A few weeks ago I was sitting in the doorway of the gym locker room putting on my shoes and taking my sweet time, accidentally overhearing other women's conversations. I happened to overhear two women, probably around my age, 30's, who seemed to be new to the gym scene. They were talking about how they just didn't think they had what it takes to go to a group instruction class. I looked at the women and thought, Why would you feel that way? You look perfectly normal. Of course, this was easy for me to think since I have been coming to the gym now for a couple years (during the course of my motherhood career) I am basically a profesh at group classes myself right?
Now, let's get past my rudeness at eavesdropping on strangers and get to the purpose of this. Since the experience I have been really pondering what makes women so prone to a lack of confidence, generally speaking of course. I thought about myself; where am I at on the confidence meter? Where have I been? How did I get to where I am now? What has affected my feelings of self confidence? And how did I forget how silly and nervous I was when I first started going to group classes?--How many hours did it take before I decided it didn't matter if I looked goofy?
I think that people are all over the spectrum on admitting to themselves what their level of self confidence is. At first I like to think of myself as having a healthy amount of confidence in myself, not too much, but certainly not lacking. I really have to dig into myself (my psyche? my spirit?) to find them, but there are definitely areas where I struggle and they come up when I least expect it. Most of the time I don't even realize that a lack of confidence in an area is creating my behavior or thoughts around an issue.
When I was younger I had a really broad array of confidence in different areas of my life: Friendships~high, Cooking~high, Creativity~average/high, Academics~average, Athletic ability~average, Looks/appearance~average, Spirituality~high, Social situations with strangers~Low, Dancing~very low, Goofiness~high, Popularity~low, Braveness~below average, Fashion~average.....these were the days when I believed that to some high degree, what other people thought about me mattered, even if I knew that I shouldn't believe such an adolescent idea. Now I know that what other people think about me says more about them than it does me, but allowing that principle to stay at the core of all you do takes years of work.
I'm not entirely sure when reality kicked in, but I think it has been a long process. Choosing to be on my own and (mostly) supporting myself through college at 18 was a huge factor, albeit, I'm pretty independent and that's what I wanted. Getting married surely brought me a decent degree of confidence, if not security. After all, I was 21 years old at the time. Then becoming pregnant with my first child gave me a major increase in confidence in life itself--I was growing a child inside me after all, and it's pretty miraculous. (There is definitely truth to that whole idea about becoming a mother lion or bear or other scary creature once you have children.) Then I gained all that weight and lost some confidence in my appearance, but at the same time I knew that I was still worthwhile as a person, and felt confident that I could simply blame the matter on good old pregnancy. So what if having a baby made me fat? I could change it. I knew how to exercise and when I wanted to eat healthy I could do it-And I did. Once I finally got a job after finishing my degree (with a small child at daycare and a hubby in professional school) I felt truly confident. I was on a role. I had always been confident in my ability to work hard and pick things up quickly once I understood them, so that wasn't an issue. My confidence changed about midway through the pregnancy with my second child and my body fell back to its old state of mental and physical chaos. Luckily, I was able to continue to work throughout the entire pregnancy and then go back to work right away and have my baby with me for a few months. Getting pregnant again so quickly with the third put my hopes of getting back to normal on hold. And then enduring and dealing with gestational diabetes actually helped me to reach a stable place during that pregnancy in a lot of ways. I was pretty sad once it was over and I had to quit my job, but two kids in daycare will make you do that. To skip over the craziness of post-partumhood and everything that it entails, I will say that being able to breastfeed my third child (after not being able to do so with the other 2) was a huge boost for me. I felt confident in my abilities as a mother to take care of my baby and as a woman for my body to do what it needed to do, even if my body did not drop fat by the ton like so many others seemed to when they breastfeed. (Keep in mind I hold NO judgement for anyone when it comes to breastfeeding, it's a journey that every mom must make separately and with each individual child. And the mind thinks differently when it is pregnant/lactating than it does when it's not, modesty for instance.) I was confident in my relationship with my kids and my role as their mom, most of the time, for the most part.
