Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #164 BITESIZE | How to Reduce Anxiety and Build Self-Confidence | Chloe Brotheridge

Episode Date: March 12, 2021

We all have times when we lack self-confidence, but loss of confidence, low self-esteem and anxiety can sometimes hold us back and stop us living the life we want to live. Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my new weekly podcast for your mind, body and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests. Today’s clip is from episode 65 of the podcast with hypnotherapist, anxiety expert and author, Chloe Brotheridge. Chloe explains why it’s important to be kind to ourselves and how we can train our mind to have a more positive outlook in order to grow our confidence and self-esteem. Striving for perfection can be problematic and it’s important for us to acknowledge that sometimes we are going to fail. Chloe explains how we can reframe these ‘failures’ as learning experiences and focus on things being ‘good enough’. We discuss the power of journaling to help us process our thoughts and emotions. Chloe also recounts her own struggles with self-confidence and gives some great tips to help us decrease negative self-talk and cultivate more self-acceptance. Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/65 Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee/ Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee/ Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. 

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10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More, bite-sized your weekly dose of optimism and positivity to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 65 of the podcast with the hypnotherapist, anxiety expert and author Chloe Brotheridge. In this clip, we talk about anxiety, confidence and why striving for perfection can be so problematic. Chloe explains why it's important to be kind to ourselves and how we can train our minds to have a more positive outlook in order to grow our confidence and self-esteem.

You see clients in your clinic all the time. Are there some common themes that you're seeing these days? I see a lot of people with general anxiety, so worrying about everything, feeling like they can't switch off, feeling like they're on high alert a lot of the time I see quite a lot of people for social anxiety I see people with panic attacks I started to notice when I was researching the book how many other people also felt the same as I did so thoughts of not not being good enough finding it hard to speak in public or having social anxiety, not having the confidence to go after things. So that was definitely my story for a long time. You know, it's been a big relief for me personally to sort of realise that other people feel the same way.

And I found that often people come up to me and say, it's like you've read my mind or you've looked inside my brain and written down what was inside my brain. So it's a thing that a lot of people struggle with. Often we look at people and think that they're really confident and they've got it all figured out and they were potentially just born confident. That's just the way they are. And we tell ourselves that we are not confident and we're not good enough and we could never do those things. And some examples are people like Adele, who has talked about how she sometimes is sick before she does a performance. And there's an inspirational speaker called Mel Robbins, who during her TED Talk, she was having a panic attack, she said the whole time, even though she seems really calm and confident when she's actually speaking. What we're seeing often is

someone being courageous, you know, inside they're doubting themselves, they're experiencing fear, they're maybe feeling like an imposter. So we're seeing that their courage, not necessarily their confidence. And I think just knowing that almost gives us a bit of permission to know that we can feel afraid and still do things and we can still give things a try, even though we don't have, you know, rock solid confidence to begin with even though we don't have you know rock solid confidence to begin with yeah I think you know just hearing that Adele one of the probably one of the most successful and most famous singers that actually she gets nervous before she goes out doesn't matter how many gigs she's done she's still getting nervous that really is

I think in some ways quite inspiring for people and quite reassuring for people. Confidence is a skill that you can learn. And I think that is revolutionary for some people. I think it's quite empowering to think that, to know that even if you are someone who is shy, I mean, 50% of people say that they are shy. So that's a lot of people struggling with maybe being themselves or holding themselves back. And to know that actually we're not fixed. We are changing all the time. We can do things to help ourselves. Even if you are experiencing anxiety at the moment, you're not going to feel like that forever.

No feelings stay the same the whole time. And so there are lots of things that we can do to learn to accept ourselves more, to perhaps go outside of our comfort zones to grow our confidence, because I found that, and this was definitely a pattern for me in the past, I would just avoid anything that I was afraid of or avoid anything that made me nervous or anxious. I had a lot of social anxiety in the past, and I would just not go to parties. I wouldn't go to a networking event. That was like my worst nightmare, the thought of having to meet strangers or something. And little by little, I started to challenge myself and started to say, right,

I'm going to go to this event. I'm going to stay for five minutes. I'm going to talk to one person and then I can leave. And in doing that, what happens is I started to retrain my nervous system and teach myself that I could survive those situations. And that's how we grow our confidence. So in some ways, it's almost like a muscle that you're not going to die if you go into that situation. Because I think at some level, you know, when we're in fight or flight is because we're perceiving or our nervous system is perceiving that there's a threat. And so without all that adrenaline is being created. And then when we go to the networking event and we survive and actually we learn it's not it's not so bad and your body starts to be retrained in that way why is striving to be perfect so problematic for us well if we're striving for perfection we're striving for something that is actually impossible

