Introducing The Confidence Sessions: A New Way of Understanding Confidence

This summer I'm doing something different on the podcast.

Every week I'll be releasing a short confidence session — a recorded meditation designed to be listened to daily. Save it, come back to it each morning, let it settle into you. Twelve weeks. Twelve sessions. A summer of quietly, powerfully coming home to yourself.

But before the sessions begin, I want to share what confidence actually is. My definition — the one I've arrived at through years of coaching women and through my own long, imperfect journey — might surprise you. And there's some fascinating research on what confidence does in the body, in the brain, and in the lives of women specifically, that I think you'll find both illuminating and quietly infuriating.

This is your invitation to a different kind of summer. One session at a time.

Want to go deeper? Discover The Confidence Key, my eight-week coaching program: https://eimearzone.com/confidence-coaching/

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to Girl Choose Yourself, where we're trading self-doubt for self-trust and settling for soaring. I'm Eimear Zone, your host, and together we're building the confidence to create lives so deliciously bold that they scare us a little, but in the best possible way. Because life's too precious to stay cozy in our comfort zones.

It's time to choose ourselves for lives that are fabulous and soulfully fulfilling. So let's go

When I was very young, I was, ooh, I guess painfully shy. And in school I would sit at the back of the room because if you sat at the back, there was obviously, well, in my mind, there was less chance of being called on. So I really recall what it feels [00:01:00] like to be invisible on purpose, to make yourself small on purpose, to look around a room of people who seem to move through the world with a lot more ease than you do, and you kind of wonder, "What do they have that I don't have?"

I spent a lot of time thinking the answer to that question was this, uh, elusive idea of confidence, and that confidence was something that other people were born with, that they naturally had. It was who and what they were, and I had clearly missed out on it, and I felt therefore it was something that I needed to fake or perform or, or construct or manufacture somehow so I could get on with my actual life and not be looking for the seat at the back of the room where I wouldn't be called on.

And I was wrong about all of that. And this summer, I am going to share with you what I've learned through real life, not theory, about what [00:02:00] confidence actually is, what it feels like, because once you move away from just intellectualizing or performing or faking this idea of confidence and you move into revealing it within yourself and embodying it, everything, everything changes.

So let's start with what it isn't. It's not loudness. God, I so remember the loud people in the room, and still in the rooms. You know, it's not that certainty. It's n- it is not the absence of self-doubt or the absence of any nerves or the occasional 3:00 AM spiral of wondering if you're doing any of it right.

And it's definitely not a personality type. You can be an introvert and be deeply, powerfully confident. You can be quiet in a room and be the most grounded person in it. Loudness isn't confidence, it's just loudness. And confidence isn't performance, and I think this is [00:03:00] really important because so much of what we have been sold as confidence, you know, like the power poses, the assertive handshake, the unapologetic self-promotion, you know, comes from that place of performance.

And one thing that I found about performance is that it's bloody exhausting. How about you? For women in particular, I think it, it comes with a tax. I wanna say something here that connects to a conversation that I had in last week's episode with journalist and author, the amazing Stephanie O'Connell, whose book, The Ambition Penalty, came out very recently.

And Stephanie showed with solid data, not opinion or a feeling, but solid data, that when women adopt the confident, assertive, self-promoting behaviors that work so well for men, women get penalized for it. They're seen as too aggressive, not a team player, [00:04:00] difficult So the bro advice that we hear everywhere just does not account for the all-important gender context, and that means the confidence advice that so many of us have been handed, much of it developed by men, for men, in systems built by men, does not fully serve us.

So we need a different definition. We need to think about it differently as women. And confidence is also not self-esteem, which is often mixed up with, and that distinction is really important because self-esteem is how you feel about yourself, like, right now, and it is a running summary of your own worth, but it looks backwards, which is key.

Confidence is different. It's a prediction about what's possible, so it catapults you forward. You can have high self-esteem and still not act. Confidence is what moves you. And one critical [00:05:00] thing about self-esteem, too, is that people who have high self-esteem are sometimes really worried about damaging that self-esteem, and that actually stops them from taking action and taking risk and growing, you know, and building that life of possibility for them.

So this is what I have come to understand what confidence is through years of coaching, particularly women, and through my own long, very imperfect, and ongoing journey. Confidence is a deep recognition of the magnificence of who you truly are and a soulful command of your inner world so that it becomes your loyal ally as you pursue your biggest dreams.

Let me say that again. A deep recognition of the magnificence of who you already are. Not a performance, not a mask, not [00:06:00] faking it, a recognition. It's something you uncover that is already there rather than construct. And a soulful command of your inner world. Not control, command, and that difference matters because control is very rigid.

