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If you’ve also ever asked the question…
- Who the hell am I to do this work?
- Does this really work?
- Am I really helping anyone?
- Do I really have what is required to make this successful and to make this viable? Then this episode is the perfect place for you.
Today we’re unpacking the essential components of the confidence equation
We’ll also examine some personal practices that I deeply stand by and have been game changes in my own coaching practice.
No matter whether you’re already a coach, or a practitioner, a leader, or a mentor that’s already working with clients, if you’re just getting started or if this is something that you desire to step into, the principles and the practices that we’re going to be speaking about today, apply across the board.
These are real skills that as coaches, we need to master if we desire our confidence combined with our own integrity to move forward and to offer the deep desires that we have to be of service and to be part of the change in the world at this time to move forward.
Let’s begin with a question…
What current challenge prevents you from bringing your confidence to your coaching& work with others?
What’s standing in your way right now?
What’s the internal story or thought?
What’s the internal feeling or idea that you have that you feel is maybe a block or a resistance, a fear around your coaching?
Some of the really common ones that I hear the women that I work with tell me are…
“What about what the rest of my family or friends will think about this?”
“How will I be perceived?”
I also hear stories from women saying,
“Well, I’m not perfect within myself. I don’t have all my life together, who am I to actually be supporting and guiding others?”
I hear women say..
“I have this deep desire to coach, but I don’t feel confident with the tools that I’m using. Am I just making all this up? Is this real? Is this really going to help other people?”
I myself at times have thought and have felt, am I a fraud in all of this?
Is this really coming from a place of sincerity and of integrity?
When we have any or all of these fears, it is really important to know that only women of integrity ask these questions.
It is only those with a deep desire to act from a place of sincerity and genuineness who are asking these questions.
If you’re asking them, it’s a good thing, but when these fears and these doubts and these resistances stay continuously stuck and stagnant in our system and they do a number of detrimental things…
CONFIDENCE & POWER
First of all, we’re not claiming our worth and our power as a woman and so we don’t have our confidence available to us.
Yes, sure. We can try and slap some confidence and some pretty images and a nice beautiful smile over the top.
But at the heart – if we’re not truly authentically feeling confident, then this will and does significantly impact the resonance that we’re embodying.
So what’s your flavor of fear?
What stands in the way of your confidence to coach or to mentor or to guide?
As we work through these next few steps, I’m actually going to share with you one of my examples. Very early on in my career, I had this real crisis of feeling like a fraud. The story of“I don’t know if I can do this.”
When I really got to the heart of it, there was a question and a fear that was living inside me and it was: am I enough?
Am I enough of a woman?
Am I embodied enough?
Am I feminine enough?
Am I wise enough?
Am I poetic enough?
Am I at the very simple heart of me, enough to actually offer a space of meaning and of worth for another person?
Now, consciously at the level of my mind, my body was like, “Yes, of course, you are. Yes, you are worthy.”
But worth is not something that we think our way into.
Worth is something that we feel in the body.
Honestly, I was having a crisis of worth& that was showing up as over-giving to my clients.
It was showing up as going over time, giving more undercharging, not holding healthy boundaries, and generally feeling like I was in a sense of servitude to my clients.
What’s very interesting is that these fears around our confidence, which very often fear around our worth, they will show up and they will sabotage and they will block our business until we sought them out.
They will show up and they will limit us and constrict us and continue to hold us back because the fact is that when we doubt ourselves when we doubt our lack of worth when we are not fully embodied in this quality, then we are not full in our power.
As coaches, as mentors, as guides, if we’re not full in our power, there is no chance for then us to hold a space where our client can step into his or her power.
My fear –am I enough?– I avoided this fear like nobody’s business. This fear comes from a question of integrity, but it’s more than that. It’s also our own very personal, very human fears.
It’s really natural that stepping up to the coach and to put ourselves and our work out there brings up these kinds of fears.
Who are you?
Are you enough?
