This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - VI4P - Reconciling Confidence with Strong Emotions (Chapter 3)

Episode Date: December 25, 2023

To get your FREE Confidence Building workbook, click here. You will be added to our weekly communication for even more confidence building tips! You can unsubscribe at any time… but we hope you’ll stay with us for the confidence building journey. Every Monday for the next several weeks (as long as it takes to get through Validation Is For Parking: How Women Can Beat The Confidence Con), I’m going to bring a chapter of the book to life!  This week we work our way through Chapter 3 where we talk about Reconciling Confidence with Strong Emotions. Here’s what you can expect: How gender expectations and stereotypes deny us the opportunity to access our full emotional spectrum Dealing with “hard” emotions in a way that builds confidence. Why people-pleasing separates you from your confidence, but experiencing your emotions without judgement builds it It’s always ok to have your feelings, but your feelings shouldn’t have YOU. You are the decider of how you want to experience emotions in a way that you’re proud of. Like what you heard? Please rate and review

I am Nicole Kalil, and we are kicking off our weeks with confidence. In today's episode, we're going to be covering chapter three of my book, Validation is for Parking, which is all about reconciling confidence with our strong emotions. And for those of you that are following along in your workbook, I'm going to give you some reflection questions at the end of our episode today. But you'll want to make sure that you've completed at least through page five of the workbook by the end of this week, because we're going to start moving much faster through that workbook in the upcoming episodes. You can find the link to get your free copy

of the Confidence Building Workbook in our show notes. Okay, one interesting inside scoop about this part of the book is that it almost didn't make it in the book. I had two completely different chapters written for both chapter two and chapter three. And after several edits, ended up going back and rewriting both of those

chapters after the rest of the book was done. I sort of always thought authors wrote their book from the beginning through the end, but it turns out many of them don't, including this one. I worked on a book outline with my writing partner that included all of the chapters, but I actually wrote the last five chapters first and wrote chapter three about five times. So here's the final version of chapter three that we start with the quote, you may encounter defeats, but you must not be defeated.

In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeat so that you know who you are, what you can rise from and how you can come out of it. Maya Angelou. Do all the double standards, the need to constantly prove ourselves by doing more and performing better, and the inequities in pay make me angry? You bet they do. Maybe anger isn't the emotion you feel when you read about issues like sexism and patriarchy. Maybe it's sadness, frustration, defensiveness, disappointment, confusion, a sense of being overwhelmed, or even judgment. My point is that many of us have strong feelings about these and other issues, whatever they

may be, and that's natural. So what do strong, difficult feelings like these have to do with our ability to be confident? Well, the answer is far too much. Anger, as an example, is an emotion that I tend to feel quite a lot. My father has always had a very fiery personality, which I inherited. And for a long time, it impacted my confidence in ways I didn't know how to navigate. I struggled to handle my anger because expressing it always seemed to result in punishment from society, colleagues, and people with power over my career path. I once applied for a high-level program at the company where I worked, but I was denied. I followed up by asking one of the guys in the decision-making seat, what was holding me back from being granted that opportunity?

Are you hearing anything about what's preventing me from making it into the program? Because I can't figure out the reason. I've hit all the necessary metrics. His response? You have some work to do on being so reactive. You should connect with Diana, not her real name, by the way, as she's made some real progress with managing her emotions. Reactive? A kind way of implying my anger made me difficult to work with. To be fair, though, he wasn't wrong. I did have some work to do in that area and was willing to

accept his feedback. What pissed me off, however, was knowing at least five men who had made it into the program that had a reputation throughout the enterprise for their reactive personalities. So if showing anger was the differentiator between being offered or denied a seat at the table, none of them should have gotten in either. I also loathe that he suggested I connect with one of the very few other women in the same position as me to work on, quote unquote, my emotions versus the mass population of men who also needed to work on the very same issue. That decision maker had ultimately conveyed a version of the message women around the world receive every day. Expressing anger or any strong emotion was unbecoming specifically due to my sex and would prevent me from accomplishing my goals.