Command is grounded. It means your inner landscape of your thoughts, your feelings, all that self-talk, your beliefs, is working for you rather than against you so that you become your loyal ally. Not some blind optimist, but a loyal ally, something that is honest with you, that shows up for you, that doesn't abandon you when things get hard as you pursue your biggest dreams.

Not somebody else's definition of a good life or what your life should be, but yours and yours alone, the one that lives in the quietest, most honest part of you. And I think for many of [00:07:00] us- We are not connected to that place, and it's really important work to connect to that place. So this is not a definition that you read and you immediately feel.

It's a definition that you grow into. It's a, a direction, a direction that brings this embodiment and this feeling of, ah, that's it, of that soulful recognition I want to tell you a story, and I think I've shared it in a podcast episode, but maybe over a year ago now. And it's one of the stories that I kind of came across years and years ago, and it made me really think about confidence in, in a different way.

It was July 2007, this story is about. It was the British Open Golf Championship, and there was an Irish golfer named Padraig Harrington who was on the verge of winning one of [00:08:00] the most prestigious prizes in the sport, which is the Claret Jug, and he had just a one-shot lead going into the second to last hole.

And so he'd never felt better, and then at the top of his backswing, he got this, what he described as this tiny twinge of doubt. And with that, he sliced the ball into the water, and then he did it again on the next hole, and his confidence, he said, just dissolved. He later said he had never in his life wanted to throw in the towel the way he did in those moments.

He was embarrassed. He felt that he'd choked. He could barely put one foot in front of the other as he walked to the final fairway. But his caddie, whose name is Ronan Flood, was beside him, and Flood did something very simple, but quite remarkable that changed the course of that experience for Harrington.

He simply kept repeating over and over, almost mechanically, to Harrington, "You're the best chipper and putter in [00:09:00] the world. You're the best chipper and putter in the world. One shot at a time. You're the best chipper and putter in the world." Just on repeat. And Harrington later described how those words, which he initially sort of dismissed, that they somehow re-inflated something in him.

His mindset, he said, shifted. He was able to collect himself, I guess, and get focused as he approached that final chip shot, and he said that he had never felt more in the zone in his life. He made the shots. He won a playoff, and he ultimately raised the Claret Jug. And the ending of the story is what I find most interesting because later that night, um, he's reunited with his caddie in, Flood, in the back of the limousine back to the hotel, and Harrington looks at Flood and said, "You know, I thought I'd blown the open, and so did everyone else in the world except [00:10:00] you."

And then Flood, his caddie, starts laughing, and Harrington says, "What's so funny?" And Flood replies, "I thought you had, too. I didn't think you had a chance." Flood didn't believe the words necessarily that he was saying. He believed in Harrington enough to say them anyway. And this is what I want you to take from that story, that confidence is not certainty.

It's not the absence of doubt. It's really a chosen direction. Harrington heard and embodied what he needed from his caddie. It's very much the chosen direction. It's the decision to take the next shot regardless, to show up, to show up for your life, to show up fully, to show up for the chip even when your hands are, are shaking, even when things have been going badly.

And the research confirms this. Confidence is like a prediction device. It's a belief that something can happen, something is possible, [00:11:00] combined with a belief that you can do it, that you are capable, so that the outcome is possible, plus this belief in your own capacity, those together. And when one wavers, you can rebuild it, as Flood did for Harrington, just through that simple repetition in that moment.

And Harrington embodied that. He knew that that was true for him, and so he was able to make those shots. I wanna name something that's really important for women before we go any further, because I think it really matters enormously. Stephanie's book obviously speaks to this very particularly, and one of the many reasons why I love it in her work, there is a real headwind that women face when it comes to confidence, and it starts so much earlier than we realize.

Researchers at the University of Illinois, there's this interesting experim- experiment from them, right? They showed five-year-old children a story about a person who [00:12:00] was really, really smart, and then they asked the children to guess which of four adults, two men and two women, was that person. And the five-year-old girls chose a woman, and the five-year-old boys chose a man Now, when the same study was done with six-year-olds, in one year, just one bloody year, something significant had shifted.

The six-year-old girls now chose a man as the really smart person, oof, just like the boys did. They were then offered a choice between two games. One game was for children who were really, really smart, and the other game was described as for children who tried really, really hard. The girls who had chosen the man in the first experiment were less likely to choose the game for really smart children.

One year, just one year, that's how long it took [00:13:00] for culture to begin its work. So I know that's a bit depressing, and I don't share it so that I'll depress you. I'll share it because if you have struggled with your confidence your whole life, if it's, if it has felt harder for you than it seemed to be for others, I want you to understand that it's not your fault.

The context absolutely matters. It's not evidence that you are in some way lacking. This is the entirely predictable outcome of growing up in a world that has been quietly and consistently telling you to aim lower, to speak softer, not to get too big for your boots. So that headwind is real. The research confirms it, and knowing that it exists, naming it clearly rather than absorbing it [00:14:00] silently as some kind of personal failure that you have to work on, is in itself a- an act of confidence, I would put it to you Here's something else that's quite practical that the research offers us, something that you can begin to use immediately, and this was researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, I think.