These types of fears and these types of doubts. We may have worked through them personally, but when it comes to the coaching space, when it comes to the space and now holding a space and stepping up, taking it to the next level we’re going to have to anchor the truth that we may have found personally into a whole other dimension in our body.
This is what happened to me. I had been really confident in my worth and my sensuality and who I was as a woman…
& then I had to step up and to say…
“I’m now going to work with others“& expand that sense in a whole new dimension as coach/leader.
That capacity, that volume of worth that I felt, boom, all of a sudden I had to anchor it now into a whole new dimension. Into a whole new level, because I was expanding, I was growing and it was really terrifying at the time.
Perhaps like you, I went through all kinds of processes of resisting this inherent sense of unworthiness. A lot of us don’t want to feel the things that are uncomfortable and whatever is standing in the way of your confidence in coaching, I’m guessing like mine, it’s something that’s inherently uncomfortable.
It’s not comfortable to feel the lack of worth.
It’s not comfortable to feel the doubt.
It’s not comfortable to feel the fear and when we notice something that is uncomfortable, our society and most of our bodies are heavily conditioned to avoid that uncomfortable, to avoid the fear and get busy doing something else, to avoid what is uncomfortable in our body and instead give our energy and our awareness to things that are safer and that are more pleasant.
Things like making practical strategies, writing to-do lists and taking the very dry linear steps towards success. These irrelevance, surface, superfluous actions are often the actions that we take in an attempt to avoid feeling what is uncomfortable.
If you cannot stand here right now and say:
I am a woman who has something of incredible worth to offer the world and I hold a power and a confidence in my body, which I am so ready to partner with another being and to activate within their body as well.
If you can not stand here and claim that, then there is a gap between the confidence and the resonance that you need to hold and where you are right now.
That doesn’t mean that you are deficient in any way.
It is not a problem if there was a gap there, but there is a problem if you are not willing or not able to sit in that uncomfortable sensation, that uncomfortable gap as it says there is something missing here. There is something more that I am not yet holding or embodying.
This is uncomfortable that I also had to sit with and when this fear arises, which to be honest, it still sometimes does when I expand into the next stage and the next stage, it can still pop its little head up. I have a very different relationship to it now, but this feeling of there’s a gap between where I want to be and where I am when this arises, it never feels comfortable.
It is much easier, particularly in the world of offering our work into the world& business to just do the next business training or focus on the next digital blah blah blah thing that you need to do.
But the fact is, what is required? When we don’t feel confident, when we don’t feel comfortable, what is required and what is necessary is to sit in that uncomfortable feeling and ask what is here.
If we are not willing to look at why this lack of confidence is here and if we’re not willing to meet it with an open, loving heart, then we are destined to be stuck in essentially a form of procrastination, of not realizing ourselves in the world.
As I really sat in the heart of am I really worthy to offer this? I began to see all the different ways that I was weaving my unworthiness into the way that I coached with women.
It looked like this:
> not holding healthy boundaries with the time that I would spend with my clients
> not charging an appropriate amount for my worth. I could tell that because I felt a little bit resentful
> over giving
> needing my clients to like me as an individual, as a person, when really it’s not about people liking me. When women step towards working with me, it’s about them loving themselves and I was doing all of these very subtle, very sneaky things that I could label as being a generous coach, when in fact what they were, were over compensations for my inherent lack of confidence.
That is not a sustainable way to run a business.
It’s also not a way to run a business with genuine feminine Integrity.
From the feminine embodiment coaching point of view, the way that we work is, when there is something that is uncomfortable (in my case, it might be my sense of worth; for you, it might be something different) I’m so interested in you genuinely contacting what that is right now.
But when we contact that little niggle, that thing that is our secret fear, our secret hearts pain.
When we contact that in the feminine embodiment coaching point of view..
We do NOT label that uncomfortable pain or frustration or failure.
We don’t label that as something that is wrong.
We do not label it as a block or as a failure or as some lack of goodness within you.
