Love Life with Matthew Hussey - Everything you know about confidence is WRONG | Matt Monday

Episode Date: October 12, 2026

Have you ever wondered why, after everything you’ve achieved and experienced in life, you still don’t feel as confident as you thought you would by now?Maybe you’ve spent years working on yourself, building a career, or achieving things you thought would finally make you feel good enough. And yet, one rejection or setback can still leave you questioning your worth.Why is confidence so easy to lose, even when we’ve worked so hard to build it?In this week’s episode, I share my 3 Layers of Confidence model and explain why so much of the confidence advice we hear misses what actually matters.I also reveal four of the biggest barriers keeping us from building the kind of confidence that doesn't disappear when life doesn't go our way.---►► Join me VIRTUALLY at my Weekend Retreat on October 24–25, where I'll be teaching my complete system for building core confidence: MHRetreat.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I think most of us hope that by a certain point in our lives, we would have felt differently than maybe we do today. You know, by the time I have achieved this in my career or found this person or accumulated enough different experiences, done enough self-development, I will finally feel the confidence that I have always wanted to feel, the confidence that people have always promised me that one day I will feel. And we carry a lot of shame and anxiety around the fact that after everything that's happened in our life, we still don't feel that way. I want to talk today in this video about why that is and give you a model that I have been using for years myself. I've developed it many years ago in response to the question of why we find confidence so difficult to achieve. And I want to show you through this model why you might not be feeling the way that. that you wanted to feel by now and how quickly that can change once you start applying these things.

A long time ago, I asked the question to myself, why is it so many of a struggle with confidence on the deepest level? And when I started looking at confidence advice out there, I realized how much confidence advice conflicts. So you'd have one person saying, confidence is a feeling. It's all about having a degree of certainty about what your worth is or where you're going in life or just a belief in your abilities. Other people would describe confidence as something external, this ability to project yourself in a highly charismatic way. The way you walk, the way you talk, the way you act around other people. And then other people would say, oh, it's far deeper than all of that. It's about how much you love yourself.

It's how much you don't care what anyone thinks in the first place. None of these things were wrong, but they made confidence a very muddy concept for most people, including myself. I developed a model, I called the three layers of confidence, to actually clarify for people what the different kinds of confidence are and why, despite having certain kinds of confidence, we still don't feel good in ourselves at the end of the day and how we can change that. So these are the three layers of confidence. I've been teaching this for years on my retreat program.

I'm excited to share it with you today. And I want to try and do it succinctly for you. So the first layer of confidence is what I call the surface layer. In this layer, it is all about how we walk, how we talk, how we are perceived by the outside world based on what we exist. So we could be talking about the cadence of our speech, we could be talking about our ability to pause in a conversation, we could be talking about how powerful our gestures are, how we stand, whether we shift our weight uncomfortably, or whether we stand with a good posture and with a solid base. All of these things impact our surface level confidence and ultimately how confident people perceive us to be by what they see on the surface.

Now, the problem with the surface level is it can be faked. Not only can it be faked, but even if we're portraying ourselves as highly confident, when someone tests it, when you go and approach that person, you find intimidating, you find extremely attractive or impressive, and they test that persona very quickly, it can disintegrate. So we need to go a level deeper to layer two. The second layer of confidence is what I call the identity level. Now on this level, our confidence is actually based on something. Certain areas of our life that give us confidence, that give us a sense of certainty. It could be many things. It could be the skills we've acquired over our life.

It could be the relationships we have, the friendships we have. It could be our relationship with our family. It could be the house we own. It could be the fact that we play the guitar. It could be that we're in a romantic relationship that we derive a lot of our significance from or that just makes us feel very safe in life. Now this level is very important. The more we create a rounded life, the more we're going to have different areas that we derive confidence from. The problem is that any of these things can go away. We can lose a relationship,

friends may go away. We might lose certain skill sets over time, either if our mind deteriorates or if our body deteriorates or we get an injury, which means we can't do something anything. more. There's all sorts of ways that life changes, that removes aspects of our identity confidence that made us feel secure, that gave us a sense of worth an identity. That doesn't mean that it's not worth building those things in our life. What it means is we have to recognize there is an incredible degree of vulnerability at the identity level. So, if the surface level can be faked or can go away very quickly once it's tested by a stronger force. And the identity level is a level that we're intensely vulnerable at because it can go away or be taken away and we don't control all of that.

How do we hold on to a deep sense of true confidence and self-worth, even when things change in our life? That's what brings us onto the third layer of confidence. The third layer of confidence is what I call core confidence. This is the absolute foundation of the most confident people. The people who can still find their centre, even amidst massive change and loss in their life, the people who are happy with where they are today, even if there are things they still want in their life,

even if they haven't done everything they'd like to do or achieved everything they'd like to achieve, it doesn't change how happy they are today. This is core confidence. And it comes from the deeper relationship we have with ourselves and with our lives. Now, sometimes when people hear about core confidence, they reduce it to a platitude, like a kind of bumper sticker philosophy, which is, oh, yeah, well, I suppose the core is all about just loving yourself. And while that's not bad advice, I have always found it to be unhelpful

advice. Because firstly, what does loving yourself really mean? What does it look like? How can I practically do it? And just hearing I should love myself doesn't remove all of the barriers I feel to loving myself or loving my life. Why I found from years? of developing models for confidence and teaching them to tens of thousands of people on my retreat program is that there are four barriers to core confidence. I think of them as the four horsemen of low self-worth. The first of the four horsemen is rejection of my current life. It's extremely common for us to be thinking about the life we want and to find ways to have contempt for the life we have. to reject our circumstances, to be at odds with reality in the present.

