Big Question | What is self-confidence? Ep 12

What if your self-confidence was the key to unlocking a more fulfilling life? Discover how personal beliefs and daily choices shape your confidence with Sian and Andy on this episode of Big Questions, Short Answers. We challenge the conventional wisdom surrounding self-confidence and explore its multifaceted nature, from the crippling effects of imposter syndrome to the chaos caused by unwarranted overconfidence. Sian's candid anecdotes and practical advice will guide you on how to build and maintain the right attitude to face life's challenges with assurance.

Join us as Sian shares her journey toward becoming a calming force in emotionally charged situations—a skill she honed through observation and practice. We'll also dissect real-life examples of individuals with varying levels of self-confidence, revealing the complexities of believing in oneself despite external accomplishments. Whether you're looking to boost your own confidence or simply gain a deeper understanding of it, this episode offers valuable insights and actionable strategies for navigating both personal and professional spheres with greater poise.

For more content, check out Sian's website sianjaquet.com, and her online course: Create The Life You Truly Love.

www.sianjaquet.com

Transcript

Sian: 0:00

How have we ended up here, by the way?

Andy: 0:02

What.

Sian: 0:03

I'm sorry, rob, very well you coming here and asking me to sit here and ask questions. Welcome to Big Questions. Short Answers. I'm Sian.

Andy: 0:11

Hello, I'm Andy Sian's husband asking the big life questions.

Sian: 0:16

And possibly adding a little bit of unsolicited advice.

Andy: 0:20

This podcast is brought to you by Sian's value-based online course. Visit sianjackeycom to find out more. In the last podcast, we were just talking about confidence, and I think confidence is a really important thing in this day and age, more so than well, I suppose, a lot of things, and you know, we're taught that. You know confident kids, confident adults. In the workplace, people are looking for confidence, but a lot of us, uh, you know, sometimes there's even the case of that feeling of imposter syndrome the first thing to do is to clarify what you mean by self-confidence.

Sian: 0:56

I think that's what we're talking about. Yeah, yeah, well, self-confidence this is the world of cornishan, doesn't make me right. Yeah, let's be clear. I do not have a phd in all this self-confidence. What, what I've learned, and what I see people do is self-confidence is when you choose to have a certain belief and therefore an attitude. Yeah, you choose to respond to your belief about who you are. That is what self-confidence is. I have met people who are incredibly self-confident and, may I say, inappropriately so.

Andy: 1:28

Yes, yeah.

Sian: 1:33

I've met other people who are lacking in self-confidence to the point of how, because of what they contribute and because of who and what they are in the world, I've worked with them and I say to them how can you not be self-confident with all of this evidence of what you have achieved and what you've contributed? So do you see what I'm saying? It fundamentally comes self-confidence. Is that nugget of? What do you believe about yourself? Yeah, now, fundamentally, it's about your life experience, your beliefs, the values you choose to hold, literally the daily decisions you choose to make, which all go into a big mixing bowl with a wooden spoon and they come out as your self-confidence. Yeah, spoon and they come out as your self-confidence.

Sian: 2:33

Yeah, I am astounded, even now, when I meet people who have and again this is my word a delusional, completely delusional about who and what they are. In certain situations, their self--confidence can be quite destructive because there isn't a filter of what is the outcome of you being this self-confident person, but without any evidence, and you create hell and desolation consistently. Equally, there are people that I meet and I hope at times I can take a seat in this space that can radiate to people, by being self-confident, that I'm here with you. I'm can stand shoulder to shoulder with you. We've got this. Let's not spin.

Sian: 3:19

Um, I mean one of the things that I I hope I do in my life. I don don't even know how to say this, it just makes me feel weird saying it. But I know I have the self-confidence to go into a challenging situation where somebody is emotionally spinning. Yeah, and I will use the analogy of you know you're on a merry-go-round and that horse is just going faster and faster and faster and faster. And my job is to have the self-confidence to be an oak tree just to stand still, to create a calm and to help you slowly slow that down. But it is my confidence in my ability to do that and I've learned how to do it. I didn't know how to do it years ago. I would get as unconfident and fearful as anybody else, but I learned to do it and I actually learned to do it by observing other people do it.

