Ep #2: How to Believe on Purpose

You are listening to episode two of The Confident Coaches Podcast. The one where I teach you to believe on purpose.

Welcome to The Confident Coaches Podcast, a place for creating the self-confidence you need to do your best work as a life coach. If you want to bring more boldness, more resilience, and more joy to your work, this is the place for you. I’m your host, Amy Latta. Let’s dive in.

Hello my friends. I am so excited to have you back here for more self-confidence goodness. And just a little heads up, we had a little cold run through our house this week and I got a little gragginess in my throat so we’re just saying a little prayer over here to the voice gods to get through a couple of podcast episodes for you and not make my podcast producer Pavel cringe.

Though I have to tell you, even as I say that, can I just be completely honest with you? I talk for a living. I coach at least 20 hours a week every single week, so graggly voice is like a real thing over here. Personally, I kind of like my smelly cat voice, so you know what, let’s just dive in and let’s just appreciate the soulful growl that might pop up sometimes.

So today, I am diving into my five steps to creating self-confidence. And it’s really important to understand what we are not talking about here. We are not talking about doing the Wonder Woman pose before we go on stage or reading a bunch of inspirational posts or dressing for success.

I mean, not that there’s anything wrong with that if it helps, but we’re going much deeper here because The Confident Coaches Podcast, this is not a cheerleading podcast. Inspiration is not going to create transformation. And if you want to see real change in your life, real change in your coaching business, we have to take these inspirational ideas that are out there in the world, and yes, they’re fabulous and they’re wonderful, but we need to put them to use in a way that actually creates change for you.

So I’m going to present each of my five steps to creating self-confidence over the next five podcasts in a way that highlights what many of us are doing that doesn’t work and what to do instead. And this isn’t just theory. This is the exact work that I have done. And as I talked about in episode one, I am someone who has struggled with confidence my entire life.

So when I say if I can do it, I know you can do it too, that is coming from such a deep place of belief and sincerity because I truly know what it feels like and not have confidence that I can do something I’ve never done before, to want to believe I can do something and I just can’t, I’ve been there, I get it, I understand it, I’ve done this work. These are the steps I personally use too.

So the five steps, we’ve been talking about it, why not say what it is, right? Okay, so the five steps to creating self-confidence, here they are. Drumroll please. Purposeful belief, embrace discomfort, be your best mentor, have your own back, and evaluate and keep going.

Again, step one is purposeful belief, step two is embrace discomfort, step three is become your best mentor, step four is have your own back, and step five is evaluate and keep going. So what does any of that mean? Well, let’s just go ahead and start talking about the good stuff.

Today we are talking about purposeful belief. Believing on purpose, which 100% is based on the idea that what you think is your reality. And full disclosure, I’m not telling you anything new here, am I? No. Your thoughts create your reality and you get to choose what you think. This is not new, friends.

Aristotle said, “It’s the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “For there’s nothing either good or bad or thinking makes it so.” And he wrote such pretty words, didn’t he? Albert Einstein said, “The world we have created is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”

This stuff ain’t new. We’ve been talking about it forever. I’m no prophet, my friend. But I have figured out how to take the idea of thinking on purpose and implement it in real life. We’re not just shucking inspirational porn around here. We are taking these ideas and we’re putting them to work.

And while the idea of believing is seeing is as old as, at least Aristotle, this is not what we learned as kids. Our culture teaches that seeing is believing, not believing is seeing. So if you can’t see the coaching business you want, you really struggle to believe it’s going to happen. And so many coaches I know are waiting to see some results before they believe that they can do this.

Actually, I was just thinking about it as I was saying this. I live in Missouri and the state motto is the show me state. I literally live in a state where the entire motto is you got to show me before I’m going to believe anything. That’s how engrained this is in our culture. It’s actually a state motto and I live in the capital. Well I mean, no, I don’t actually live in the capital of Missouri. I’m digressing back. Let me come back.

If my thinking creates my reality and I want to create a new reality, something I have never created before, how am I supposed to create those new results if my brain wants results before it can believe it will happen? It’s like the dreamer’s paradox. I got to see it before I can believe it, but I can’t create it if I don’t believe it.

Friends, it’s like, running around in circles in my head just even thinking about that. I mean, here’s the thing; some of us can get lucky. We can totally have crappy belief and still get some results because we all get lucky some of the time, right?

