Do you consider yourself to be a confident mama? I am a pretty introverted person and I feel like I am a pretty confident person. It was not always like this though.
Right when I got married and especially when I started having kids, my confidence too a deep dive down.
Suddenly, my life was completely different. As a wife and mother, I was no longer going to school or working and I felt lost. I did not particularly know how to fill these roles either. I had great role models and books to look to but I still felt like I had been thrown into the deep end with everyone expecting me to know how to swim.
I felt overwhelmed and frustrated like I was missing some piece of the puzzle. And I started very quickly to feel insecure in myself.
Out of nowhere I started to feel my anxiety creeping in again. It started to take over all aspects of my life. I started to isolate myself in fear that I would somehow mess it all up. When I did talk to friends, I felt like I had to meet this perfect expectation of what a wife and mother should be.
I felt terrible about my abilities as a mother, as a wife and any ability to make friends or hold any kind of responsibility. My confidence was lost.
To compensate for my lack of confidence, I looked to my husband. He can surely prove to me that I was worthy and provide me with confidence that I lost.
I wanted him to make me feel loved and like I was enough. I wanted our relationship and him to somehow make me feel good again.
Umm no. That obviously does not work.
The exact opposite happened. We started arguing more. He started to withdraw. Who wouldn’t have problems with that circumstance? I was asking him to do something impossible and then getting frustrated with him when he couldn’t deliver.
Do you have a familiar story?
I know many of the women that I talk to fo through similar situations and thoughts. Similar loss of confidence in there lives as mothers and wives.
So not the big question is…how do you find your way back after years of living in the cycle?
I have 3 things for you today that have helped me tremendously and keep helping the women that I talk to. Hopefully this will help you feel better in your life and especially in your motherhood.
Grab a friend
This can be someone you trust that can be non-judgnemental and to love you no matter what. In can be someone in church or a family member or a life coach! I help my clients with this all the time. The cycle that I talked about is a very common shame/blame cycle. I felt shame for not living up to some made up expectation, my husband didn’t help me feel confident. I blamed him for not feeling confident, which caused me to feel more shame for not having the perfect marriage.
Shame likes to hide. As soon as we see it and name it for what it is, it starts to move on.
When we vocalize our shame about something, then it stops having such a grip on us and then we can start moving on.
What do you love?
In the middle of this low point, I felt like I have completely forgotten who I was. Eventually I decided that I wanted more than anything to know who I was again. This new version of me changed. She was not the same. I needed to spend time with her and get to know her again.
Things that I used to love weren’t really that important to me anymore. So I spend some time learning what I love now. I started finding out what sparked my curiosity NOW.
I was really interested in mental health and how it would make a difference in motherhood especially. So I decided to go on a journey to learning tools that can really help me now and sharing with other women. I loved connecting with other moms. It lit me up again.
Spending time doing something that I was passionate about helped me to really value my own needs and desires and see the gifts that I have been given. When I began to value them, then I began to value me and my confidence naturally increased.
Serve
This one is important but it is important to not think that just by serving others that you will gain confidence. Only when you do the first two are you really able to serve others from an authentic place. It is a place of wanting to give vs a place of fitting into this perfect mold.
I had to understand my own brain first and the shame that I was feeling before I could truly serve others. It has to come from a clean place and not a place of obligation.
Have you ever served from a place of obligation? Most likely you felt worse. Like you could never do good enough.
When finding opportunities to serve your own community from a genuine place of wanting to help others, you will feel more connected to who you are. It becomes this genuine practice instead of another thing that is on your list of to-do.
When I gained more confidence, I showed up to my marriage differently. I did not and still do not depend on my husband to make me feel loved. That job goes back on my own shoulders.
With that in place, your own motherhood will begin to thrive. Everything can change. Letting go of expectations on how others are supposed to make you feel anything can have you feeling more connected and stronger than ever.
It is a beautiful thing and I know that it can work for you also.
If you need more guidance with self confidence in your life, click the button below to grab my free confidence for moms course where you start creating that road map yourself.