We simply label this as a unit of frozen tension.
Inside this unit of frozen tension is a whole heap of your life force, of your goodness, of your power, of your confidence – That is not free to flow.
If it’s not free to flow, then it’s not free to be sent out into the world, into beautiful work with clients and beautiful words and beautiful expression.
This unit of frozen tension it doesn’t feel good because it’s not flowing.
It’s a natural, most essential way of the operating unibody is to flow. This little unit of uncomfortable tension that you might be feeling inside or around you in a particular part of your body, in a particular part of your thoughts or of your heart.
This unit offers intention. What is required to shift it, is to allow it to flow.
Think about it this way. Imagine that you’re sitting out on a beautiful deck overlooking a gorgeous view when you see this delicious sunset and it is all orange, with purples and it’s a beautiful, warm, balmy afternoon, and there’s a gentle breeze that’s fluttering across your skin at that moment.
The sheer beauty of the site in front of you just brings this sense of contentment to your body. As you feel the beauty of that sunset inside you, a smile comes into your face, your shoulders relax, you just take a big breath in and out, and you fully allow yourself to be in the flow of that beauty. You allow yourself to express it, to embody it.
In doing so, you complete that moment of beauty and you allow the next moment, and the next moment to flow through you. Maybe you turn to a partner or a good friend who’s sitting beside you and you amplify each other’s smile back. None of us have a problem with expressing beauty and expressing a smile on our face.
We allow this energy to flow through us.
But now imagine we’re back to this pocket of frozen tension, uncomfortable frozen tension that’s sitting in your body.
I’m guessing you don’t want to embrace, embody, and express that first intention because it’s uncomfortable.
You’d rather go somewhere else, do something else, procrastinate or exert your energy somewhere else because we don’t want to feel the things that don’t feel good.
But unless we are willing to grab that uncomfortable feeling and just as we did with the sunset, allow ourselves to experience it, to embody it, to express it, then that unit of tension, that uncomfortable sensation feeling thought in your body, it’s not going to go anywhere.
It’s going to stay stuck and so will your flow.
EMBRACING THE SHITTY FEELINGS
We live in a society that celebrates the positive, the happy and the joyous and that shames and says there’s a problem if you’re feeling the dark, the heavy, the fearful or the uncomfortable, and because our society conditions us to not feel this darker end of the spectrum, we resist all of the feelings and experiences that go on down here. In doing so, we resist completing them.
When you are experiencing that beautiful sunset, in the moment as you are embodying and expressing your happiness, your joy, that is completing and you’re just free to come back to yourself.
But if you don’t complete the fear, the doubt, the sense of unworthiness, that’s the little niggle in your heart that is preventing you from stepping forward with confidence. If you don’t complete that, then it’s just going to continue to stay frozen instead of flowing.
Sitting with all of the ways that I was over-giving and over-delivering and sacrificing my boundaries so that I could feel like I was offering enough because I deeply feared that I wasn’t enough.
Sitting with that was actually really heartbreaking
It was not comfortable.
It was not pretty to feel.
But avoiding these fears doesn’t help us either.
As a woman who’s had to claim her worth not only just as a woman, but also as somebody who works with others.
LINES OF ACTIVATION
I’ve had to really deepen the worth that my body can hold.
It’s had to get deeper and wider and fuller and juicer because that’s what I’ve been called to share and to speak to and to partner with other women to create.
This is one of my lines of activation.
As a woman, there is a particular frequency or message or lesson that I feel like I am here to embody and to anchor onto the earth.
One of the components of one of my core lines of activation is worth.
Activating our worth, owning our worth. It comes by examining, feeling and expressing all of the ways that we don’t feel worthy.
It’s not particularly pretty, but it is so incredibly liberating.
Whatever you’re struggling with or whatever is in the way of your confidence to coach. It’s very possible that you may have already claimed this as an individual human and now you need to claim this at a new level, at a new depth.
