It’s Not About Confidence, It’s About Capacity

For someone who spends a lot of her day discussing various aspects of confidence (and what’s more has it featured as a keyword in her business!), it may surprise you to hear that I think we have things a bit mixed up when it comes to understanding what confidence actually is… and what’s more, what we *actually* mean when we say we want to feel more confident.

Over time, I’ve come to understand the complex relationship so many of us have with the word “confidence” (let alone our feelings around it) and from the place I sit now, I think we are focusing on the wrong end of the stick. While we may want to experience confidence, what we need to be focusing on as a practice is increasing our capacity.

So, what, then, does that mean? When I say, “increasing capacity”, what’s that all about?

Well, think of it this way.  Every experience that we find ourselves in the midst of holds a certain energetic blueprint, or activation level. If I’m feeling Zen, there’s a relatively low level of activation present, and I can easily contain that experience within my body without it feeling like it’s a problem.

Anxiety, on the other hand, has a much higher charge. Our ability to hold that charge before it moves to a place where we feel disconnected from ourselves and no longer in control of the energy relates directly to our capacity.

Capacity is basically how much energy and activation you can hold without overflowing.

Exceed it and you move into survival mode.

Stay within it and you feel like you have a handle on things- even if those things are hard.

In this episode, I dive into our associations and misconceptions around confidence, share some personal stories with you… and get you to consider that it might be capacity that you are looking to increase rather than confidence.

I hope you enjoy it!

❤️ Jane

✏️ 25 Notes To Self: An Advent Calendar of Self-Reflection 🌷✍️ 9/25 On Your Beautiful Body (yes, yours too)…

I’ve spent a good part of my life not being very nice to my body. It’s kind of been like a low-grade relationship with the schoolyard bully; they might not actively beat you up, but they stole the good part of your lunch, laughed at your hair cut, and called you names that made you want to slink off and hope you were invisible. I think that’s how it was. Convincing myself for whatever reason, this, that, or the other was just not good enough.
In the last decade, though, things have started to change. My focus has shifted from aesthetics to function and it constantly blows my mind just how beautiful our bodies are. It’s incredible how when under threat, our lungs move down and wrap around our heart to protect it. Or that when everything feels too much, that we have this ability to tune out in an effort to keep ourselves safe, our nervous system protecting us from input that feels too much or too difficult to manage. That we have this beautiful fascial container that lets us feel into the edges of our skin and communicates to every cell, like a superhighway of sensory information.
It only takes ten minutes to learn about your body to really blow your own mind.
And then- even beyond that- how we can merge with our horses to create as a unit a power and a strength that neither of us could feel independently. What a gift.
So now, in whatever state you feel, in whatever position you are in if you can take a moment to appreciate that. To appreciate the fact that whatever hardships, difficulties, or joys you have had, your body has sailed you through them the best way it knew how, and that every response it had was nothing more than its best effort to keep you safe.
What could be more beautiful?
Onwards.
❤️ Jane