Chapter 10
Developing Your Physical Confidence
In This Chapter
Noticing how your body affects your thoughts and deeds
Getting more comfortable in your own skin
Holding out a healthy vision of yourself
Do you jump out of bed in the morning raring to go, knowing that your physical body is in good shape, fit, healthy, and free of pain, ready to enjoy the day ahead? Or do you sluggishly grab for the first coffee, croissant, or cigarette to get you on your feet and force you into action?
When you get yourself in the best physical shape you can, you’ve a strong foundation for being your most confident best. Confidence takes energy, and this chapter is about getting the energy flowing for you.
Connecting Your Mind and Body
Think of your body as a car, and then realise that your body is the most complex vehicle on the planet. Some 50,000 million cells make up your body, forming your bones, muscles, nerves, skin, blood, and other organs and body tissues. None of these systems works in isolation – they all communicate through highly sophisticated pathways of information signalling.
As you consider your mind and body as one system rather than as two separate and unrelated parts, you notice how the two are inseparable. When your state of mind is calm, clear, and focused, your physical performance is likely to be at its best. Conversely, if your mind is confused and frazzled, then you’re likely to be off balance physically, experiencing symptoms from clumsiness to butterflies in your stomach.
Breakthroughs by neuroscientists over the last 30 years indicate that when an emotion is triggered, your physiology shifts even though you’re not consciously aware of it. This shift sends a message back to the brain affecting virtually everything the brain does. So your performance, your ability to act with confidence, is inextricably linked with your physiology.
Many mantras, prayers, yoga, and spiritual practices can have a beneficial effect on wellbeing. By practising disciplines such as yoga, meditation, Tai Chi, and martial arts, you can develop the discipline to calm your mind and centre your body for effective action.
One of the quickest ways to get your physiology regulated is through changing your breathing patterns. Practise simple deep breathing exercises every day and focus your energy on your heart as you do so. When you find yourself in a situation of tension, breathe through the situation rather than reacting with anger or negative emotion. Breathing helps you conserve your reserves of energy. (Chapters 9 and 11 introduce you to our monkey breathing steps – an easy calming technique.)
Considering What Makes You Healthy
What does healthy mean to you? Perhaps your measure relates to the food you eat, the exercise you take, whether you floss your teeth each day, or the medical treatment you receive. Take a moment to write down what makes you feel healthy.
In the Western world today, a rising tide of people is becoming chronically obese, which in the longer term produces severe health problems, including heart disease and Type 2 diabetes. Regular exercise combined with a healthy diet is essential if you want to live to a healthy old age. And feeling healthy makes a huge difference to your overall confidence.
If you’re struggling to increase your exercise, cultivate an exercise buddy to walk or run with you or join you in a sport regularly. Kate has been playing tennis with friends each week for many years, turning the game into a social occasion that is friendly and fun as well as healthy.
Health and fitness are not the same. You can be superfit, yet damage your wellbeing from over-exercising or poor eating habits.
Releasing stress, staying healthy
Stress is a key factor in modern living and working as your time, money, and energy feels the squeeze. Financial pressures plus family issues such as divorce or caring for young children and elders take their toll at home. Increasingly, in tough economic times modern workers are experiencing substantial job insecurity, longer working hours, increased travel, and lowered morale. Workplace stress also damages health, happiness, and home relationships. All of these things can have detrimental effects on your self-confidence.
Stress is not all bad – it can create excitement, innovation, and motivation. Yet when it crosses the dividing line from a positive stretch to a negative pressure, you feel out of control. An excess of stress leads to hypertension and greatly increases your risk of heart disease.
You may think of stress and depression as strictly psychological problems, but they’ve an effect on the whole body, not just the quality of your mental processes. You suffer physically as you become more gloomy and pessimistic. Your confidence and physiology are so closely linked. That’s why managing your stress levels is so important.
Normal everyday stress affects your body and can:
Raise your blood pressure.
Make your heart beat faster.
Restrict the flow of blood to the skin.
Deplete your immune system and resistance to infection.
Disrupt the digestive processes.
Create a feeling of edginess inside.
Stress can become extreme as a number of work and domestic issues get compounded. This situation happens, for example, if you’re working long hours for a period of time and can’t see the end to it, then you suffer the death or ill health of a loved one, face financial difficulties, or your marriage breaks down.
Your body is pre-programmed with a basic ‘fight or flight’ response to keep you safe. This program may show itself as flight, as when you physically can’t get out of bed to go to work or you experience panic attacks – or fight, when you lose your temper or lash out at someone unexpectedly.
Getting stress out of your system
Getting negative stress out of your system involves building good everyday habits. By this statement, we mean regular practices that keep your system functioning smoothly.
Don’t wait until you feel bad. Instead, make sure that you develop stress-relieving habits while all is well so that you’re better prepared when your immune system is most vulnerable.
Delegates on Kate’s workshops based around her book Live Life. Love Work (Capstone Books) create their own set of everyday habits to stay centred and quieten the mind. These habits range from physical postures such as the Yoga sun salutation – a range of movements to stretch and energise the body – through to problem-solving strategies and mentally creating a quiet place that they can visit in their heads to feel calm.