Andy: 4:13

To be honest, yeah, because that is one of your skills.

Sian: 4:19

You have several that ability to go into quite scary situations and just to slow that spinning, as you say down yeah, but but, andy, let's be clear yes, I can do that in those situations and, yes, I'm old enough and wise enough and maybe I do need to own my space. I know I have a skill in being able to do that, but there are other places that I've got no self-confidence. This last weekend I was seriously considering going to audition for a play, right, you know me, I love a bit of theatre, darling, I love a bit of a spotlight, right. But in the audition pack they said that I had 15 minutes to audition. But it had to be a cold audition, cold read, which is when you just.

Sian: 5:06

They would go in there and they would just hand me the book and I had to read it straight away and I bottled out.

Andy: 5:11

Because you're dyslexic.

Sian: 5:12

Because I'm terrified of being made a fool of because I can't read properly.

Sian: 5:17

But the thing, there is the stuff I do, right? I mean, even I have a little smile to myself. You know, if I were inclined which I'm not I've never spent more than two minutes on my website, but when I do, I look at it and I think who the hell is that woman? Right, but I can assure you this weekend that woman wasn't to be seen in the room. So this whole thing about self-confidence is it isn't a thing. It's a movable feast and it goes up and down like the weather and like the temperature, depending on what the situation is and what your fundamental beliefs are about yourself. Again, you tell me to go in the kitchen and make a birthday cake. Right? Have I made a number of them over the years? Yes, yes, I have. But you damn well know Sian will go in there and give it a go, but is she confident that it's going to come out? No, why? Because my entire family have taken the piss out of me about my breaking all of my life. I'm trying to give you basic examples.

Andy: 6:18

But just coming back to the cold reading, you know, because you're dyslexic, obviously that's a thing. But I've seen you cold read scripts and it's fine, you know.

Sian: 6:32

Right, I'm really pleased that your judgment is that the point is, andy, and that's what most of my life trying to drill this into your head it's not about what you think. It's about what the individual person thinks. Yeah, true, not about what you think. It's about what the individual person thinks yeah, true, and exactly what I'm saying.

Sian: 6:47

There'll be some situations where somebody's self-confidence is absolutely evident, front and center, fabulous, let's all applaud, we need it, we want it and it was there in the moment. And there are other times when we can expect people to be confident or we think they will, because that's their role or that's how we see them and they don't deliver at the time. Can I give you one example left field, yeah, right, I remember talking to somebody about their self-confidence, about their ability, intellectually, actually, that's what the confidence, confidence, the situation was about, and I can remember this like it was yesterday, and they were sitting there chatting to me and telling me that when their parents went to parents day uh, teacher, yeah, and this was a grown adult I was talking to they used to get really upset and angry that their parent, their mother and father, were not assertive in front of the teachers that they didn't engage with. Well, I think you've got my son and daughter wrong and that actually they're this, that and the other and none. You don't like my child or whatever.

Sian: 7:55

We learn that ability from our parents. If you do not have assertive, confident parents, the chances of you having assertive, confident child is greatly reduced. Now I don't know how far below the line you want to go, but I'm looking at you and I'm eyeballing it right. Um, I had an incredibly confident mother who had the ability, yes, to switch on that confident, to switch on that assertiveness at certain times. I know I'm kicking my fingers and you're looking at me and thinking we're recording this. You silly bitch, you shouldn't be doing that she could be a scary bird.

Sian: 8:28

Well, she was a fault of nature. Um, however, and it's not comparing and saying one's right and wrong, right, please. That is not what I'm doing, but you didn't overtly come from a family that had assertive, confident parents. No, right. And if you look at your life journey, there are times when your self-confidence had exited the room, pursued by a bear oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, no question, yeah, no question.

