Intuitive Counsellor and Life Strategist
Language is potent. Think about it; Starve – Feed.
Most women have had or continue to have, an uneasy relationship with being healthily fed; physically and emotionally.
We diet, even starve ourselves, we lose weight and we put it back on. In order to maintain a healthy weight we have to feed our healthy emotions and starve our negative fears relating to our body image. Otherwise all we are doing is transferring the obsession from eating to not eating.
Similarly, in feeding a confidence that sustains, we have to analyse the emotional source and patterns behind our fears in order to release them.
We know that going on a starvation diet just does not work, so that is why, to build up your confidence we need to think less about starving our fears but about feeding our confidence.
We are human and therefore, flawed and it’s normal to feel irrational fears; it’s completely unrealistic to eliminate fear … it’s an important part of our flight or fight mechanism, an integral part of our psyche.
Sometimes we can starve our fears to death but mostly, we need to think more about harnessing them and working with them; understanding their source; why they come to the surface at this particular time and how to safely work it through to arrive at a more confident, experienced you. It’s a little like managing a child, in fact, your inner child.
On a wider scale, fear is used in society to control the masses. Fear cripples us and keeps us in our place; but what place? A place chosen by society.
By that I mean your birth, your talents, your limitations that allow you to have so much ‘success’ but we will cripple you if you try to go beyond your given ‘box’.
After years of patterning, we then take up the mantle of control and limitation and do it to ourselves. We become experts at feeding our fears and giving reasons not excuses for being stuck. We no longer need an outside voice to restrict our aspirations and our achievements. We give our fears a banquet!
Do not despair. You can change – we all can.
Firstly, identify your main fear. With many of my clients, for example, it boils down to a constant struggle between fear of success/fear of failure.
Attaining your goal and sustaining your success can be as daunting as failure. Failure can be a familiar, oddly ‘comforting’ emotion. UNDERSTAND your fear; know its origins; look at all the situations since that time which have reinforced and fed that fear. Now you can recognise the fear each time it enters your head.
Secondly, BELIEVE that you can change and transform the fear by feeding it a powerful rather than a fearful response.
Stella, was back in the workplace after being a mum for 7 years. She had acquired a great job based on her past credentials but she was so afraid that she would blow it in her first week.
I told her to remember a moment in her life when she felt on top of her career; to visualise the scene, to feel that emotion in her body and almost be there again; that every time she felt panic, she had to starve those feelings and feed herself with the positive visualisation. She had to find other moments of success and feed them to her brain before she went to sleep and before she got up.
So we come to ‘feeling’ those moments of success in every cell of our bodies. These FEELINGS of success begin to join up and there comes a critical mass that feeds itself and thus the fear is starved.
By continuously feeding our cells with ‘success’, there is no room for sensations of ‘failure’ and this is how it will wither away.
Remember, you have been feeding yourself incorrectly for years so don’t give up if things don’t change in a week. We have to keep doing it to succeed. Your confidence will grow and grow.
The key is to work on feeding your confidence, otherwise the doing centre keeps getting fed the old messages and will, at best, do a watered down version of it. If you find yourself feeling an old fear rising, replace it with a positive feeling. Then just breathe all this in and DO it. Think of this reprogramming as a continuous part of life. Practice really does make perfect.
Breathing is a simple and powerful technique that can feed your confidence. They say everything from the blood is fed into the cells on the Out breath. So, learn to breathe in for a count of 4 and out for a count of 8 – smooth even breaths. You’ll find your heart rate calming and your body relaxing and rebalancing quickly if you focus solely on your breath.
In my line of work, the Solar Plexus Chakra (energy centre) – is seen as our seat of self-confidence. It is here that we can feel our doubts and fears when under duress.
We slouch or fold our arms across it to instinctively protect this area. So, visualise a beautiful halo of yellow light around your midriff. See if you can feel the heat radiating from within. Feel this heat melting the fear.
So, to recap, identify and UNDERSTAND your main fear; be vigilant; watch when it shows itself. BELIEVE you can transform it into positive energy that feeds your confidence and sense of self. Put energy into FEELING differently about yourself and your situation. Use practical methods to create new patterns of BEHAVIOUR based on your healthy feelings. It’s in this way that you starve your fears and feed your confidence.
Finally, remember, self-confidence is not about being perfect and always getting life right. Self-confidence is about feeling comfortable with who you are, flaws and all. It’s about trusting your integrity and experience to work things out and get to where you need to be.
We can all be a better realised person but our flaws give us compassion, humility, intuition and creativity. Make sure you feed this message to yourself as well as to others.
Susie Johns is an internationally acclaimed Psychic, Intuitive Counsellor, and Life Strategist; Her classes, workshops, articles, books, and private sessions empower people everywhere through self-awareness. Her goal is to help you gain insight into the bigger picture of your life so that you can face your demons, develop a plan of action, and overcome negative patterns to achieve true fulfilment.
photo credit: TEDTalksLive_20151102_RL15491_1920 via photopin (license)