change so bad in that period of life. If you really want something, again, you will make it happen. Got it? A little tough love there, but I got to put that out there.

Now, the other thing I want to say there too is it is really important, yes, external stuff can impact us. Yes, absolutely, but what I find with many of my clients is that they’re putting up with way more shit than they need to be, and nobody knew. I know when I learned this about what boundaries I needed to be setting, there were boundaries like letting people talk me out of my truth, having people talk to me longer than I wanted them to talk to me. What were some other ones? People convincing me to do things I didn’t want to do, saying yes to things that I don’t want to say yes to.

Those are all things that when my coach told me, “Hey, Lindsey, you don’t need to put up with that anymore. In fact, you’re supposed to have boundaries around that stuff,” it blew my flipping mind. It blows the clients’ minds that I work with a lot of times of, “Wait a second, I can say no to that? I can set boundaries with that and I’m not going to be a mean nasty person?” No, you’re not going to be a mean nasty person because you can do it in a really nice way. In fact, you’re going to be a very confident, empowered person who goes after what they want. You’re going to give back so much more to the world than you putting up with this little crap of saying yes to the big sell when you don’t want to do the big sell or saying yes to that work project that you know is not going to go well. You know it because you can feel it in your body.

So many women have turned off listening to themselves, listening to their bodies and their intuition. That’s in essence I’m giving my clients too, is to turn that crap back on. You have all the answers inside of you of where you want to go, but for some reason, something’s happened to you where you may have turned some of that stuff off. We all do it. We’re all conditioned into a society of this groupthink mentality of, “Oh, you need to look this one certain way and do these one certain things,” and all that. It’s time to break the mold. It’s time to jump out of there and start looking at life a different way and really start to think about, again too, “How can I change my external circumstances?” The way that you can do that, I’ll give you a little hint here, is by changing yourself.

So many people look at my life and say, “How’d you go from a broke single mom to now really in the 1% financially, and have the life that you have and all that stuff?” That was because I changed myself. I was not going to chalk the life that I wanted unless I changed myself. It happens for my clients too. It can happen for you too, my friend. Now, if you’re a client of mine, you’re like, “Lindsey, I know, I get it. I get it. I get it.” These are just great reminders for you, my friend. If you’re trying to boost your confidence again, here’s the process. Keep going through it. You got this. Keep going.

Step one, as I said, of boosting or cultivating that confidence is self-awareness. We talked about knowing who you are, especially knowing your strengths can be the first step there, knowing that inner negative voice, and then knowing too the external shit you’re putting up with that you really don’t need to be, but nobody told you otherwise. Especially we see so many women from past generations who put up with way too much crap, way, way too much. Then we saw them be so unhappy. I know I saw it with my mom. I thought, “God, if my mom could just be happy, I would love to see that.” I know that’s something I’m giving my daughter of she gets to see a woman who gets to live a freaking great life and be confident in her body. Yes, it’s not perfect, but I feel pretty good about it. She feeds off that. I know if you’re a mom, you want that for your kids too. Step one, self-awareness.

Step two. After you build that self-awareness, it’s important you get into action. I see a lot sometimes with newbie clients, especially if they’ve done a lot of therapy, they have a ton of awareness. Like, “Oh, I know that this is my problem and I know that this is related to this, and this is why I’m doing this.” Then they’re just still freaking stuck. It’s like, “Okay, you have so much awareness. Why aren’t you taking action?” That’s where they’re getting problems.

With coaching, what we’re doing is we’re always building awareness, and then they’re implementing. Build awareness, implement. Build awareness, implement. The way that we’re doing this is by creating little bitty 21-day habits. The research has changed out there. Some people say it’s 21 days to create a new habit in your brain or a new wire. Some people are really moving toward 28 days. Some people say it’s a little bit longer, but 21 days is the minimum of having back-to-back consistency of doing a habit.

Let me give you some examples of how I’ve done this in the past with clients. If a client comes to me, they’re wanting to build confidence, as they’re working through the Become An Unstoppable Woman process, we’re going through things like knowing their inner mean girl, knowing their strengths, knowing their external blocks. Then we’ll get to the point of, “Okay, let’s start to implement. Let’s do some 21-day habits.” Depending on where they’re finding as the biggest stumbling blocks, is where we’ll build a habit.

