The Confidence Coach - confidence at work

0:02 A listener production. This podcast aims to provide general information only and is not intended to be a substitute for psychological therapy. If any of the topics discussed raise issues for you, please seek advice from a trained psychologist, and if you're struggling, you can always call Lifeline on one three one one one four. Hi, and welcome to the Confidence Coach, the podcast for people who struggle with self confidence, question their self worth, or have a persistent nagging voice in their head that tells them they're not good enough.

0:46 I'm your Hostcast done. I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist, and in each episode, we'll start with a real person sharing their confidence struggle with me in their own words via a voice memo. I'll share with you ideas and tools that you can apply to help boost your self esteem and live a more confident life. Today we're going to hear from Ali. Hi, Cass, my name's Ali. I have confidence issues around my work. I find that I second guess myself a lot, and I create more work for myself because I'm double checking that I have finished a task. I will sometimes wake up in the night worry that I've forgotten to do something. Sometimes I'll send myself an email to my work email to remind myself to follow something up. I'll get to work the next day, I'll have a look and I've followed it up and that there's no issue.

1:41 I find that I create issues in my mind and that I constantly have this fear that I'm forgetting to do something and I don't have trust in myself that I am completing a task. So some tips around that would be great. Thank you. Wow. Ali has done a really great job of describing exactly what she is experiencing, which is a lack of trust in herself and creating issues in her own mind. So I guess if we can just start with a definition of self confidence. Self confidence is it's a feeling of trust in your own abilities, qualities, and judgments. It's a belief in your ability to succeed at something. But it's also trust that even if you don't, that doesn't diminish your sense of self worth in any way. And what Ali is describing is this lack of trust in her ability to do her job to a satisfactory level.

2:47 And she describes perfectly that this is a kind of a mental game. So what she's experiencing is actually something that's really common. And even if you don't experience this in the workplace like Ali is describing, you might be able to relate to other scenarios. So she has an automatic thought, an idea pops into her head, and in this case, the thought is I haven't done enough. That thought creates quite an uncomfortable emotional response. It's a fear, and she describes it as fear. And the fear is that I haven't done enough, which is really the fear of repercussions or judgment or criticism of not being good enough in some way. And because of that fear, when any of us experiences that kind of sensation, it triggers an urge to do something to make that uncomfortable feeling go away. So the cycle is that a thought pops in my head, I get an emotional response, I feel fear, I feel anxious, I feel self doubt, and that produces an urge to do something to seek reassurance to know that I did do enough. When Ali checks, when she goes back and she checks whether she did the work, or if somebody has health anxiety and they google their symptoms, or somebody is not sure that they've made the right decision and they ask a friend. All of this opinion seeking and reassurance seeking and checking that we do. What

4:20 that does is it gives you a very immediate sense of relief and that immediate drop in anxiety knowing that you have done the thing gives you a huge surge of dopamine in your brain, and dopamine in your brain is highly, highly reinforcing. People refer to dopamine as a feel good hormone. What it actually is, it's a motivational kind of hormone. It tells you what to do next time to get that same feeling of reward. So what happens then is the next time you have that automatic thought that maybe you didn't do the thing, or maybe you didn't check the eyron, or then your brain remembers that feeling of relief that you've got because you checked.

5:06 And over time this becomes more extreme. People begin checking things over and over. They begin sometimes taking hours of their day in their heads, worrying about things and engaging in these compulsive kind of behaviors and this reassurance seeking and at its extreme, this is what OCD looks like. But you don't have to have full blown OCD to relate to some of these kind of habitual patterns of thought, feeling, urge to act. So when we have that urge to check that we did something or to reassure ourselves that we've done a good enough job, that seems like a really logical thing to do. The problem is every time you do that, every time you entertain that thought, you give that thought weight and you act on those feelings.

5:57 That pattern of behavior typically happens more and more and more frequently. It can become like Ali describes, waking up in the night with worry and with that lack of self trust. Every time you check, as opposed to trusting yourself, trusting in yourself that you did a good enough job, you reinforce that lack of self trust. You never actually give yourself the opportunity to prove to yourself otherwise to let that thought go, to not check, and to find out that in fact, there was nothing to worry about in the first place. Over time, if you let these fears kind of rule your behaviors, your emotions and your behaviors, then they can actually become really consuming, and on a longer term level, they can really erode your sense of self worth and your sense of self trust. So when it comes to changing this pattern at the top level, we can look at the thoughts when you have an automatic thought. We all have automatic thoughts all day long.

7:16 We can look at how you challenge those thoughts, how you can look for evidence that that thought isn't true. These are techniques you can do to manage the mental part of it. But really more important in this situation is how you manage that urge, because in that moment, what you're really dealing with is this compulsive need to seek reassurance or this compulsive need to check. And if you go to battle with yourself in your mind, and this applies to any urge, you will know the power of an urge. And if you go into battle in your mind, typically you will lose. Your brain will always default to doing the thing that it wants to do that it thinks is going to keep you safe, and it thinks that doing that behavior or doing that checking is the thing that's going to keep you safe. So it's much more important to learn how to manage your urge at a physiological level. And we have a technique in mindfulness called urge surfing, and this is a technique that can be applied to any experience where in that moment you are grouped by an urge or a feeling, a compulsive need to engage in a particular behavior, whether that is a habit that you're trying to break, whether it is this need like Ali describes, to go back and check her work whenever you feel overwhelmed by an urge to do something. Urge surfing is a really useful

8:50 process that you can use to help you manage. So the first thing that we do with urge surfing is bring your awareness into your breath and into your body. So start by taking some slow, deep breaths and connecting with your body. The important thing here is unhooking from the thought in your head about the behavior you want to do, telling yourself that you really need to check that it'll only take a minute, that it won't do any harm. Come to your breath and just be curious about where you feel that sensation in your body, and you stay with the sensations, and what you will notice if you're experiencing a strong urge to do anything is that, just like a wave, it will increase in intensity and that's okay. You just stay curious to the sensation. But then what will happen is eventually it will subside. Usually we never give ourselves the opportunit unity to ride that wave and see it through to its logical kind of conclusion.

10:05 It will peak and it will subside. But we're so quick to jump in and do that behavior and get that immediate sense of reward, that immediate sense of relief, reinforcing the lack of self trust, reinforcing the urge to check instead of just allowing ourselves enough time and space to give ourselves a different experience. And the more times that you can ride out this urge and not give into it, the less and less intense those urges become. Eventually, over a period of time, those urges just fade out to nothing so that they're no longer a problem. So I would love to encourage you to give this technique a go. If you like self trust or self confidence in any area, and that's causing you to have these automatic thoughts of self doubt and urges to seek reassurance outside of yourself. The next time that automatic thought pops up in your head, can you give yourself a few minutes to try urge surfing ride that wave. Give yourself the opportunity to prove to yourself that you can trust yourself and that you can break that compulsive habit, that compulsive need to check. If you do try this out, I would love for you to let me know how you go. If this has been helpful for you, send

11:37 me a message. I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you so much for listening to the Confidence Coach podcast. If you have a confidence challenge that you'd like my help with, send me a voice memo. You can do that on my Instagram account at cast done underscore XO, or you can just use the voice recorder on your phone and email it to the Confidence Coach at casdone dot com. And I look forward to helping you with another confidence challenge on our next episode. Listener