Andy: 8:56

And I haven't got the resources to pull myself up, so that was part of our relationship, wasn't it?

Sian: 9:03

you know, just like you've taught me to do things and be things, yeah, in the moment, because that's what was needed, right?

Sian: 9:10

One of the roles in my relationship with you was to be the custodian, in some ways, of your confidence when you were going through a hard time, to sit there and remind you I mean from a career point of view.

Sian: 9:22

Come on, you can pinpoint at least five conversations when you felt like the world was falling apart and I would sit there and I would say, right, we're going to have a conversation and we are just going to talk through the journey of who you are, what your career is and what you've achieved. Because in that moment of a lack of self-confidence just like most people, you know you'd completely forgotten None of that, even had a headspace. But once we stopped the spinning, stopped the merry-go-round and said, right, let's just look at the evidence here. Right, this isn't me loving you and feeding you with bullshit, telling you you're fabulous, you're marvellous and they're all wrong. Right, it was feeding you with bullshit, telling you you're fabulous, you're marvellous and they're all wrong. Right, it was about sitting there and looking at the evidence. Right, and that could be true of all situations. Yeah, if you want to actually look at self-confidence or find it, or at least open the door, you have to look at the evidence of the journey.

Andy: 10:21

And, to be fair, I don't want to bring your course in here. You know your online course, but that actually steps it through, doesn't it? In terms of your all your values are very much part of that and your life story, so that you've got that evidence, not just a cv, but something that is just yeah, the bad and the indifferent.

Sian: 10:43

Yes, that none of us get out of life scot-free. None of us don't make massive mistakes All relevant, or a relative sorry, to who we are and what lives we lead. Yeah, but the art of having a mature, emotionally balanced life, says she who doesn't always get it right right is to be able to look at those things and learn from them. I did it, yeah. That's where I'm.

Sian: 11:10

Possibly didn't make the best of choices yeah but now, reflecting back on it, or now I'm facing a similar situation, I'm going to address that in a different way. Yeah, and that is how you build confidence? Yes, by having the confidence. How do you get it? You look at yourself and you find little ways of being positive, right? Yeah, one of the other things you know, when we're doing this, you keep saying to me, sean, try and give people something to think about. I am now sitting here with my hand on my heart telling you that there are people literally all over the world that I have worked with in the past 20 odd years who, every night, when they clean their teeth, look for two or three things to reflect on the day, to tell themselves they're proud of what they have achieved yeah and it doesn't necessarily mean solving world peace, right.

Sian: 12:07

It means I was kind to somebody at work who you know. I took the time, I made a lovely dinner for the family. I stopped on the way home and made an effort to go and buy a face cream for myself. You're laughing at me, right, but those are the stuff. It's not the monument.

Andy: 12:30

It's like if you're buying yourself a face cream. I'm sure it's just about valuing yourself.

Sian: 12:39

And, yeah, that end of every day, day, let's come back to that. I have clients that we still smile about it. They're still doing it. They share that with anybody and everybody, from children to people they work with. Yeah, damn good idea if we every day took a little bit of time to reflect on what we've done right, instead of beating the shit out of ourselves telling us what I should, must, could have done better, should have done whatever. That is what is creating a space for confidence to grow and be acknowledged.

Andy: 13:11

I like that.

Sian: 13:12

I like that.

Andy: 13:14

Thanks very much. Go and clean my teeth. Join us next time on Big Questions. Short Answers with Sian Jacquet and me, Andy.

Sian: 13:26

If you have any questions you want to ask, please send them via the website sianjacquetcom.

Andy: 13:32

If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and share it with everyone you know.

Sian: 13:37

We really do appreciate you sharing 15 minutes with us.

Andy: 13:41

And if you want to do a bit more learning, go on to Sian's website siansjackaycom. There's a course on values to create the life you truly love. I did it and it really does do what it says on the can.

Sian: 13:52

See you next time.