because perfection is something that is just an opinion and everyone in the world has a different opinion of what is perfect if you were trying to create the perfect And everyone in the world has a different opinion of what is perfect. If you were trying to create the perfect podcast, everyone in the world has a different idea of that. And you're not going to please everyone. And also what happens when we have that perfectionist mindset is we constantly move the goalposts. So once we've got one job, we're looking at the next one. How can we get the next promotion? Once we've sold a certain amount of books, we still want to go to the next thing. So we're never satisfied because we've got that mindset of always pushing, always pressuring, never feeling good enough. It actually comes down to not feeling good enough. If we don't feel good enough on ourselves, no external thing is going to really satisfy that. And I think it can be very

toxic. We often think of perfectionism as being kind of a good thing and obviously in some situations you'd want people to be perfectionists like your surgeon or something um but in a lot of cases it's not needed and actually just causes us to worry and and stress and and actually sometimes not take action because we're worried that we're going to fail we do wait for perfection too much don't we and when all we're looking for is progress. Yeah, so just focus on it being good enough. Be kind to yourself. Know that you're going to fail at times and progress is going to happen.

And I think at some point we do just need to try to let go. And actually, often things feel perfect when we accept them. If we can have that attitude of just being more accepting and embracing things as they are, things start to feel as we imagine they would when they're perfect. We get that sense of contentment and that sense of satisfaction. So I think it's about, yeah, trying to cultivate some more acceptance. How can people who are listening to this and who recognise some of the tendencies we're talking about say, you know, I'd love to change that. You know, I would love to be more accepting of myself, but I find it hard. What can they do?

So many of us find it really hard to accept compliments or even think about ourselves in a positive way. And I think a really key first step is to start to train yourself to think of yourself in more positive ways. We are often in a pattern of always beating ourselves up or, I mean, in terms of negativity bias, which is just the way our brains are wired, we naturally look for the negatives and things or the criticisms because it was a survival mechanism in the past. But we can counteract that by thinking about what were three things that you appreciated about yourself today what did you do well today what do you like about yourself today did you overcome a challenge did you help someone did you complete a project and getting into that habit of every day thinking of three things that you can appreciate about

yourself starts to train your mind to look for more things to appreciate about yourself and you eventually start to think of yourself in a more positive way and this can grow your your self-esteem your confidence you can be kind to yourself as a result you shared a really nice story in the book I wonder if you could just tell that story because I think it's it's quite inspiring for people and just A, what happened, but B, how you process it and what you learned from that experience. When I first started as a therapist, I decided to do my first event and I was really excited about it and very, very nervous. And I'd prepared a lot for it. I'd learned the script off by heart. I'd put up posters in local

cafes and contacted clients and put quite a lot of effort into trying to organise it. I got a grand total of one person turning up and I was completely devastated. I spent the kind of next, I don't know, the next hour after the workshop really beating myself up, thinking, I'm a terrible therapist. This is a sign that I should just quit and never try to do an event again. And catastrophising and thinking that this meant all these things about sign that I should just quit and never try to do an event again. And catastrophizing and thinking that this meant all these things about me that I was, you know, not good at what I was doing. And after kind of a certain period of beating myself up, I had a bit of a word with myself and I decided to do some writing about what I was thinking. And I wrote down some of those

thoughts that I was having and started to realize how ridiculous they sounded. And I started to ask myself, what can I learn from this experience? It's such a common thing how we, you know, we quote unquote fail at something and we make it mean a load of things about us that we're not good enough. And quite often we give up if we beat ourselves up about something. And if we can think, if we can be kind to ourselves, and if we can think about, you know, what am I learning from this situation? How can I use this as information to help me to get better next time? then we're much more able to try again and to use that as a valuable learning experience. I think you used journaling, didn't you, as part of your way of processing this. If someone comes into you and you recommend journaling,

how do you break it down for them in terms of what they should be doing? I often recommend that my clients get a notepad. and it could be at any time of day that works for them. Often people do it in the morning because it's a nice way to start your day. Some people do it last thing at night to help them to unwind before bed. But you just write a stream of consciousness. So whatever you're worried about, whatever's on your mind, whatever you've got on that day. And what happens is it it helps us to put our feelings into words and there's something very powerful about doing

that because when we're able to kind of label our emotions and really kind of narrativize the thoughts and feelings we start to feel more in control of them we start to process them more easily and it's not just a jumble in our heads anymore. And all these anxious kind of thoughts and worries, it's out and it's down on paper and we can start to process it. Yeah, I think it's a great tip. And I think it is deceptively powerful. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Please do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the full conversation with my guest. And if you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my new bite-sized Friday email.

It's called the Friday Five. And each week I share things that I do not share on social media. and each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short doses of positivity, articles or books that I'm reading, quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across and so much more. I really think you're going to love it. The goal is for it to be a small yet powerful dose of feel good to get you ready for the weekend. You can sign up for it at drchastity.com forward slash Friday five. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back next week with my long form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.