I will say that throughout these 10 or so years that I'm looking back on, I had watched something amazing that unconsciously increased my confidence. Two months after my first child was born my husband began Veterinary school---four years of medical education to take care of animals. Then he did a 1 year internship and a 3 year residency to specialize in his chosen field. I watched him study and search and fight to learn things that I could barely grasp. As I watched this process, beginning with his preparation for the GRE testing and then applications and acceptance and everything that he worked on, I did my best to support him, all the while taking it all in. I bet he didn't even realize how much I paid attention to what he was doing. I watched how he did pretty much nothing else for four years except study and read and do everything he could to cement endless concepts into his brain. The way that college 'works' had never really made sense to me, let alone the world of Professional/Graduate education, until now. Only recently did I realize that this experience is a major factor in my personal level of confidence.
Watching him and his classmates year after year and watching people in my job (at a private college) move through class after class, I realized that anybody can succeed at anything that they want to, if they work at it. Even me, if I wanted to, I could do something so amazing and challenging like learn an important skill--I had the ability. (In spite of my take on those challenges, there were and are people that tell me how amazing what I do all day is--creating and caring for tiny humans, which seems to come so naturally to me, I take it for granted.) All these years I had simply been lacking the confidence in myself to believe that I could do something difficult, so I never made a decision. Now I've watched it happen, and I've seen it done well. I am certain that if and when I choose to do something challenging in my life, when the time is right, I will be fine. I can do hard things, in fact, I should do hard things. I will never grow if I don't. My journey right now is to discover this level of confidence in my roles as a wife and mother. (Sure, no problem, no pressure, right?)
I know that my confidence comes not from my appearance, certainly not from my weight, and not from what I do on a daily basis (even if I am pretty good at detecting sticky hands and snotty noses), but from who I am. I know that I'm a child of God, literally, all of us are, and part of that means that He created me to be like Him. If He believes that I have that kind of worth and ability, why don't I? So, I'm working on it, a little bit at a time, building up my abilities and talents so that I can be the person He sees that I can become; maybe one day, something like Him. When I know who I am and what my potential is, it doesn't matter if I struggle to follow the lead in my body pump class or that I feel like a complete monkey in zumba class (which I have no intention of doing in public again BTW-but never say never..). It does matter that I keep trying new things and that I do recognize that my worth doesn't EVER change. Nothing that any of us say or do can change how much we are worth-- "The worth of souls is great in the sight of God".
Now, let's get past my rudeness at eavesdropping on strangers and get to the purpose of this. Since the experience I have been really pondering what makes women so prone to a lack of confidence, generally speaking of course. I thought about myself; where am I at on the confidence meter? Where have I been? How did I get to where I am now? What has affected my feelings of self confidence? And how did I forget how silly and nervous I was when I first started going to group classes?--How many hours did it take before I decided it didn't matter if I looked goofy?
I think that people are all over the spectrum on admitting to themselves what their level of self confidence is. At first I like to think of myself as having a healthy amount of confidence in myself, not too much, but certainly not lacking. I really have to dig into myself (my psyche? my spirit?) to find them, but there are definitely areas where I struggle and they come up when I least expect it. Most of the time I don't even realize that a lack of confidence in an area is creating my behavior or thoughts around an issue.
When I was younger I had a really broad array of confidence in different areas of my life: Friendships~high, Cooking~high, Creativity~average/high, Academics~average, Athletic ability~average, Looks/appearance~average, Spirituality~high, Social situations with strangers~Low, Dancing~very low, Goofiness~high, Popularity~low, Braveness~below average, Fashion~average.....these were the days when I believed that to some high degree, what other people thought about me mattered, even if I knew that I shouldn't believe such an adolescent idea. Now I know that what other people think about me says more about them than it does me, but allowing that principle to stay at the core of all you do takes years of work.