I share this story as an example of how society uses our anger against us. But it wasn't the first time I'd dealt with this issue. As a result of being ostracized for this natural emotion I happen to have a lot of, I spent years trying to soften myself and shove my anger deep down. It developed into an obsession with self-control that ultimately became a full-fledged eating disorder. I did anything and everything I could to curb and purge my anger, even though I had never stopped feeling it. And let's be real. Women have a number of things to be rightfully angry about, but we're told from a young age

that showing it is unacceptable. No one shrugs off our anger while saying, girls will be girls. No one deems us strong, firm, or assertive when we let it out. Instead, our anger is perceived as a character failing and we're gaslit, ignored, belittled, questioned, and shouted down in response. I've heard from so many Black women that they can't express emotions that are even anger adjacent, lest they get tagged with the label of angry black woman. And I can't think of a community of women with a more legitimate reason to be angry. Latina's anger, on the other hand, gets called feisty or fiery, which effectively minimizes it and sort of brands it as cute. It's these reactions that can cause us to question ourselves,

even in cases where our anger is justified and it elicits people-pleasing habits. This separates us from our authentic feelings and fractures our trust in ourselves, damaging our confidence if we let it. But I've learned that it doesn't have to. In fact, when we approach anger from an authentic and responsible place, we can leverage it to fortify our confidence. Gender stereotypes deny our emotional spectrum. All humans experience the full spectrum of emotion from anger to sadness to happiness to fear. The feelings that are seen as acceptable for us to express, however, were determined by gender stereotypes that existed before any of us were born. Men are allowed hard emotions like anger, but not softer vulnerability-laden ones like

sadness. They're berated and told to man up if they cry, right? Women, on the other hand, get called difficult if we dare let our anger be known. None of us are freely allowed to feel or demonstrate all the different parts of who we are. We're told either to follow the script or suffer the consequences. And there's nothing wrong with soft emotions like sadness. The problem is when something hard happens in our life, soft emotions are incongruent to the situation. Hard things happen frequently, and it's natural that hard emotions come with it. If someone punched me in the face, as an example, while I was walking down the street, I might feel a variety of emotions,

but being pissed off would definitely be high up in the mix. It'd be strange if it wasn't, no? When we're not allowed the specific emotion that matches specific experiences, our ability to process and get through them is limited. We think there's something wrong with us and beat ourselves up for feeling these forbidden emotions in the first place. We try to ignore that internal voice telling us to feel something, and our confidence suffers as a result. We lose trust. Through therapy and the confidence-building work I've done, I've come to believe that my anger is valid simply because it's there. It's okay to own all my feelings as long as they aren't owning me. I've learned that

denying ourselves a difficult emotion only ends up creating more problems, which is the opposite of what we want. What you resist persists. My coach, Lisa Kalman, taught me this and so much more. In fact, anyone who's health-oriented will tell you that holding in feelings like sadness or anger rather than processing and releasing them creates stress. The hormone generated by this stress in turn can manifest in the form of depression, anxiety, panic attacks, colds and viruses, circulatory problems, and so much more. It creates a vicious cycle leading to more stress, more anger, more depression. This cycle isn't just harmful to us as individuals, but also to our interpersonal relationships and society as a whole.

It benefits no one to have large numbers of people trying to make their way through life on the edge of exploding or having a whole. It benefits no one to have large numbers of people trying to make their way through life on the edge of exploding or having a breakdown. Pushing away the feelings we don't like does nothing to solve the problems causing them. Our emotions have to go somewhere. And if we're not mindful about dealing with them, they remain trapped and they fester within us. And if you don't make time for your mental, emotional, and physical wellness, you'll end up needing to make time for your illness. You'll never get to a point of only feeling emotions you like or being able to block them all out entirely. Humans don't work that way. When we don't let ourselves experience all of

our emotions to the fullest, however they come. We send the message to our subconscious that there are parts of ourselves that we can't trust. You may as well build a brick wall between yourself and your confidence because to be truly confident, we need to trust our entire selves. Remember, confidence is knowing who you are, owning who you're not, and choosing to embrace all of it. Dealing with anger in ways that build confidence.

