How to Boost Your Confidence: Two Lessons from My First Half Marathon
If you want to design and live a more confident life, you must be willing to try new things. Want to know why? It’s because a confident life is a life of growth. How can you grow if you never do anything or try anything new? I tried something new last year, and though it was painful, it was definitely a period of growth in my life. This painful thing I’m talking about was running my first half-marathon. If someone had told me a few years ago that I would actually finish a half marathon without dying, I would laugh and say “that’s never going to happen”. I did not believe it was something I could do, but I’m glad that I took on the challenge!
I spent several weeks training for the race which produced a greater level of discipline in my life. It wasn’t always easy and fun to wake up earlier to go running, but those early morning runs gave me plenty of time to think and reflect. I learned a lot about myself and life through the training process and the actual race. Two of those lessons have changed the way I look at what it means to have a confident life.
The first lesson is that a confident life is one lived on your terms. Even though there may be hundreds or even thousands of runners in a race, each person is essentially running her own race. You set the pace for yourself depending on whether you’re trying to win the race, run a personal best, or just finish the race to check off an item on your bucket list. If you get in the race and try to run as fast as someone else without knowing what pace they’re running, you could run out of steam pretty quickly and end up having to slow down or stop because you’ve overextended yourself too early in the race. You can’t go into the race with ‘trying to keep up with the other runners’ as your strategy. Instead, you must come in with your own strategy knowing what pace you’re going to run and how you want to run the course.
I realized this is also true if you want to live a more confident life; YOU must choose how you want to live your life (run the race). You need to define what a confident, successful life looks like to you and live your life according to those terms. You cannot want to live a more confident life by trying to live the life you see others living. That is not a good strategy. Don’t let your definition of success or happiness be defined by your friends, family, the media, or even Hollywood. The truth is living a life chasing someone else’s dream or living up to the expectations of others will leave you frustrated, overwhelmed, unhappy and burnt out. You’ll spend much of your energy trying to keep up with those around you instead of focusing on yourself and what you need to do in order to finish YOUR race.
The second lesson I learned is that a confident life still has challenges. I’m not going to lie to you, if you want to live a more confident life, it will be challenging at times. When I started that race, I was feeling great and excited that race day was finally here. By the time I got to mile 5, I began to wonder why I was doing it and by the time I hit mile 10, I was telling myself the race was a bad idea. I almost shed a tear at mile 10 when I turned the corner and saw the biggest hill I’d ever seen in my life. This hill was so evil that it was called the ‘Green St. Monster’ and after you got over the hill, there was a sign on the side of the course that said “Nice job! You own the Green St. Monster!”
The same is true for living a more confident life. You will face several monsters. You will come across negative people, unexpected challenges, tough decisions and even internal monsters such as fear and self-doubt. A confident life isn’t an easy one, so don’t panic when you turn the corner and run into a monster. Instead, stay focused and push forward… this is an opportunity for growth.
Just like a half marathon race course, life will have ups and downs. The key to living a more confident life as I learned from my race is to develop your own strategy and live YOUR life on YOUR terms and to understand that there will be challenges along the way. Don’t quit or get stuck because of challenges, instead deal with them and keep it moving!
Ready to design a more confident life?
- Define what a confident life means to you. Spend a few minutes this week just thinking about what YOUR confident life looks like. Write down your ideas or add them to your vision board.
- Come up with three affirmations that you can use to help you push through challenges. Memorize them or keep them handy so you can recite them often.
How would you describe your confident life? Share one aspect of your confident life in the comments below. Looking forward to hearing from you.
