​​Today’s blog is all about building confidence in the workplace and comes from a recent "Career Mindset Reset" session I had with one of my clients, who was looking for advice on how to feel more confident as she steps into a new role and organization.  

If you are struggling with confidence at work too - this is your lucky day! I break down my 5 steps to building your confidence at work, focusing on: time, skill, experience, remin​ders, and self-belief.​

1. TIME

Before you feel confident in anything you need time, you need a transition period as you learn and adapt to the role, figure out who’s who in the zoo, start building rapport with your colleagues and boss, and eventually settle into some kind of flow.

You simply cannot expect to understand and know everything on day one, week one, or even month one. Learning and confidence takes time, so be kind and don’t rush yourself. Know that things take time, but you will absolutely get there.

2. SKILL

If you're in a job, role or business where you don’t feel confident you probably have fears like:

• Am I doing this right?
• Am I the right person for this job?
• Do I really have what it takes?

In order to make you feel more confident and capable, first take a look and map out your skillset.

• Write down your degrees, awards, qualifications, and any courses or training you’ve done. 
• Write down all the skills and practices that have helped you hit career highlights and milestones.
• Think about what people come to you for help with and what you’re always getting complements about.

Now look at all of those amazing skills you probably didn’t even realise you had! Amazing isn’t it?!

After mapping out your skillset, maybe you realise there are a couple of gaps. Yes? No problem!

• Is there someone you can reach out to for mentorship and guidance?
• Is there a teacher, coach, or guide you could enlist?
• Is there a course you can take to learn, relearn, or upscale your knowledge?

​Taking the time to map out your skills can help you see everything you already have to offer while also narrowing in on areas you might want some training or assistance with.

3. EXPERIENCE

After time to adjust, and the getting to know your skills comes experience. You need experience and practice using your skills and skill sets, because there’s no way you’ll feel confident in something if you have no experience using that skill. You simply cannot expect to be confident and know what you're straight away, especially if it’s a relatively new or unpractised skill. Instead it takes trial and error, daily consistency, and sometimes failing or even sucking at things before you actually learn and have the experience necessary to build up your confidence.

Take myself for example. I cringe at some my early mindset coaching videos, but I practiced and learned, and built up my experience so that now I produce better quality content that I’m extremely proud of. I have the experience of trial and error and reflection to feel confident in what I produce.
It takes time to build experience, and that’s okay. People understand. And the more you do it and repeat the experiences you’ll build up that confidence.

4. REMINDERS

I had a client come to me once and say, "I just don't feel experienced enough", to which I said, "How do you know you aren't? When did you decide? Is this your standard or someone else's?"

The next thing I asked her was to create a career timeline and look back asking herself:
​

• What did I learn?
• What work did I produce?
• What did I achieve?
• What experience did I gain?

In doing this exercise there was a light bulb moment (there always is!) where she realised her lack of confidence was actually coming from her OWN mind. Seeing it in black and white she had the realisation that she’s already achieved so much and actually does have the skills and experience. She just needed to be reminded.

5. SELF-BELIEF

Belief in yourself and your skills, abilities, and experience is my last tip in building confidence and helping you see that you ARE capable and anything IS possible. Like everything else, is takes practice to really get comfortable with self-belief, and positive affirmations can absolutely help with this.

Writing affirmations in your journal, reading them to yourself, and saying them out loud every single day will 100% embed these positive affirmations into your mind and shift your mindset and confidence.

Here a few to get you going:
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• The work I produce is amazing!
• I am valued and opportunities flow easily and effortlessly to me
• I am experienced and capable  
• I am good enough!

If you're interested in exploring any of these confidence-boosting tips, I run a single two hour workshop called "Silencing Your Inner Critic" where I help women understand their major limitations and the power of self-belief. If you want to explore more check out my one-on-one coaching offering, comment below, or send me an email ([email protected]).

Anxiety is 100% the physical response your body has to fear. Sometimes the fear stems from a real threat. If you’ve ever been bushwalking and seen a snake you would be absolutely grateful your body responds to the threat and triggers you to move to safety.

More generally in our everyday life or work-home-sleep-repeat the fear typically comes from an imagined danger. Meaning that the fear emotion is caused by our own thoughts. Things (or obsessing!) about the future and all the unknowns is what actually triggers the fear.

​Your worried and fearful thoughts then spark a hormone response in your body. Your body is flushed with cortisol and adrenaline, stress hormones as the fight or flight mode gets turned on. Your body thinks it needs to act on these fearful thoughts and either get you out of the situation or fight it.