It’s like you’re being taken to the next stage and it could be because this is one of the lines that you are being asked to really activate and to anchor into the earth at this time.
This is such a beautiful gift when we think about it this way.
As a woman who’s expanding wider and deeper and who is integrating this particular lesson, this particular challenge and its solution.
As you are integrating this into your body more fully into your life, into your work, into the way that you work with others.
What we actually can imagine is that you are beginning to hold a very different resonance.
RESONANCE
In the feminine embodiment coaching view, resonance is the quality that you are holding in the field and in the space around you.
It is almost like the transmission or the frequency of who you are as a coach, as a leader, as a mentor, as a teacher.
It is a direct experience of what you’re willing to hold within yourself.
When you meet somebody for the very first time and you automatically get a little bit of a sense of who they are (ultimately you don’t know them really probably from a bar of soap) but you’re getting a sense, you’re getting a flavor of their energy.
That’s the resonance that they’re holding.
On a day to day level. We’re constantly emitting our resonance, but when we actually step up to say, I actually want to work with other people, we’re now saying this resonance is part of what I offer my clients.
Resonance is the energy that you’re holding and there is nothing more important than as a coach holding a resonance that says:
I’m full in my power and I am a powerful woman.
I’m full in my worth and
I don’t have to prove my worth through any particular way
Because I am worth and I feel confident in what I bring.
Resonance is the energy that we are embodying and the fields that we are transmitting around us and when we shackle the uncomfortable challenges like all of the things that might be standing in the way of our confidence to coach.
When we actually tackle them and shift them from being frozen and uncomfortable to flowing, then we actually create a more coherent and more powerful transmission.
RESONANCE IN ACTION
Let me give you an example to demonstrate this…
Recently, one of the students of our school asked a group of others: why are you here? What drew you to this particular training?
There were many beautiful responses, but one response from one of our coaches from Europe, actually really personifies this concept of resonance.
She wrote, “If I choose one reason, it’s the attraction of the vibration. Being in it, gives an enormous transmission that happens on a physical and even more on an energetic level. At one level, it’s a little bit abstract to detail out, but it’s a felt sense of rising together.”
Such a beautiful way to describe resonance.
If you’ve ever been in a space with a friend or a peer or a coach or a leader who’s just really risen you up, who has not done the work for you, but has almost shown a plane of existence, a way of operating that through seeing in this woman, this person you’ve recognized in yourself – THIS is resonance.
On the scientific level, this concept of resonance makes sense if we think about it through the lens of mirror neurons.
Mirror neurons are literally the parts of our brain that are geared towards mirroring what other people do.
There are little habits, their little sayings, the little postures of their body. These mirror neurons exist to help us learn and to help us mirror other people so that we can be welcomed into the tribe.
They’re also very much used in the concept of resonance. When there is somebody who is modeling or who is embodying a very deep, authentic, true, felt a sense of let’s say, feminine power or sensuality or radiance or purpose, then our body, our mirror neurons are actually picking up the way she operates. We’re also being up-leveled or upgraded into that same space.
VULNERABLE RESONANCE
This resonance, it is your frequency. It is your transmission. It is not only concerned with all of the beauty and the power and the purpose that you are. It is also concerned with how much and how willing you are able to allow the uncomfortable, the frozen and the fearful parts of you.
When our resonance holds this broad spectrum of all of the beauty and light of all of the dark and uncomfortable, and when we are still centered and grounded and connected within ourselves in the midst of all of that spectrum, then this is where I believe we as women hold a resonance that becomes effortlessly magnetic.
Drawing on what we desire because we are the embodiment. We are holding the transmission of that particular line of activation.
When we face a crisis, confidence, it really is an invitation to claim our power in a deeper way. As a coach, as a leader, as a mentor, this invitation is never one that you want to turn down, even if it feels uncomfortable. It is a path to deepening your resonance, deepening and anchoring the frequency of the unique gifts and the unique message that you are here to share in the big or the small or the medium way that you are here to share it.