You might be feeling stuck about the best way to handle your own anger or whatever tough emotion you may experience. What if I express it and people don't like it? Well, I'm not a therapist, but I do know it's effective for me and the many women I work with, and it allows us to propel toward the best version of ourselves. And that's a shift in mindset. I now trust myself to know that I'm allowed to have any emotion that comes up and I get to decide what to do with it and that I'll be able to handle

whatever consequences stem from my decision. And there are always consequences for your choices. For every action, there's a reaction, whether it's good, bad, or indifferent. It's likely someone will have an opinion about my emotions. Yours too, by the way. Someone else can think I'm not supposed to show up that way, but that doesn't make it true. I can't decide or choose what others think of me. At the end of the day, especially when it comes to my confidence, what matters is whether I feel proud or good about myself. So let me be real. I've expressed anger in ways that I am not proud of in the past. I've gotten into arguments with friends and ex-boyfriends and said horrible, hurtful things I regretted the moment they flew out of my mouth. Reflecting on bad behavior we

regret can feel bad, but it also can allow us to grow. Expressing anger can build confidence when we speak our truth responsibly and in a way that's authentic to us. If we're bothered by something that's happening and choose to stand up for ourselves, we create trust in ourselves. If someone makes a joke at our expense and then tells us they were just kidding,

we build trust in ourselves when we say there was nothing funny about it. If someone hurts us and tells us not to take it personally, it's okay to say that their actions were personal and there's really no other way to take it. When someone tells me not to be so sensitive, I can say, that's funny. I'm not generally known for my sensitivity. Standing up for ourselves builds trust and increases confidence exponentially. So I don't know about you, but I always feel worse when I don't say what I believe or when I choose not to speak up when I feel I should. I could line up pages of examples where not speaking up chipped away at my own trust, all because I allowed myself to sit through them

quietly and effectively condone somebody else's bad behavior. I shouldn't have laughed at that joke. It was hurtful. He shouldn't have talked to her like that. Why didn't I tell him how inappropriate he was being? Or I had every right to express my boundaries at that moment. Why didn't I? These were learning experiences that allowed me to get clear about the fact that my anger, discomfort, and hurt feelings were my gut telling me that something just didn't feel right. When we make a habit of owning our emotions to the fullest, we get the opportunity and benefit of feeling proud of how we choose to handle them.

We get to decide when and how we want to show our anger to others, when to say something and when to walk away, when to spend that energy and when to conserve it, and when it's worth it to us and when it's not. No one else is entitled to make those calls. Trusting ourselves enough to handle those moments is all about getting in touch with our authentic selves and using that connection to foster our own integrity. Choosing integrity over people pleasing. So many of us get in the habit of working to please everyone but ourselves because we think making other people happy will feel good and benefit us. We want to be likable rather than rock the boat. We believe advantages will come to us if the recipients of

our people-pleasing like us. The unfortunate reality, though, is that it's rarely possible to prioritize living in our truth when our main focus is getting others to like us. You're going to have to choose one or the other the vast majority of the time because every time you're people-pleasing, someone else may like you more, but you're going to end up liking and trusting yourself less. It's a lovely feeling when others recognize how awesome you are, but it only has substance when our good deeds are coming from a place of integrity. Choosing to prioritize living your truth actually has the added benefit of attracting the people who are right for you. So that's something to consider as well. If you're not prioritizing yourself, you're probably sacrificing your own pleasure and happiness for others. And you're probably attracting people who are happy to take

advantage of that. The word integrity, by the way, is one I avoided a lot in my 20s. At the company where I worked, we'd get the entire organization together on a regular basis and discuss questions like, what are our values? What do we stand for? What's our mission? The people around me working in financial services would inevitably answer integrity.