The anxiety symptoms you get may differ from the woman next to you - stomach-ache, racing heart, racing mind, the shakes, loss of appetite, shortness of breath, muscle tension, insomnia etc
The problem is that the body is amped up, just from what you’ve been thinking!
The stress hormones have nowhere to release.

The good news in all of this is that I “thinking” got you in the situation, then our thoughts can be changed and ultimately get us out of it!

If you suffer anxiety, the key to freeing yourself is learning how to master your mind, and doing some work to heal your unconscious belief system and release that base level emotion of fear.

​The flow on effect is that our body response changes!

So, if you are ready to release the fear here are my 3 steps to help you start to learn to shift your anxiety:

I bet you’ve looped around in your mind down a rabbit hole of “what if this and what if that happens” over analysing and over thinking every possible scenario of this situation GOING WRONG.

It is basically your imagination having a field day. Triggered by that first fearful worried thought.
So, when the loop starts, I want you to catch yourself. Sometimes that is the hardest step. Catch the thought process before it spirals. If you can do that, you can master anything.

First things first move your body, go for a walk, get some fresh air, take some deep square breaths. Get out of the space you were in. You want to move your body and shift that flush of stress hormones. Remember the fear from your mind has just flooded your body with hormones.

Then Ask yourself: Is this a real or imagined scenario?

Am I on the “what if” loop Janel was talking about AND imagining every possible scenario going wrong, and being the worst it could ever be?

Say to yourself “This situation is not real. It is not set in stone. It has not happened. I am safe, I am safe, I am safe”

Use this like a mantra and keep repeating it until the feeling begins to lighten as you realise that this is your imagination taking you places that you do not need to go.

Break it down into specifics to get clear on the fear:

• What am I afraid of? Slow down, and tune in. 
• What specifically am I anxious about? 
• Why is that a concern?
• What are you specifically worried about in THAT concern?
• How is that a problem for you right now?
• What is this stopping you from doing, or causing you to do right now? Are you lashing out? Are you an emotional wreck?

And once you’ve got specific about it then get rationalise it, lets shine some reality on it!

Ask yourself “What would happen if this thing, that you now realise you’ve imagined in your mind, did actually happen?

On a scale of 1-10 how likely is it that this could actually happen.

And if it did how bad would it be? Is it really as bas as what you’ve imagined which is the sky is falling.

Sometimes our imagination has us down a rabbit hole and in reality, on the scale the event actually happening is like a 2-3, or but the fear in us triggered as a 10.

This step is all about perspective.
​

Why is Anxiety is showing up in your life?

This may be an entirely new concept for you, and it may or may not resonate and I’m ok either way.

I’m talking about the WHY – have you ever asked yourself WHY is this fear showing up in your life? What do I need to learn?

A growth mindset says that everything we go through, every challenge every obstacle is an opportunity to learn and shift and grow.

Tad James, one of the founders on Neuro Linguistics Programming, the coaching modality that I have been professionally trained in states that :

“Anxiety is your unconscious mind telling you to focus on what you want” – this body response you are having is reminding you to stop and focus on what you want instead of what you don’t want.

So, what is your anxiety trying to tell you?

Maybe even instead of hating on your anxiety could you shift your perspective and see your anxiety as a signal from a friend within?

And when you start to feel anxious you realise this friend is asking for your attention? She wants you to wake up. She wants to work with you, there is something she wants to tell you.

So, ask her – ok friend you’ve got my attention. What am I focusing on? Am I focusing on what I want, or what I do not want?  

• Ask – what do I want here?
• Is that toxic job or friendship or relationships not what I want? And yet I continue to keep going back?
• Do I keep pushing myself to do things in situations, or for other people that I really do not want to do?

This concept may take some time to ponder, but this is what I am here for!

I am here as a Mindset Coach to stretch your conscious and unconscious thought process to help you get back to thriving.

If you struggle with Anxiety and you would like to find freedom from this grip of fear in your life, then I would love to help you.

I run a 2 session short program that will help you to identify the root cause or event that has programmed your anxiety and release it. You’ll get an understanding of the specifics of what triggers your anxiety. And you leave the session with an amazing tool – you will learn my anxiety release technique to have help you in future.

Email me here or comment below for more information!

Take care, 
JB

​Being a tragic people pleaser from day dot saying “No” to people used to be really hard for me.  I found the feeling is usually one of three things. Either you don’t want to let people down (urgh!), you don’t want them to think badly of you (argh…), or it’s a total FOMO (fear of missing out). 

