Create Confidence Within, with Kara Loewentheil

(mouse clicking) (soft music) Headspace Studios. (gentle music) Hey everyone, it's Kara Loewentheil here, your guest host for the week. Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Thursday. As you know, this week is all about finding ways to live with less insecurity and more confidence. For some people, confidence seems to come naturally, but for some of us, it's a lot harder to build. So today, let's dive into some of the biggest hurdles to confidence and the most effective ways to start to create it for ourselves. To me, I like to think about confidence as a feeling that can come and go, but I like to think of your relationship with yourself as the bedrock that doesn't change. You can cultivate this positive relationship with yourself, whether that's self-acceptance or self-love, or self-like depending on what level you're at with it. And that is something that you really can build to support you, and that is where confidence comes from. Insecurity and low self-esteem are such a epidemic really, because we are all taught that our worth and value are conditional. They depend on how we look, and what we achieve, and how much money we make, and if everybody likes us and approves of us, and any other number of factors. And this is especially true for people who are members of marginalized communities or identities, because the number of marginalized identities you live in is like a multiplier or magnifier of the messages that you are not as worthy or valuable as other people, and that you have to prove your worth and value. If you believe that you have inherent worth and value that can't be diminished by life's circumstances or your accomplishments or anything else, even your own actions or thoughts, that's when you have that kind of unshakeable foundation. So in previous episodes, I talked about the importance of creating the awareness of what you're thinking. And now I want to teach you a really powerful technique for how to actually change what you are thinking. This is called the thought ladder. So here's how it works. Write down things you're thinking, and now you can see, "Oh wow, here's all my thoughts. My thoughts are I can't believe I screwed that up. My boss is going to be so mad, I'm probably going to get fired." You take one thought out. So let's say that thought is, "I'm such a screw up." Now we want to come up with what you want to believe instead. Here's where a lot of positive thinking or reframing work goes wrong is we have the thought, "I'm a screw up," and then we think that what we want to believe or what we're supposed to believe is like, "I am amazing," (laughs) something super positive. So the thought ladder is a way of coming up with intermediate thoughts to help you get there. It is a thought that is just a little bit less terrible than your...