But this is also how we only get results some of the time. Counting on luck to get results, not a great strategy. So many coaches also rely on the belief of others. So we look to our spouse or our mom or friends or our coaches or our mentors to believe that we can do this thing that we want to do, like maybe their belief will rub off on you.

Now listen, this also can work some of the time but what if those people are not constantly in your ear telling you that you can do it? Then what are you going to do? Or worse, this can totally backfire against us. What if they are telling you you can’t do it? What if they don’t believe you can do it? What happens if your family or your spouse are not on board here?

Now listen, your loved ones, they want to keep you safe, and building your own coaching business just doesn’t sound safe to a lot of people. So unless they themselves are out there and they’re building something they’ve never created before, we can’t rely on them to believe for us. So relying on other people believing you can create this coaching business, again, not another great strategy for you.

Some coaches just really hope this is going to work. They rely on hope. And hope, also not a great strategy. Hope is actually a killer of dreams. You cannot hope yourself into a successful coaching business. It sounds good, it sounds positive, but hope is not belief. Hope will not keep you going when this stuff gets hard and it will get hard. If it wasn’t hard, anybody would be doing it.

So if we need to believe in order to see, which is a truth as old as time, quoted by the greatest minds and thought leaders across history, then what should we do instead of wait for results first or rely on others or rely on hope? So the first thing to do is decide what you want to believe on purpose. This means believing before seeing. This means believing you can do something with zero evidence, with no past history, with no proof.

Now that’s purposeful belief. And you will need this at every level of growing your business. Not just at the beginning. Like really think about this. Whatever level you’re at right now, there’s always going to be another level ahead of you that you haven’t created before. And you’re going to need to be able to believe on purpose again and again and again.

And in fact, actually, the entire five-step process I use over and over again, no matter where I am in my business. I have had to use it at each new step. So how do you do that? How do you actually believe on purpose? I keep saying it over and over again, but I want to make sure that we’re not just talking fancy words here, that I’m actually teaching you how to do these things.

So you need to ask yourself, what do you need to think in order to believe? Define what a successful coaching business means to you. Because seriously, it’s different for everyone. What is a successful coaching business? What I think it is, what you think it is, what she thinks it is, it’s going to be different for everybody.

So define what it is for you. And then if you were to rate, say on a scale of one to 10, if you could rate your belief in your ability to create the successful coaching business, if you could rate it out of 10, what would you need to think?

You know, maybe it might be, “I can absolutely do this. There are clients waiting to work with me. I am the perfect coach for my ideal clients.” That’s one of my favorite ones. “I can absolutely sign five clients this month. Clients can happen in an instant. This is the work I’m meant to do. This is happening.”

I mean seriously, this list could be endless. We could go on and on, we could totally brainstorm this. In fact, that’s one of the things that I do with my clients. So next, you need to try those thoughts on because what looks good on paper doesn’t always work in my mind.

This is also why I can’t just tell you what to think. I can’t just feed you a bunch of thoughts and go, go think these things and you’re going to have a successful coaching business, because what works for me may not work for you. So with all the possible thoughts you can think, after this kind of brainstorm of thoughts that you could think, think of them like a rack of cute tops. We got to try these thoughts on.

Now, they’re all different cuts and they’re all different colors and you have to try them on to see if they work for you. That cut and color may look great on me but it may not look good on you. What looks good on the rack may not look good on the body. And then sometimes, you might even see something that doesn’t look that great on the rack but then you try it on, you’re like, holy crap, this looks amazing.

You don’t know until you try it on, until you actually practice thinking it. How does it feel when you think that? Does it click? Does it connect? Does it look like, super cute on you? Does it feel good? Does it feel bad? Does it feel indifferent? You have to try different thoughts on just like you would a bunch of clothes and really find the thing that makes you feel good, that’s like, yeah, this is it.

And then you need to practice sitting in belief every day. Now, I’m going to be the first one to tell you, the first time I heard someone tell me that I needed to sit in belief, I looked at them like, you know that meme of that cute little girl and she’s sitting in a car seat and she’s this cute little, tiny little blonde girl and her face is like, hanging half open, she’s looking at you like, what the hell are you talking about?

Totally me. I was like, what does that mean? What does that mean to sit in belief? Can somebody like – what’s happening here? So again, this podcast is going to be all about – we’re going to talk about these things but then what does this actually mean? What does that look like? Can you draw a picture for me?

