56 | Recovering from a Confidence Hit

Have you ever wanted to make a mindset shift after getting a confidence hit?

This episode is all about recovering from a difficult work situation. It's a key leadership skill to regain your confidence after a stumble.

xo
Liz

well, Hey there, I'm Liz St. Jean, and this is the Rise in your Nine to Five podcast. Where I help quietly ambitious leaders who want to have meaningful and fulfilling careers, making an impact in the world. It's where strategy meets intuition to become a better leader with more joy, less stress and endless impact.

So let's break free from perfectionism, imposter thoughts. And that inner rule keeper that keeps you in a career comfort zone. It's time to become unapologetically you. And step into the life you were meant to live. We're going to talk presence, productivity, and having it all. Or as my four-year-old would say, we're going to take over the world. So let's get to it.

Hey there. Welcome back to the show. So today's episode is going to be a bit of a shorter one. And I wanted to talk to you about recovering from a confidence hit. Now, this is a topic we could look at in so many different ways. And for today, all I wanted to do was to give you some food for thought about some ways you might approach it.

If you've ever had that experience of. Taking a hit to your confidence. And especially those times where they hit to your confidence feels very real. Like, it feels like you have very real evidence that it didn't go well, or you made a mistake or maybe you got some critical feedback. And I wanted to offer some ideas on, on how to recover from that, how to process it and how to move past it.

And the reason it's been on my mind is that I won't go into the details of it, but just wanted to share that I had my own confidence hit lately. So, I mean, this is the kind of thing that is throughout our lives. We will have these moments. We'll have these experiences, these events, things will happen where we take that hit to our confidence. And this is especially the case if you fit squarely within my community, my audience, you identify has a quietly ambitious leader. You you care so much. I know I've said this before, but it's true. You really do care. You're in it for all the right reasons.

You care about your impact, your you're not going for promotions or advancements simply for the sake of the title or prestige or anything like that. You really care about the people around you. You care about the work that you're doing, and you have a lot of integrity and a lot of values. And so when something doesn't go well, um, and especially if it's a real right, like let's not pretend that things always go well . Things can go badly and that's okay. Right. And this is part of the growth, and this is part of the process of growing. He is learning how to handle those moments and to recognize that yeah, we are going to have those moments of a confidence hit.

So I've got five different things I want you to consider. And at least for me, it always works in this order. And if you feel free, if any of these five don't resonate for you, you can skip over it. Or if you feel like you need to change the order of it, please go right ahead. This is, this is truly meant to be a food for thought, just based on, I thought I'd share what works for me.

And in the future. Um, if it's an interest, let me know if in the future you'd like me to do more, more shows on this, bring in some guest experts and do some deep dive into research about recovering from confidence hits, because I do know that this is a, a theme for a lot of people, right? Like whether you've had a confidence hit recently, you know, it's still raw it's in the last few weeks or whether it was longer, maybe it was even a couple of years ago, but you still kind of feel like it's pulling, pulling you down a little bit or holding you back a bit.

But let me know, send me a message. Or applied to any of my emails, come, come over and find me. And let me know if this is a topic that resonates for you. Okay, so let's get into them. So. The very first point I want to make is that if you have a confidence head and especially one that feels real, like, like if you get some critical feedback on something and especially something that's important to you really close to your heart. It is completely natural to have emotions about it, right. To feel sad or frustrated, upset. Worried. All of those different, you know, quota, negative emotions. That is perfectly natural. And one of the things that we want to be able to do is be okay having emotions and not just the quote good ones, right. You know, being, feeling comfortable, being sad.

There's there's this phrase that goes around and called a toxic positivity. And it's the idea that that too often we're told to ignore those, you know, dark green emotions or the Saturday emotions. And instead of we should just. You know, be happy and be positive and, you know, turn that frown upside down.

But being sad is part of life and it happens and , it's okay to be sad. If something didn't go well to let yourself, you know, sit with those emotions. And the important thing here is to, to learn for yourself. What is the way that works for you to process them? How can you work through those emotions? Really it really experienced them and work through them.

And this is the part where, you know, for some people it's going for a long walk, listening to music. For other people, it might even be a bath, you know, as much as basket I can, Nate bad rap in the self care kind of discussions, but for some people that can really work. And for some people is going and talking to someone, you know, in some cases it may be a coach, but in a lot of cases it may be more therapeutic. Right.

You know, depending on the, the depth of the hit, like how, how, how much it hurt and depending on what else it might trigger. This could be a really, really important moment to talk to a therapist or counselor. Explore your EAP that you might have access to. Whatever it is like, this is so important for you to identify what it is for you to process those emotions and not to judge yourself for them and just to be okay. Just recognize it. I I'm having an emotional reaction to this and that's okay. That's a natural reaction.

Hey.

Then once you're ready to, to start working past it. Right. You've processed those emotions. You've allowed yourself to have them. The next part I, I really recommend is paying attention and notice if you start slipping into comparison. Or you start to accumulate all the evidence that somehow you're less than that you're, you're not worthy or that you started having you start looking for all the proof. You know, like this was, this was one more bit of proof about the negative self-talk that might be happening in your head. I don't want you to notice it because when that happens, you really need to question that evidence. You really need to catch yourself and stop and really question.