Confidence really is a process of personal mastery, mastering our worth, mastering our power, mastering our boundaries.
Where does all this lead us?
What are the next steps in terms of really practically approaching your confidence to coach?
Well, I’m going to share with you a few diverse little ideas and concepts here.
Things that have really helped me.
PRACTICAL TIP #1
First of all, we absolutely must remember that it all really comes down to what you’re holding, the resonance or the frequency that you are claiming. When we feel across this code of confidence, a doubt, or fear, or a confusion, know that it is simply just the next door, the next invitation into claiming more of your power.
Confidence is a result of just feeling full within yourself.
That is feeling full within your power as a woman.
When a crisis of confidence, of fear, of doubt, arises, it is not a problem. Actually it’s an invitation into the next level, into the next level of activating yourself and your gifts, even though it might feel uncomfortable.
It’s a beautiful threshold to be at and what is required, I believe, for every single coach to be successful is to be able to work with these types of uncomfortable sensations and feelings and crisis. This is our personal mastery. There is nothing that will propel your work forward, then using your own tools, your tools to coach on yourself as a practice of personal mastery.
This has been a game-changer for me. When I am using the tools, tools that I use are feminine embodiment coaching tools. When I use these tools and they successfully move me through the next transition, deepen me into the next resonance. There is an experience of really benefiting from the fruits of what I’m teaching, of what I’m sharing, of what I’m inviting my clients into.
This has two beautiful effects:
#1 it deepens my personal mastery. My confidence and my power expands
#2 it also reminds me that these tools really work.
PRACTICAL TIP #2
My next practical tip is a question. If you’re in a space of asking who am I to do this? Or who am I to offer that? Or who am I to…
Instead of asking yourself: who am I NOT to?
Who are you not to honor the bone-deep calling that you feel? |
Who are you not to take the privilege and the beauty of your experience and to offer that to help others?
Who are you not to do this work?
By de-centering ourselves, we remember the devotion in this work because ultimately this is a devotion to free not only ourselves but to free everyone that we work with.
From whatever the shackles are that bind to them.
Until all of us are free. None of us are free. Who are you not to contribute and to do your part to this evolution of humanities freedom?
You are not required to be a perfect person in order to be a wonderful coach. You are not required to have it perfectly together.
I would really invite you to reflect what is your version? What is your criteria of expertise as a coach, you do not have to be confident that you are perfect.
You need to be confident that you are perfect at your version of an expert. From me, my expertise looks like doing the personal practice that I preach, receiving the fruits of that practice. Fruits like deepening my worth, expanding my power, loving myself and the uncomfortable parts of May that society would have me reject and shout away.
Being sincere, being true, being honest. These are my versions of expertise and these are things that I live and breathe every day. I’m still hugely imperfect. I still get angry at my partner. I get tired and I get cranky. I do days where I don’t have my practice and I’m not at my peak performance.
All these things happen because life happens, but I continued to show up and I continue to devote and every single day that I say, who am I not to do this work?
When I know that I have something to contribute to the freedom of humanity. Every time I show up to put that first, which means dealing with all my uncomfortable shit so that I can step forward, that to me is the bigger picture.
I know any crisis of confidence that I face or that you face is simply the next doorway.
The next activation that is required to free up more of our old tension, to allow it to flow so that our resonance can deepen and our ripple effect can continue to activate those women who also desire to remember this power.
If you’ve read this far… then it is very clear that you are committed to this path.
I find that so desirable.
The world needs more feminine and I believe the feminine is the future. That’s not to say women are the future. That is to say the feminine feeling sensitive felt the essence is the way that this planet is going to move forward.
This is the path of our freedom.
You don’t have to stand in your way any longer. Is safe for you to know that you are so desired for these gifts.
They are so needed, and so just simply ask yourself the question, who are you not to do this work?
If you’re interested to find out more about studying and training to become a feminine embodiment coach head to www.feminineembdoimentcoaching.com