But I was adamantly opposed to listing that as a core value, probably because I wasn't living it in my own life. As it turns out, however, there are two definitions attached to the word. The first is the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles and moral uprightness. That sounds great and all, but didn't resonate with me because I had to question who got to decide the morals we were using as our standard in business. Are morals about being ethical and honest when dealing with clients? Well, obviously. Do they mean not lying, stealing, or otherwise doing harm to my company? I would think so. But does it also mean that a woman

can't bring a date unless it's her spouse to an overnight work trip? True story. Does it mean that my work colleagues get to have an opinion about my personal choices? Are we talking about religious morals? And if so, which religion? Are we referring to philosophical approaches to ethics? And whose ethics, values, or perspectives are being used to decide? Discussions surrounding the concept all seem too vague and loosey-goosey to me. The second definition of integrity, however, describes the state of being whole and undivided. It's about integrating every part of ourselves, tough emotions included, into our life so we can experience wholeness. That's a far more relatable concept for me. And as counterintuitive as it may seem,

does more to boost our confidence in the long run. People pleasers run on the belief that if they get what they want from others, they'll feel good about themselves. They think that if other people trust them, they'll be able to trust themselves and their confidence will grow in the process. This is an illusion. For the most part, it's the opposite that's true. Trusting yourself has to come first in order for your confidence to be real and to endure.

Validation from others can be taken away from you at any point, but true confidence as we've defined it in this book is always in your hands. And when you show up authentically and other people like it, well, that's just icing on the cake. How many times have you heard it said that you can't please everyone? More than you can count by now, I'm sure. And that's because it's true. You'll be too much for some people and not enough for others. Those just aren't your people. I teach a workshop on occasion called Who Do You Serve? It's designed to help women narrow down their target market so they can effectively serve their ideal clients. The foundation of this workshop is the fact that we do not, cannot, and will not ever be able to serve everyone. This is marketing 101. When you try to speak to

everyone, you inevitably water your message down so much that success becomes an impossibility. The clearer you are on who you're speaking to, the more successful you'll be. If you only attracted 1% of the U.S. population to your business and each of that 1% only invested $50 in your product or service one time, you would be a multimillionaire. Said another way, 99% of the population can think you're a complete hack and hate everything you do, sell, or stand for, and you'd still make around $165 million. In a world where someone's bound not to like you, regardless of whether you're being real or faking it, you might as well choose to express yourself authentically. There are people out there who will like you for you.

They'll respect you speaking your truth. They'll make space for the parts of you that others might find difficult and value them as much as the parts that are easy. There's a whole slew of people in the world who will see and appreciate you just as you are. And it feels so good to find your people. But it's important to know that while validation from others does feel good, it won't bring you any closer to your confidence. What matters is whether you trust yourself. Okay. So far in this book, we've analyzed confidence through the lens of the female experience. We've talked about what true confidence is, the confidence gap between men and women, and how we can approach strong emotions society tells us we shouldn't feel in order to build lasting trust for ourselves.

Next, we're going to move toward embodying our working definition of confidence through practices that can help us know who we are, own what we're not, and choose to embrace all of it. To start down this path, we're going to talk about reconnecting with what many call our inner knowing. Okay, friends, that brings us to the end of chapter three. So here are my questions if you want to dig a little deeper, and especially if you're caught up through page five of the free workbook you can download by using the link in show notes. Okay, my first question. If not anger, what emotion do you feel a lot but don't feel is acceptable for you to express? My next question. If you reflect back

on a time where you didn't speak up when you felt you should, what do you wish you would have said? Or how do you wish you would have handled it? Remember, reflection can help you prepare for your next opportunity to speak up. And my last question, what are some healthy ways you can work through a hard or soft emotion when it comes up? And one last thought, many of us either just celebrated a major holiday or are celebrating one right now, and lot. So this is a good opportunity to practice choosing to express them in a way that makes you feel proud, regardless of how other people react. Okay, I'll see you again on Wednesday for another episode of This Is Woman's Work. So let me leave you with this. Confidence is when you trust yourself firmly and boldly. And validation? Well, that's for parking.