The so-called evidence that, that your less than. Because more than likely what's happening is that you are inflating all the quote, bad evidence or the evidence of bad. And that you are also ignoring all of the other evidence that would go against that story. So you really need to notice you should catch yourself and really examine, right? If you're, you know, looking at all this evidence.

Really recognize when your, your brain might start saying that, oh, it always goes badly. Well, really catch yourself. Does it really always go badly? You'll probably not. Cause you're, but your brain's going into like evidence motive of how this is just proof of, of the other, the rest of the negative self-talk you might be experiencing.

Hey. And then you don't want to ignore the good. You also really need to pay attention to the counter evidence, the things that do go well that have gone well. And to make sure that you're, you're not just ignoring it and focusing on the negative evidence. Okay.

Then the next part and this part, this is the part that has been very crucial for me when I've had confidence hits. What I love to do is start focusing and asking myself about well, who do I want to be? Okay. Like this happened, this thing that happened didn't feel great. Who do I want to be now? Right now in this moment? Going forward. Who do I want to become six months from now a year from now? You know, what's the story that I want to tell. And really let yourself think more about the, who, who you are, who are you going to be in this moment, but then also like, okay,

W where, where am I going with this story? Where's the story going? I'm picking myself back up. I just had this confidence had just got knocked down. I'm picking myself back up. Where do I want to be? And it doesn't have to be this, you know, huge story about all the things you overcame and, and suddenly accomplished everything. And, you know, they, the raw rosary doesn't even have to be that it can just be.

A natural story of, but I want you to focus on that future, the, the, who am I now and who am I going to become? What story do I want to be telling six months from now? And those are the kinds of thoughts and thinking about that, that's going to keep you motivated, get you to pick yourself back up and get you to keep going.

Okay. And then once you have that, usually that's a point where at least in my experience I found. I've got that motivation again and I'm ready to keep going. And I've also had a bit more distance from those really hard emotions and I've processed them. That's the point when I can start to be a bit more objective and a bit more neutral.

And I can ask myself questions like, okay, what did I learn from this? You know, What did I learn about myself? Or what did I learn about this kind of situation? Hey, and you can ask those questions. And again, from that place of being more objective of being more neutral, you want to ask those questions.

Because if we are, if we haven't gotten past it, if we're not being neutral, what often can happen is that we can slip back into that comparison place that back to that place of collecting evidence about, you know, what's not going well or why we're not. So you know why we're not so good. Okay.

one of the last things we can do. And again, there's so much more we can do, but at least in this case, we can ask ourselves, okay, how can I apply what I just learned? Going forward. So that last part of this fifth part, essentially fuses together.

Parts three and four. So that question of, what story do I want to tell, who do I want to become? Who I want to be in this moment? You're kind of fusing that together with the, with what did I learn about myself? What did I learn? And so you're saying, okay, how can I apply what I learned going forward?

What might I do differently? What could I try that? I didn't try before. What would I adjust? What, what, what might I do less of, or what might I even do recognizing that if I do this, that there, that there can be either mistakes or failures. And that I might have these moments and how can I be prepared for those moments?

And maybe in the future the next time, even in the exact same scenario, maybe it's less of a confidence hit. And instead it becomes more of a growth opportunity, right. That learning opportunity. So the more we think about this and the more we, we really. Question, what can we learn? Who am I going to become? Focusing on that that future person that we are becoming. That both helps you recover from the confidence hit. But it also helps you be prepared for future confidence his. 'cause like I said, like this is going to happen throughout life and career is that, you know, things don't always go well. And so we also want to be ready to be okay. Be like, oh, okay. That happened.

Yeah. That didn't go well. Or I made a mistake or that didn't go the way I expected it to go. All right. How can I learn from it? And the more you practice this, the faster you go from that stage one, that's sitting with your feelings. All the way to that forward facing learning growth mindset of phase five. Okay. What am I, what am I applying going forward? You know, you're still going to experience it.

Uh, but the, the more you practice and where you flex those muscles, those is, um, The mental fitness muscles on your emotional experience muscles. The faster you go through it. And the faster that you recover going forward. So there you go. Like I said a quick episode today. Let me know, send me a note back to any of my emails. If you're on my email list or, or I hit me up on LinkedIn or Instagram, come find me, let me know. What do you do to recover from a confidence hit? Do you have a, a special tip that you want to share that I can then share out with other listeners. Is there something that you've, you've tried, but you would actually, maybe you'd even forgotten that it works for you and this is reminding you. Please, let me know, send me a note. And if you want to hear more about recovering from confidence heads, let me know that as well.

Alright with that. Have a good one.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Now, before you go, make sure you click to follow the show this way you don't have to go looking for the latest episode. I'll come to you. Just click the plus button or the follow, and you'll get the latest episode fresh off the press. Thanks again. And remember that you are amazing. Now, get out there and RISE.