Can you relate? 

Let me ask you - how many times in the past month have you said YES, when you really want to say NO?  No doubt... there will be a few. 

We all do it.  Why can’t we just say “NO! I’m at capacity with life juggling my own commitments! ” (ha!)

Well, the reason is we like to “people please”.

We all strive to be good humans.  Fundamentally you want to be kind and helpful, right? You want to be that person that people can always count on.  In fact, you probably spend a lot of your time doing things for other people… to make yourself feel good. Yes?  Because people’s opinions of you should matter, right?

Having a “servant’s heart” and being of service will absolutely make you feel good.  However, doing it for the purpose of wanting someone else to LIKE you, INCLUDE you, LOVE you, or to change their OPINION of you… totally defeats the feel good purpose.

This may shock you - people pleasing (saying YES – when really you mean NO) is actually all about YOU having control.

It’s you trying to control someone else’s opinion of you.  #truthbomb!

It is saying yes to someone for the sole reason that they will continue to like and respect you.  Even when you don’t have the time and you desperately want to say no. Or sometimes you just do it to keep the peace, to smooth things over. 

Ultimately to make THEM happy.  Because their happiness must be more important than yours, right?  Their opinion of you must mean more than your opinon of yourself, right?

Or perhaps you think when they are happy, it’s a flow on effect and you should be happy then too? 
Actually no.  It doesn’t work like that at all.

People pleasing leads to the polar opposite.  RESENTMENT.  

How many times have you done something for someone, and then when you’ve asked for that favour back the person was “too busy” and said no?!  And you soon realise that not everyone is like you.  Not everyone will drop their plans to assist you, to help you in a pinch, to “please” you.

Or perhaps they said yes and agreed to help you out…  only they didn’t really put in as much effort as you did for them… or they didn’t do it to your standards??  Yep. Gotcha!

Resentment kicks in, a notch on the tally board.  You become hurt and promise yourself you will not let that situation happen again, you’ll just do it yourself next time.

People pleasers have high expectations. We intrinsically expect to get back all that we give out. Most of the time, our expectations are not met.

If you are now becoming aware of the people pleasing pattern in your life - then here is where I can help – no favours expected back in return ;). When someone asks you for your help and you feel compelled but know it is going to throw your priorities out of wack - take 60 seconds to respond and first:

ASK YOURSELF 5 "PEOPLE PLEASING" QUESTIONS:

1. Am I saying yes, because I want to do it? Or because I feel compelled to please someone?
2. Am I saying yes, to control someone else’s opinion of me? Am I fearful of what they will say about me if I don’t do it?
3. Am I saying yes, because I “have to” and I really don’t want to?
4. Am I saying yes, because someone is putting me in a bind to do this thing?
5. Am I saying yes, because I don’t know how to say no?

​
If you answered YES to any of these questions – then… just say NO! You are not doing it for the right reasons.

It is likely negative emotions like resentment, guilt, and fear of other people’s opinions of you will bubble up and fester in YOU.  Save yourself the heartache today.

Honestly, people will find someone else to do that “really urgent, super important thing”.

As I shared in my last blog article self-medicating with busy there is something really powerful in the word NO. This may be a new concept for you – “No” can actually be a full sentence!
“No, I wish I could but I can’t help with that” - doesn’t have to be backed up with excuses, reasons, or an explanation.  It’s just your answer.

The word No sets a boundary to protect your time and your energy.

It gives you the power and ability to make decisions for yourself. When you begin to take this power back and guard your time you will see that other people in your life start to do things for themselves and find other ways to accomplish things.

WOW!  Imagine that.

It is OK to say NO! And to give up trying to control how people see you.  WE are only ever responsible for ourselves.  You cannot ever fully control people’s opinions or thoughts about you.
You are you. People will love you anyway. People always understand.  If they don’t – then perhaps you should be looking at who you are spending time with? 

Are they draining your energy and not respectful of YOUR time and your PRIORITIES?

Saying No is a learned skill… it will take practice. 

Once you do it the first time then every time after that becomes a little easier.

And if it turns out that it’s just FOMO – then ask yourself, is there another time I can be involved when I have less on my plate?  If the answer is yes, then give yourself a break and say no.  If it’s a ONCE IN A LIFETIME OPPORTUNITY… then say yes, and compromise – agree to cancel something else to make room.

Keeping your layers of “busy” within reason is they key to finding balance.

What’s the most important thing?  YOU are the most important thing in your life.

Protect your time and your energy, to thrive.