I'm not entirely sure when reality kicked in, but I think it has been a long process. Choosing to be on my own and (mostly) supporting myself through college at 18 was a huge factor, albeit, I'm pretty independent and that's what I wanted. Getting married surely brought me a decent degree of confidence, if not security. After all, I was 21 years old at the time. Then becoming pregnant with my first child gave me a major increase in confidence in life itself--I was growing a child inside me after all, and it's pretty miraculous. (There is definitely truth to that whole idea about becoming a mother lion or bear or other scary creature once you have children.) Then I gained all that weight and lost some confidence in my appearance, but at the same time I knew that I was still worthwhile as a person, and felt confident that I could simply blame the matter on good old pregnancy. So what if having a baby made me fat? I could change it. I knew how to exercise and when I wanted to eat healthy I could do it-And I did. Once I finally got a job after finishing my degree (with a small child at daycare and a hubby in professional school) I felt truly confident. I was on a role. I had always been confident in my ability to work hard and pick things up quickly once I understood them, so that wasn't an issue. My confidence changed about midway through the pregnancy with my second child and my body fell back to its old state of mental and physical chaos. Luckily, I was able to continue to work throughout the entire pregnancy and then go back to work right away and have my baby with me for a few months. Getting pregnant again so quickly with the third put my hopes of getting back to normal on hold. And then enduring and dealing with gestational diabetes actually helped me to reach a stable place during that pregnancy in a lot of ways. I was pretty sad once it was over and I had to quit my job, but two kids in daycare will make you do that. To skip over the craziness of post-partumhood and everything that it entails, I will say that being able to breastfeed my third child (after not being able to do so with the other 2) was a huge boost for me. I felt confident in my abilities as a mother to take care of my baby and as a woman for my body to do what it needed to do, even if my body did not drop fat by the ton like so many others seemed to when they breastfeed. (Keep in mind I hold NO judgement for anyone when it comes to breastfeeding, it's a journey that every mom must make separately and with each individual child. And the mind thinks differently when it is pregnant/lactating than it does when it's not, modesty for instance.) I was confident in my relationship with my kids and my role as their mom, most of the time, for the most part.
I will say that throughout these 10 or so years that I'm looking back on, I had watched something amazing that unconsciously increased my confidence. Two months after my first child was born my husband began Veterinary school---four years of medical education to take care of animals. Then he did a 1 year internship and a 3 year residency to specialize in his chosen field. I watched him study and search and fight to learn things that I could barely grasp. As I watched this process, beginning with his preparation for the GRE testing and then applications and acceptance and everything that he worked on, I did my best to support him, all the while taking it all in. I bet he didn't even realize how much I paid attention to what he was doing. I watched how he did pretty much nothing else for four years except study and read and do everything he could to cement endless concepts into his brain. The way that college 'works' had never really made sense to me, let alone the world of Professional/Graduate education, until now. Only recently did I realize that this experience is a major factor in my personal level of confidence.
Watching him and his classmates year after year and watching people in my job (at a private college) move through class after class, I realized that anybody can succeed at anything that they want to, if they work at it. Even me, if I wanted to, I could do something so amazing and challenging like learn an important skill--I had the ability. (In spite of my take on those challenges, there were and are people that tell me how amazing what I do all day is--creating and caring for tiny humans, which seems to come so naturally to me, I take it for granted.) All these years I had simply been lacking the confidence in myself to believe that I could do something difficult, so I never made a decision. Now I've watched it happen, and I've seen it done well. I am certain that if and when I choose to do something challenging in my life, when the time is right, I will be fine. I can do hard things, in fact, I should do hard things. I will never grow if I don't. My journey right now is to discover this level of confidence in my roles as a wife and mother. (Sure, no problem, no pressure, right?)
I know that my confidence comes not from my appearance, certainly not from my weight, and not from what I do on a daily basis (even if I am pretty good at detecting sticky hands and snotty noses), but from who I am. I know that I'm a child of God, literally, all of us are, and part of that means that He created me to be like Him. If He believes that I have that kind of worth and ability, why don't I? So, I'm working on it, a little bit at a time, building up my abilities and talents so that I can be the person He sees that I can become; maybe one day, something like Him. When I know who I am and what my potential is, it doesn't matter if I struggle to follow the lead in my body pump class or that I feel like a complete monkey in zumba class (which I have no intention of doing in public again BTW-but never say never..). It does matter that I keep trying new things and that I do recognize that my worth doesn't EVER change. Nothing that any of us say or do can change how much we are worth-- "The worth of souls is great in the sight of God".
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