And you'll know if you are falling prey to this horseman right now, if you're falling into compulsive comparison. Either compulsive comparison with other people, or compulsive comparison with either a previous version of yourself and what they achieved, or what you believe you should have achieved by this point in your life. In other words, comparison with the you think you should be by now. The second horseman of low self-worth is regret. Regret is when we spend our lives berating ourselves for past mistakes, decisions we've made,

and the things we've done along the way that have got us here. So there is a strong tie between these two horsemen, the regret and rejection of our current life, because many of our regrets are the things we have done that have led to our position in our life today. If you are living in constant rumination about your perceived mistakes from the past, and you're continuously raking yourself over the culls for those mistakes, you're falling prey to that second horseman of regret. The third horseman of low self-worth that stops us from feeling core confident is self-dust.

Self-distrust is when we have the sense that we are our own worst enemy, that we cannot trust ourselves, we can't trust our own mind, we can't trust our decisions, we can't trust our actions. For many of us, self-distrust goes back a long way. There was someone in our lives who sowed the seeds of that self-distrust, who made us feel like our opinion didn't matter that we weren't smart enough to take care of ourselves or to make good decisions, that we always needed them, that we weren't someone who was capable of surviving on our own. That taught us that we couldn't rely on our own intuition. So one of the hallmarks of self-distrust is self-doubt and constantly looking for other people to validate your decisions,

to tell you you're doing the right thing, to tell you what you should do next, because your own opinion isn't enough for you. That doesn't mean you should never ask for opinions, but when you can't get enough information to trust yourself to make a decision, and ultimately you end up wanting someone else to make the decision for you, that is self-distrust in action. Self-distrust also shows up in our lack of faith that we will hold to our promises to ourselves. Let's say that you articulate a new goal, maybe not even to other people, but to yourself. You know, you're thinking about what you want to achieve in 2027 and you write down a goal or you write down a new habit that you want to take on, something you want to create or achieve or attract in your life. You may get the feeling,

even as you write it down and think about it, that it's not going to happen, that you're not going to follow through, that you're not going to take the actions necessary, or if it's a new habit, you're not going to be able to stick to it. If, when you start thinking about what you want and what you're going to do, very quickly those thoughts enter your head that tell you, you're never going to do that. Like, who are you kidding? You're not going to follow through on that. You're not going to stick to that. Then you know, self-distrust is a major thing that is affecting your ability to feel core confident right now. Self-distrust leaves us feeling like we are our own worst enemy. And when that happens, it can lead to hopelessness and ultimately apathy and numbness. The fourth horseman of low self-worth,

is self-rejection. This is when we have denial, shame and hatred for parts of ourselves. And by the way, we may not even distinguish it as parts of ourselves anymore. We might just say, I feel this about all of myself. I hate me. We simply don't feel that we match up either to other people or some internal standard we have set for ourselves. If we are currently rejecting ourselves or key parts of ourselves, we cannot feel core confident. This is why so many of us don't feel confident today. We might have developed all sorts of skills on the surface

that make other people feel like we're confident, and they might be shocked to learn how insecure and inadequate and unworthy we really feel. We can spend our lives trying to achieve things, and attract certain kinds of partners and develop skill sets and, you know, accumulate things, also that on the identity level, we feel like we're somebody. Neither of those two things will leave us feeling confident at the end of the day. Core confidence is where true bulletproof confidence resides,

the kind of confidence that can make you feel invincible in this life, psychologically and emotionally. I don't think there's anything more important than removing these four barriers to core confidence. Because when we do, we're able to access something that is not only going to emotionally change your entire experience of where you are right now. When you have core confidence, nothing needs to change for you to feel better today.

You'll feel more at peace, more happy, more in touch with yourself and your life and the joy in it than you've felt in a long time, maybe ever, and nothing will have changed on the outside. It's all what changes on the inside. But things on the outside will change because core confidence doesn't just change your feelings. It changes your results. It is a superpower because when you're core confident, you start attracting different things in your life.

It's like you put an energy out into the world that starts attracting things you've never had before. What you're achieving right now in your life, what you're experiencing right now in your life is not a result of your worth. It's a result of your patterns. When your core confidence changes, your patterns in life change, how you show up changes. And when that changes, all of a sudden, the world starts to change around you and it starts to offer you new opportunities, the kind of opportunities you've always wanted. I have spent literally over a decade of my life developing the most comprehensive system for core confidence that I believe exists in the world today. The place where I have been teaching it is on my retreat for many. years and here's the tragic part most of you have never come and understandably it's been a program that

you've had to travel to America to do it's a program that you had to take a week off of work for and it was a significant financial investment we have changed this my retreat is coming up this month but we are doing it as a weekend program on the 24th and the 25th of October and we have just released a live stream ticket so that you can experience the entire thing and get my entire system for core confidence virtually from the comfort of your own home. If you know that the key to unlocking your potential is tapping into your core confidence, which I believe it is. I've been coaching for 20 years. Everything I've ever done has shown me that when people tap into this, their world begins to change. Then come join us. Core confidence isn't just going to change how you feel

in your life without anything changing, it's also going to open doors for you and attract people that you have never been able to attract in the past. The link is mhretreat.com. Go grab your ticket now. Time is of the essence. This is literally just around the corner now and I can't wait to see you at the retreat. Thank you so much for watching this video. I will see you next time.