They asked volunteers to perform a nerve-wracking mental arithmetic task in public. I can hardly get that out because I'm already feeling anxiety just thinking about having to do this. Before they began, one group was asked to say out loud, "I feel anxious." That would be my group. The other group was asked to say out loud, "I feel excited."

Now, the people who told themselves they felt excited performed significantly better in the task. Same task, same pounding hearts and twisting stomachs, but just a different word. Here [00:15:00] is what this means. The physical sensations of anxiety and excitement are almost identical. Think about it. Raised heart rate, heightened alertness, energy moving through the body.

What changes is how you label what you're feeling, that story that you tell about those sensations to yourself, the meaning that you give it, and this is what I mean by soulful command of your inner world. It's not about suppressing what you feel. It's not about trying to control it. It's not performance, but choosing consciously, deliberately how you relate to what is already happening inside of you.

That is the command, and it's available to us right now in this moment before anything in our external world has changed at all. It is not conditional on outside factors, and that's why it's so powerful. "I feel [00:16:00] anxious," sends a message to your brain that something is threatening. "I feel excited," sends a message that something important is about to happen, and you are ready for it, goddammit.

You are ready. And no, this is not toxic positivity. This is not telling yourself everything's fine when it isn't. It's, you know, it's a precise, it's evidence-based reframe of a genuine physiological state. It is really knowing yourself deeply, a soulful command, an okayness deep within yourself that is not contingent on anything external.

That's real power. The next time you feel the nerves rising before a difficult conversation, if you're younger, before you put your hand up in class or, or even in that big meeting, before you press send on the thing that you've been working up the courage to share, try saying to yourself, "I'm [00:17:00] excited." So this summer I'm doing something a little different on the podcast.

I am launching what I'm calling the Summer Confidence Sessions. These are a series of recorded meditations and reflections which will be released weekly, the normal cadence of the podcast on Thursdays, but they're designed to be listened to daily. So not just listening to the podcast like a podcast episode and kind of going, "Okay," and, and taking what you take from it, but daily for a week at a time.

And each of these meditation sessions, these are -- each one is very much an experience rather than a lesson. I want it to be something that you're absorbing, like, into your being. It's not information about confidence. It's not a how-to. It's [00:18:00] not, you know, for your cognitive deliberation. It really is something for you to receive, a weekly immersion in the inner work that genuine confidence is actually built on.

Because I, I think we all know, 'cause I've tried, we all know you can't think your way into confidence. You, you can't read your way into it. I've read every book on confidence. You know, it's, it's really a full body experience. You know, it's in the nervous system. It's in the quiet daily practice of returning to yourself, choosing to believe.

It's in that soulful command, even when doubt is loud, and it is that knowing that you're capable, worthy, and that the life that you want, that you dream of, is genuinely available to you So these sessions are the kind of work that we do together in The Confidence Key, which is my eight-week coaching program, and I [00:19:00] wanted to bring a version of it into this podcast freely, openly for every woman who needs it.

And here's how you use them, and I would love if you committed to it every week, super short, and then kinda tell me how they're landing for you. So when a new session drops, here's how you use them. Just, you know, save it, listen to it that day, and then come back to it every day for the rest of the week.

What I love to do is wake up to it in the morning, and I will sort of listen to it and then sit in silence for a while, and then to end the day sort of drifting off to sleep listening to it. But just once a day is great. Some weeks it'll land immediately, and some weeks it'll take a few listens before anything really shifts, and that's normal.

It's the nature of the work. The shifts are often quiet before they are significant. So in closing, I hope that you will enjoy these [00:20:00] sessions, these shorter sessions, over the coming summer months. Confidence is not something that we're going to find outside of ourselves. It's, it's something that we uncover.

It's something that we remember, and it's something that has been there waiting beneath all the doubt, all the diminishment, and the years of being told in subtle, and let's face it, not so subtle ways, to make ourselves smaller. The confidence sessions are an invitation to begin that uncovering, and I hope you will enjoy them and find them really helpful.

And if you do, please share the episodes with, with others who you feel will also benefit. So I'll see you next week for the first of our 12 confidence sessions this summer. Have a great week. Take care. You're awesome. Bye. Thanks so much for tuning into the episode this week. I hope you got a lot out of it, and if you did, please share it with somebody who you feel would benefit and leave a review.[00:21:00] 

Always greatly appreciated. Lots of free and paid resources to take things a step further. You can find those in the show notes. And hey, if nobody's told you this yet today, you are amazing, and the world is a far more beautiful place 'cause you're here with us all. Stay cool. Bye.