Liberate Your Power: Building Confidence
- Headmistress Jill Miller
- Mar 29
- 6 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
I recently taught the Liberate Your Power class for the first time. This class is part of the Power Series of classes I offer, along with Speak Your Power and Embrace Your Power, which you can catch on April 16th.
Liberate Your Power has quickly become one of my favorite Finishing School for Modern Women classes. I spent a lot of time thinking about the title's meaning and digging into how to break through our self-imposed boundaries to free our power, and it has helped me. But it takes actually teaching the class to see how it impacts others to know how strong the class truly is. This class is powerful.
Although I wish all of you could come to this class, I know that's impossible for all kinds of reasons. Because this information is too good not to spread far and wide, I'm going to do something I've never done before. I'm sharing the content of this class in a series of articles on my blog. In each section, there will be an exercise you can choose to do - or not.
This is the first installment.
Liberate Your Power: Confidence
Imagine a world where your potential knows no bounds.
Every challenge you face is a powerful opportunity to move you forward, and every setback is a stepping stone on your path to success.
Feedback is seen as a driving force for improvement and a crucial tool for growth.
In this world, you're free to learn and adapt and confidently seize every possibility that comes your way, transforming obstacles into catalysts for greatness.
Liberating your power is believing that skills and smarts can grow through hard work and determination. This belief changes your self-perception and how you tackle life's challenges.
Because when we embrace the possibility of change, it's like flipping a switch that illuminates untapped potential and turns limitations into launchpads for success.
What if changing your mindset is the key to landing your most remarkable achievements?
After all - you are the driver of your success.
In the Liberate Your Power class, we explore how to build confidence and the belief that you can make the impossible happen. We talk about finding the courage to go for it and overcoming obstacles that hold us back from embracing a growth mindset that the sky is the limit. We'll start with building confidence.
Building Confidence
Much of what holds us back from doing what we want is confidence: the sense of comfort with ourselves and our instincts and the belief that we can trust our abilities, knowledge, and judgment.
Although we tend to think of them as the same, there are differences between self-confidence and self-esteem:
Self-confidence is outward-facing. It's what you put out to the world and what people around you see.
Self-esteem is inward-facing and only sometimes noticeable from the outside.
Your confidence comes from knowledge and experience. Self-esteem is more about knowing yourself and valuing your self-worth.
Confidence is complicated.
We can be confident in some areas and less confident in others.
Confidence ebbs and flows. We've all experienced times in our lives when our self-confidence gets a boost or takes a hit.
Just because you don't feel confident today doesn't mean you won't feel confident later.
Imposter Syndrome is real, no matter how old or accomplished you are.
Confidence can be grown like a muscle. Just like our ability to spring back from challenging situations by practicing coping strategies in advance, we can take action to purposely build our self-confidence. (We talk more about this in the Picking Up The Pieces class.)
There are lots of ways to work on building confidence. When I was working on an article for my Working Up the Nerve blog, I asked my friends on social media what they do to build confidence.
They answered:
Boosting their inner mood by sprucing up their outer appearance.
Moving and exercising.
Achieving goals.
Gratitude journals
What do you do to build your self-confidence?
Self-Limiting Beliefs
One of the most effective ways to create long-term differences in confidence is to get honest about our self-limiting beliefs.
Self-limiting beliefs are judgments about us that we think are true that restrict us in some way. They are the stories that we tell ourselves that hold us back.
For example, "I'm not smart enough." "I never do anything right." "I don't have enough time." "I'm not good enough."
Self-limiting beliefs:
Hold us in a negative, self-doubting state of mind.
Keep us from discovering new opportunities, taking risks, and experiencing life.
Wreak havoc on our mental health.
We tell ourselves these stories so often that we convince ourselves they are the truth.
Self-limiting beliefs aren't just about what we think of ourselves. It can be about other people, too. Unconscious biases about others make it hard to collaborate effectively, ultimately impacting our work quality.
What you choose to focus on becomes your reality.
These stories keep us stuck. We become set in our ways and beliefs and committed to our stories about who we are and what our reality looks like.
Our brains want to keep us safe, so they will go to any lengths to convince us not to do anything different, not to take risks. While that can be a good thing, it holds us back and doesn't allow us to change the things that would actually make our lives better - and happier.
What if a shift in perception could give us everything we want?
"Our entire experience on this planet is determined by how we choose to perceive our reality." – Jen Sincero.
You are the author of your own life.
The stories we tell ourselves are not the truth, and we can rewrite them.
Before letting go of our stories, we must be conscious of what they are. We have to start listening to ourselves and calling ourselves out on our own lies. We get too used to what we're telling ourselves. We may not realize they even exist or that they aren't real.
Yet, we'll fight fiercely to uphold these false stories.
Listen for sentences that start with:
I always…
I never…
I can't…
I should…
I suck at…
One day…
I'm trying to…
I want (rather than I will and I am)…
What is holding you back from liberating your power?
You are here right now because you want to embrace your power. I'll bet there are stories you're telling yourself around this topic.
What stories are you telling yourself?
"I'm not good enough."
"I'm too old or too young."
"I'm not smart enough."
We have to pay attention to these self-sabotaging stories so we can rewrite them. We have to see the beast before we can slay it.
We also have to be honest with ourselves about how we actually benefit from telling ourselves these stories. For example, if I tell myself, "I'm just not good enough," it kind of lets me off the hook to even try.
Once we can see the false benefits we get from telling ourselves self-limiting stories, we can let them go and replace them with stories that serve us better.
Important: Don't be hard on yourself about these stories. These stories are how we've protected ourselves from being hurt in the past. Today, we get to make a new choice.
What false benefits are you getting from the story you're telling yourself?
Now, we can replace our old stories with powerful new stories!
For example:
"By saying I'm not a neat person, I'm giving myself an excuse to not even try to get rid of clutter, even though it's making me feel stuck."
Can become:
"I am in control of how much clutter I have in my life. I choose to be a neater person to keep the clutter in my life down."
By replacing our old narrative, they become our new truth. You'll need to repeat your new story over and over again to help it stick.
Now it's your turn. I've attached a worksheet from the class so you can do this activity on your own.
What self-limiting stories are you telling yourself, and how will you rewrite them?
If you'd like to turn in your homework and earn a badge for this class like we do in our in-person classes, email me at Jill@FinishingSchoolForModernWomen.com.
Next installment: Building Belief
Did you know I've published a book? Learn more about it here!
Because We’re Never Finished
The Finishing School for Modern Women, located in Wichita, Kansas, offers classes to help women find their authentic selves, not because we need finishing, but because we’re never finished. We bring together women of all ages to learn from experts and each other how to claim our power in business, finance, communication, and life.
To learn more about what we do:
https://www.finishingschoolformodernwomen.com for our classes and free social membership.
Contact Us
Phone: 316-841-8927 Email: jill@finishingschoolformodernwomen.com
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