Even my dog senses my lack of confidence! Seriously! We have noticed differences in how Zoe reacts to each of us. Jason sternly instructs her to stop or whatever and the dog meekly obeys. I attempt to sternly instruct and she ignores me. No, he hasn’t beaten her to put the fear of God into her or anything, she just chooses to ignore me sometimes. I have learned that I have to literally get in her face, look her in the eye and make my voice as stern as possible to make her listen. Yes, I know, Zoe is trying to exert her dominance….and my lack of self confidence makes it easy for her to win. I don’t want an out of control dog, so I am having to force myself into a self confident being, at least when I am working with her.
Yes, I have known that while at one point that I have a self confidence issues. Oh, I used to be somewhat confident and willing to try new things, put myself out there, walk with my head held high and all that. But that confidence has wavered. Ok, saying that it has wavered is putting it mildly. It virtually became non existent. Life just beat any self confidence straight out of me. There was the great teaching debacle and the repetitive lackluster experiences in my career. Then of course there was my first marriage where my ex repeatedly showed me that I was worthless through his disregard for me. (Isn’t that a nice way of putting it?). I have had quite a few situations where people have worked to undermine any self confidence that I had managed to scrape together. I have had numerous people put me down and constantly tell me that what I do is never good, I’m not enough, etc. when possible I have actually purged those people from my life, sometimes it’s impossible. And of course being obese sucks the confidence out of a person.
I know that the lack of confidence will grow when I lose weight. It did before when I lost weight. But in the meantime, how does one grow a self confidence? It’s a vicious cycle, because I know that my lack of self confidence plays a part in my weight loss efforts. It plays a huge part. I’m constantly thinking, I can’t do it, it’s worthless to even try, I’m not worth the time, etc! And that is the crux of the matter in my perpetual weight loss struggles of late. Sure, temptations hit me (I’m talking to you cake) but if my self confidence and self worth were stronger it would make a huge difference in what choices I make.
I don’t have the answer….except to fake it until I make it.
3 comments:
Just keep faking it. Believe in yourself and the confidence will grow.
I can understand this struggle. I've felt a relief when I put my confidence in God rather than myself, but definitely easier said than done some days!
One unexpected way I found some pride of self was in researching my family tree. I realized all the great people who came before me are what I'm made of and I had to be proud of that because they may have been simple farmers or innkeepers or hat makers, but they transversed oceans and fought wars and thrived in timed when that wasn't an easy task! It also helped me see that some of the things that weren't positive parenting traits were things borne out of our ancestral survival, but the generations didn't know how to adapt it to better suit us little people back then. I used meditation to go back to the experiences that hurt a lot and comfort my younger self. It may sound hokey but it works! Also, saying positive affirmations works. "I am powerful! I am worthy!" You do have to work at building it if you don't innately have confidence, and it absolutely should not be reliant on your weight!
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