For one client recently, it was setting the boundary of not doing things she didn’t want to be doing because she was just saying yes to all these things, and then getting so resentful and so drained at the end of every week, and then starting the next week even more drained. She just started to build that habit of every day she was going to question herself before she said yes to something because she was just in such a pattern of saying, “Yes, yes, yes, yes.” Instead, pausing, thinking, “Do I want to do this?” tapping back into that intuition again that we’re trying to turn on. Then say, “Okay, yes, maybe I do,” or, “No, I don’t,” or, “Maybe I want to do it this way.” After 21 days, she started to see a momentum with that. It wasn’t as hard of a thing for her to pause. It was more habitual.

With other clients, it’ll be, “I want to say this mantra to myself. I am confident. I am strong. I am this. I am that,” in order to combat that negative inner voice because we can do that with mantras. We can come back at that negative inner voice and say, “Here’s what I’m going start to say to myself and program this wire to calm you.” That helps a lot, too. I used to hate mantras, by the way. If you’re on that boat, just know I totally understand, but just try it. Try saying positive, present, focused statements about, “I am this. I am that.” Oh my gosh, after 21 days, you’re going to be thanking me that you did it. I know I was thinking my coach. That’s another idea.

Another thing that I’ve done with a client too, is it may just be they need a lot of self-care. They’ve just been so used to giving and giving and giving and giving, that for 21 days, they’re going to spend an hour on themselves doing something in order to build up some inner strength before they can go out into the world and build more outer strength. Hopefully, that gives you some ideas, but again, you just want to take little baby action steps.

Oh, I want to give you one more example. On my strength soirées, when I’m going in, I’m teaching people about their CliftonStrengths. I give them these one-sheet pages on each of their top five strengths and I give them specifically documentation on what their basement of their strength is. When it’s in overdrive and it’s straining them versus when it’s in their balcony, and when it’s in a really great, awesome place. Then I say, “Okay, we’ve gotten some awareness today in these past 20, 30 minutes already in the workshop. Now, let’s build a little action step. What’s something you want to change?” Already, I’m taking them into action of what’s one little thing you can do to start to change a pattern of behavior you want to change. I’m so sorry if you can hear that train in the background. I don’t know why the train is coming by right now, but it is. Anyways, they’re taking these 21 little baby day step habits.

Now, then we go into step three. Typically, again, when someone’s working with me, they’ll do my Life Leverage 21-day challenge course. That course is really, I would say, just the appetizer of starting to understand if we’re a good fit to work together even more, if you’re showing up for yourself, if you’re ready for change, do you like my teaching style, my coaching style, and all that stuff. Then after that, we get into the good stuff of the Become An Unstoppable Woman process. We do those 90 days of lots of self-awareness, especially around their blocks, getting into taking those baby action steps with 21-day habits. Then after that course is complete, some clients go on to my last and final course called Become Authentically Awesome, where we spend 90 days growing essentially their authentic self, so the best of them.

Because we’ve diminished so many of the blocks internally and externally, they can bloom and blossom, and this is where their confidence just starts to soar. One of the big things that they’re doing is not only building awareness of the puzzle of who they are and all that other stuff, but they are taking massive action toward their goals. I’m starting to teach them what massive action feels like.

There’s something called passive action, and there’s something called massive action. Passive action is learning and being behind the scenes and stuff. When you’re taking, for example, like a course of mine, that’s more passive action. Massive action is when you’re out in the world more. For example, when I went through the coaching process, in the massive action phase, that was when I started building my business. I was out there. I was getting the LLC, I was starting to take on clients, all that stuff. Where some of my clients are right now, they’re in that massive action phase. They’re just constantly putting themselves out there toward their goals to make it happen.

What’s great about massive action is you get out there sometimes and you’re creating action, action, action. Something may happen, and all of a sudden, you feel blocked again. Now, you have the process of knowing how to understand your blocks from the Unstoppable Woman course. You’re able to analyze and say, “Okay, this is why this is coming up,” and you’re able to push through it, heal it, release it, whatever you want to call it, and then you’re able to get back in action again.

I’ll give you an example, again, of my own life, of when I was building my business, at the end of when I was getting coached, it was like I would go through these waves of massive action, and then for whatever reason, I’d hit a block. Then I’d be more in passive action of being behind the scenes and maybe learning a little bit more, and then I would have to figure out what the block was, and then getting into massive action again, and then I maybe hit another block and get into passive action.

I wasn’t really aware of this whole process yet. This is something I did not learn in coaching, I had to teach myself, of when I hit these blocks and I’m in passive action, that’s a red flag to say, “Whoa, stop. Let’s figure out what’s going on so I can get back into massive action.” As I figured out this process, and I realized when I’m not in massive action to look at myself and see what’s going on. Now that I’ve done that for a while, oh my gosh, I’m in such massive action with my business, and I am making more money than I’ve ever made, and I’m working less than I’m ever working. It feels so good and it’s almost like magic. I’ll just say, “Well, I just ended my last free consult. I don’t have any more on the books, and I don’t have any marketing I’m doing right now,” and all of a sudden, it’s more consults start getting booked. It’s so weird.