Talking things over with a coach or mentor can help give you a better perspective on the issues underlying your stress. You need to objectively identify the root causes for the tension and work on these causes in order to move on happily. Joining a support group of people in a similar situation is also helpful – whether this group is a group of mums of toddlers or a job-search group.
Raising the feel-good factors
Think about what gives you the feel-good factor. In Figure 10-1 is space for you to evaluate the positives in your life from various angles. Then when you’re feeling down, you can spend a minute circling round each spoke of the wheel inhaling the good vibes. This activity unlocks the endorphins in your body that boost your immune system and help you to feel better about yourself.
For each section of the wheel, capture two or three positive suggestions. These suggestions may trigger a memory of an event or place that made your feel good or a reminder of something to do like playing a piece of music, looking at a favourite picture or object. The categories are:
Places you’ve visited or would like to see – these places can include cities, beaches, mountains, gardens, galleries, or buildings.
People and animals can be those you know and others you don’t but who inspire or interest you.
Exercises include your favourite sports as well as mental exercises.
Objects are things of beauty; items that trigger a happy memory.
Events such as holidays, anniversaries, and celebrations – important times in your life.
Pictures and symbols may be items of art, postcards, icons, and photographs.
Smells and tastes are your favourite food and aromas.
Words and sounds include music, poems, mantras, and affirmations.
Make a note of these suggestions in each sector of the wheel shown in Figure 10-1 as a reminder to give you a boost when you need it.
Figure 10-1: Circling round the feel-good wheel.
Following the golden rules for a healthy diet
You wouldn’t consider putting the wrong kind of fuel in your car, so why do it to your body? What you eat and how much water you drink has a major impact on your energy and thus your confidence. So eat well and with awareness.
Put the brakes on your eating at moments when feeling stressed, anxious, or over-excited, because losing awareness of what is going in your body, how hungry you feel, and what the best food is for you right now is all too easy during those times. Instead of grabbing fast food on the run, step back, choose the more healthy option, and get ready to savour every mouthful.
Here are some more healthy diet tips:
Drink water: Unless you want to end up as a dried-out prune, drink 11⁄2 to 2 litres of pure, clean water every day. Your body naturally loses several litres of fluid each day. Water is critical to help you cleanse your body, eliminating waste and toxins. Often when you think that you’re hungry, you’re actually thirsty.
Examine your oils: Avoid chemicals and additives in the fats and oils you choose. Hemp seed oil is one of the richest sources of essential fatty acids omega-3 and omega-6.
Choose brown, not white: Brown rice is more cleansing for your immune system, and go for wholemeal breads and pastas every time.
Snack on seeds: The zinc in pumpkin and sunflower seeds boosts your energy. Seeds are instant and tasty.
Don’t add salt: Save the salt for when you swim in the sea. Cut back on salt and look after your blood pressure.
Go with greens: Eat leafy greens every day. Watercress, spinach, cabbage, lettuce, Swiss chard, mint, and parsley are rich in minerals and vitamins.
Avoid tobacco: Get away from all forms of smoking. Whether the smoke is yours or someone else’s, smoking depletes the nutrients in your body.
Re-educate your sweet tooth: Eating regularly and well keeps your blood sugar stable and save the need for a sugar fix. As well as cutting down on sweets, biscuits, and cakes, beware the hidden sugar in processed food such as flavoured yoghurt, fruit and carbonated drinks, and sauces.
If you’re good at keeping to the healthy rules 80 per cent of the time, you’re well on your way to making a healthy diet a natural way of eating.
Believing in your health
Beliefs are the working principles on which you act. They’re not proven facts but working assumptions. To develop your physical confidence, believing that looking after your well-being to the best of your ability is both possible and desirable is helpful.
The following belief statements can support you. Try them on for size by taking one principle a day and acting from that position.
When I’m healthy my confidence levels rise.
I can create a healthy life for myself.
It’s never too late to start being healthy.
I have a strong appetite for physical exercise.
I can look after my health in many different ways.
My health is my responsibility.
I can accept an injury or illness and still be a healthy person.
I can discover new things from a number of role models.
Fun and laughter play a great part in my wellbeing.
Keeping moving is important.
My vitality and wellbeing are infectious.
Looking Forward to Your Healthy Future Self
Your behaviour today has a direct impact on your health in the future. Your health is one area of your life that you can’t afford to ignore.
Sports coaches often film you playing your sport and then compare your movements, shots, strokes, or swings with a sporting hero. If you had a video camera, what picture would you record of your own physical wellbeing right now? Now fast forward that image and see what you look like one year, five years, and ten years from now, and at the end of your life. Imagine the image you’re going to see if you carry on as you’re doing just now and feel how that affects your confidence. What, if any, changes do you want to make?
To be healthy and energetic, you need fuel from good-quality food and water, adequate rest, a healthy environment, sufficient exercise, variety and challenge in your work and play, and supportive people around you.