How do the characters on your Inner Team affect your confidence? Here are four ways.
1. Self-Trust
The word confidence comes from the Latin phrase con fidere which roughly translates as “with trust”. So, confidence has a lot to do with whether you trust yourself.
What can the Inner Team tell you about self-trust, or self-distrust? What you trust yourself to do is likely to be a behavior which follows the rules of one of your Insiders. Where you don’t trust yourself, it’s likely because of lack of access to an Outsider.
For example, I trust myself to be on time, because my Responsible Insider is reminding me to keep my attention on the clock, and of the dangers of being late.
By contrast, I don’t experience self-trust when it comes to not eating the leftover Halloween candy. The ability to set limits on my candy intake is a capacity that comes from access to the Restrictor, which is an Outsider on my Inner Team. Historically, my restrictor has been crowded out by its opposite, the Indulger.
2. Low Confidence
Where you experience low confidence, self-doubt or impostor feelings, look for the impact of the Inner Critic. A feeling of grounded self-confidence is elusive, if not impossible, when your Critic is activated.
The Critic’s message is that you are flawed, deficient, and fundamentally not good enough. It will offer a litany of your glaring character flaws and past failures to prove its point. Offering evidence of your successes or strengths does nothing to convince your Critic of your worthiness, because it is incapable of anything other than a critical perspective. The Critic is unmoved and unaffected by any form of positive thinking you deploy to counteract its negativity.
When the Critic activates and begins criticizing you, there are two choices. The first is to get caught up worrying that what it says about you is true, which will crater your confidence. The second is to recognize the Critic’s intensity as merely a powerful signal to get your attention. It’s warning you that you’ve strayed from behaviors which kept you safe in the past. This gives you the capacity to notice a criticism without giving it any credence, allowing it to pass quickly without negatively impacting your confidence.
It is possible to reduce the frequency and intensity of critic attacks themselves. This requires becoming compassionately aware of the Insider whose rules of behavior the Critic is enforcing, and working to cultivate access to its balancing opposite. The emergence of this perspective is an indicator that your Inner Leader is present. When this is so, confidence naturally begins to return.
3. Overconfidence
Overconfidence is as widespread as low confidence, if not more so. In study after study, humans tend to over-estimate their capacity, the accuracy of their predictions, and their confidence in their understanding. But where low confidence is a problem that will propel many people to engage a coach or therapist, overconfidence has exactly the opposite effect: why seek help, when you’ve got it all figured out?
The character most involved in overconfidence is the Expert. Where the Critic distorts your sense of self by my minimizing your strengths, successes and progress, the Expert magnifies feelings of certainty and correctness. Certainty is best understood as an emotion, the feeling of correctly understanding what is so. It is not necessarily an indicator that your perceptions are accurate.
And when you’re certain that you’re right, curiosity about what you don’t know or may have misunderstood is dramatically reduced, or eliminated altogether. Or to put it another way, the Expert will blind you to your blind spots.
Underneath the confident exterior, the Expert is working hard to protect you from feeling uncertainty, disorientation or confusion. Access to the opposite character, Learner, provides a permission to not know, to be curious, to take in new information, to change your mind. Where Expert offers a brittle confidence - especially when challenged - Learner offers a different type of confidence which arises not from existing knowledge and expertise, but from a belief you will be able to learn what you need.
4. Inner Leader Presence
As you develop Inner Leader presence in relation to more and more characters on your Inner Team, confidence naturally emerges. It’s the confidence that comes from knowing that you have the resources within you to respond to whatever challenges you may encounter. Feeling resourced in this way is a good working definition of confidence.
Having access to the strategies of only a couple of Insiders to solve every problem you face is a bit like having a toolbox with only a hammer and screwdriver. Because Inner Leader presence allows access to the gifts of all parts of who you are, it’s like having a wider range of tools available to you.
Perhaps most importantly of all, the Inner Leader’s unconditional, radical acceptance of all of who you are makes you far more resilient in the face of experiences that might otherwise dent your confidence. The Inner Leader will respond to feelings of uncertainty and self-doubt in the face of life’s difficulties with compassion rather than self-judgment. The Inner Leader accepts these experiences as normal, coherent reactions, not an indication of a flaw or deficiency in your character.
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