I realized recently, oh my gosh, where I’m at my business now, I’m just constantly in massive action. I realized too, for example, if I have a consult call and somebody doesn’t end up signing with me, I don’t let it block me anymore. Before, I’d be like, “Oh my gosh, what did I say? Maybe I didn’t tell them this.” I just say now, it’s like, “Well, it wasn’t a good fit. They’re not moving forward. Moving on. Next person. Next, next, next, next.”

That’s what you want in your life. Say, for example, if you’re trying to build confidence in your career and you’re wanting to apply for jobs, say you start to get in that massive action phase where you’re just applying and applying and applying and applying. Maybe you go on some interviews, and maybe you don’t get the job. You being in the massive action phase, it shouldn’t faze you. If it fazes you, that tells you there’s a block that you need to build some self-awareness of and heal to get back into massive action. Otherwise, it’d be like, “Well, I didn’t get the interview. No big deal. It was not a good fit. Moving on, moving on, moving on.”

This is where, when you’re at this space, you start to become awe inspiring. I will tell you, it’s taken me a couple of years to get here. This is like when I’m going on podcast interviews. People are like, “Oh my gosh, I just can’t believe how resilient you are and how you’ve done all this and created all this. Now you help women do this.” It’s like, yes, because I’m in a massive action phase, baby. Because I have gained that self-awareness, I have done these little baby action steps. I am just out there all the time. This is where people are like, “Man, she’s so confident. Man, she’s got this. Man, she’s got that.” It’s like, “Okay, man, if only everybody knew this.”

This is how we cultivate confidence. We get that self-awareness. We take those baby steps. We get into massive action. We know how to look at our blocks when we’re not in massive action. Because it just seems like I’m on fire. You ever see that with other people? It’s like, man, they’re just on fire. They’re just going and going and going.

I will say, I think I’m at the very start of my little fire here. If you look at somebody in my space, like at Marie Forleo or Rachel Hollis, who is bigger in their career in the self-help industry, they’re really on fire. Because they’ve done the same thing. It was self-awareness, taking little baby steps, massive action. If they’re not in massive action, figure out why they’re not, get that self-awareness again, little baby action steps, back to massive action. This is just when you’re like, “Man, I have done it. I am confident beyond anything I’ve ever thought.”

That’s what I find with clients too. They’ll say, “Lindsay, I want to take my confidence from a 3 to an 8,” and we’ll get there in the 90 days. Then later, the 8 looks so different, because it’s like, “Man, what I used to think was an 8 in confidence is now probably like a 4 because now, my confidence is even bigger and bigger and bigger.” Of course, a lot of confidence, I think, sometimes comes from just constantly, again, putting yourself out there and being okay with failing sometimes and stumbling and just getting back up and doing it again. It just comes from repetition.

This is really the process, my friend, self-awareness, baby steps, massive action. Self-awareness, baby steps, massive action. It really is that simple. I think we try and overcomplicate things so much. Again, we have this inner script from that nasty inner mean girl sometimes that’s saying we’re weird and different, we can’t do this and it’s too hard and da, da, da, da, da. We can do it. We can absolutely do it. You just don’t know the process yet on how to do it.

I hope today helped you to start to understand that process. Of course, if you want to go deeper with this and really get the life-changing results of having a coach by your side and me helping you, come on over. I want to talk to you. Come on over to my website lindsaye, L-I-N-D-S-A-Y-E, preston.com. I have a free coaching assessment on there, go take that. If we’re a good fit to work together, we’ll get on a free consult call, we’ll talk through what you’re wanting, really make sure it’s a good fit, customize my coaching process to see what programs will be best for you and which ones we maybe don’t need, and we’ll go from there. Wherever you are, my friend, I’d love to talk to you. Again, go to my website lindsayepreston.com. Let’s see if we’re a good fit and take it deeper.

Otherwise, get into action, my friend, from this content today. I love hearing when somebody has listened to a podcast and they say, “I’m already making changes,” like on the last episode with the resume, “I’m already making changes with that.” Yes, that’s what this podcast is all about.

That’s all I have for you for today. Hope you love this episode. Till next time, my friend. Remember, you’re only as unstoppable as you believe you can be, so believe in yourself. You got this.