So sitting in belief, I have a very specific process to teach people just for sitting in belief that I share with my coaching clients because I get asked all the time, how do you actually do that? How do you actually believe something you don’t believe yet?

And guess what my friends, I’m going to share that process with you right now. So you have a list of what you need to think in order to believe you can be a successful life coach. Now, say the thought out loud and take a deep breath, and then say it again out loud, and then take another deep breath. And then say it again out loud, and take another deep breath.

And with each breath in that you take, pay attention to how deep you feel that in your body. That first breath, you might just feel a feeling into your throat, and then maybe on that second breath, it might reach into your chest. What your goal is to feel it down in your gut.

Now, I find that it takes three to six breaths for you to really feel it. And if you don’t feel it, if it’s not hitting you in the gut and taking root in your gut by that sixth breath, you may need to try another thought on. That top just don’t work for you.

These are the steps that I take with my clients. We actually have coaching sessions where I actually do that with them. And the look on their face when that breath finally clicks and that belief actually takes root in their gut, you can just see their face get brighter and lighter, like yes, that. That right there is what we are going for.

So helping them come up with the thoughts that they need to think in order to believe, helping them try them on and then actually practice sitting in the belief of those thoughts. The beautiful thing is that when you find the thoughts that fit, you totally know it. It feels good. You can feel it in your bones.

Dr. Joe Dispenza talks about that. Thoughts are the language of the brain and feelings are the language of the body. So when you’re thinking these purposeful thoughts, when you’re purposefully believing, it’s just going to feel amazing in your body, and that’s what you want to practice every day.

Now, we will talk more over the course of this podcast about how our thoughts create these amazing feelings in our body and how these feeling spur us into action. Actions that we need to take that actually sign the clients we really want to work with.

And this, my friends, is why we can be doing things, why we can be taking action and not signing clients. Really pay attention here. Any coach or consultant can tell you what to do. You can go Google that right now. But those actions are just how-to’s. They’re just check boxes on a list. They aren’t actions created from or driven by this place of purposefully believing, of believing on purpose.

You’ve got to make a list of thoughts you need to think in order to believe. You want to try them on. You want to see how they feel in your body. Really practice them. And sit in belief every day before you get going. And from that place, just see, even this next week after listening to this, really see how differently, if you’re really practicing that and you’re really feeling it, how differently you show up.

Purposeful belief is the first step of creating self-confidence, is really about if you’re thinking, “I can do this, clients are waiting, they’re waiting to work with me, I have something of value to offer, I’m the perfect coach for my ideal clients,” there’s so many endless things that you can think here, and really seeing that all of the doubt, all of the disbelief, all of that I’ve never done this before, it’s going to come very naturally to your brain to think that way.

But when you can really think in advance, this is what I want to believe, these are the small things that I need to think in order to believe that this successful coaching business is totally going to happen, and then you really try them on and you see how they fit and how they feel, and then you really practice and the breathe in and the breathe out and really trying to get that belief to take root into your gut, this changes everything.

The other thoughts are still going to keep coming. We’ve got so much more to talk about, like how to deal with that, how to deal with, well sometimes I’m thinking positively and sometimes I’m thinking negatively and I think something’s going wrong here. We’re going to dive way more into that, but just even start to see how self-confidence really comes from believing you can do something you’ve never done before.

Eventually, you will start getting results and you will start being able to feel confidence because you have results, but before you have them, you got to start somewhere. And this is the first place to start. It’s the first place I start with all of my clients. We dive in right here and it helps so much to just start replacing the crap with some of the good.

So give this work a try this week. See what you find. And then we’re going to dive into step two of how to create self-confidence in the next episode. See you then. Hey friends, to celebrate the launch of this show, I am giving away some serious fabulousness. Four lucky listeners will win a $50 gift card to Amazon, while one lucky listener will win a free Apple watch. No joke. A series four 40-millimeter gold stainless steel with Milanese loop. Just like the one I wear. I love it.

And those are some seriously awesome goods to five lucky listeners who subscribe, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Of course, I hope you love the show, but it does not have to be a five-star review. Because I want your honest feedback so I can create an awesome show that provides tons of value.

So go visit www.amylatta.com/podcastlaunch to learn more about the contest and how to enter. I’ll be announcing the winners on the show in an upcoming episode. Thanks friends.

Thanks so much for listening to The Confident Coaches Podcast. I invite you to learn more. Come visit me at www.amylatta.com and until next week, let’s go do epic stuff.