Self Confidence & Body Image: Week 4

At the start of June, I set myself the challenge of working to improve my self-confidence and body image. The plan was to do some research, get some advice from other people who've been in a similar situation, try the ideas out and see if I can find something that works for me.

It took a lot of guts for me to post the first post in this series. I considered deleting it numerous times before it went live, but I'm glad I went through with it.

This month has taught me that the key to self-confidence is learning to love yourself.

Credit

That's not an easy thing to do. It often requires a big change in mindset (or in my case it did anyway). You have to move your focus away from your weaknesses and onto your strengths, accept your flaws, trust yourself and your decisions, and remember that the only opinion of you that matters, is your own. What other people think is irrelevant.

The same as numbers are irrelevant. I'm an accountant so I spend quite a lot of my life looking at numbers, calculating numbers, analysing numbers. I like numbers, but they're not good to run your life by.

I used to weigh myself every day, and found that my mornings used to start off quite negative as I was very rarely happy with what I saw. So, I banned myself from going on the scales this month. It took a while to get rid of the urge to just jump on and check, but when I started to notice the changes in my body I felt happier. Like I could tell my hard work was paying off, without actually seeing a change in the number.

I did jump on the scales this morning, out of curiosity, and I was disappointed to see it had gone down by less than a lb in the past four weeks. I know my body has changed, and I was expecting to see a big drop in the numbers. But it wasn't there.

I've had time to process what the scales told me, and I'm beginning to feel less annoyed and quite pleased about it. Because it made me realise that confidence doesn't come from a number, it comes from how you feel.

Yes I have a goal weight I'd love to achieve, and yes that goal weight is in numerical form. But there's no guarantee that when I reach that I'll be happy. So, going forward, I'm still going to weigh myself, but only once a month and I'm going to start taking more notice of my NSVs (non-scale victories). If I get to a weight where I'm happy, I like the way I look, I'll ignore the number on the scales and just try and keep myself at that body state.

The past four weeks have definitely been a journey, but I know I haven't completely overcome my lack of self confidence. I still have a long way to go. But there have been instances where I could see progress in my journey.

I made a decision, and didn't regret it

I've said it a few times, I am rubbish at making decisions. Particularly when they are big, important and affect other people. This month I had a big decision to make at work, and I tormented myself over it for a good few days. Then I woke up one morning, a decision set in my mind, and I felt happy. It's been a couple of weeks now since that moment, and I haven't looked back and regretted it. I've found out other things since then that if I knew at the time might have changed my decision, but I'm happy with what I made and I know it will work out right in the end.

I stood at the front of a room full of people, and didn't get embarrassed

Large groups and crowds of people have always made me nervous. Standing up in front of them and knowing they're watching me is even worse. But this night I embraced it. They were just people. Other women from my professional sitting in the same room as me wanting to learn about colours. They weren't there to judge me, make fun of me, or anything like that. They were there to learn, same as I was, about what (in theory) suits them. I was stood at the front of that room getting a mini 1/1 consolation in what I wanted to learn. I embraced it, took it all on board and didn't once thing about what the people sat around the rest of the tables thought. It felt good.

I bought a bikini, tried it on, and decided I'm keeping it

I've never worn a bikini on holiday. Partially because I don't normally go anywhere hot enough to wear a bikini, but largely because I always felt too fat to wear one. The last couple of years I have always said that I wanted to wear a bikini on holiday, and I've bought a few but always ended up returning them because I always felt like I looked horrible in them. This year, that changed. I bought a bikini, tried it on and actually thought "this looks alright". I took a picture and sent it to my boyfriend, just to show someone that I had a bikini and I liked it. But then I did my usual and picked out the flaw in it. "My tummy is definitely my worst feature" was what I said, then I stopped and told myself off. Told myself I shouldn't be doing that, I shouldn't pick out my negative bits, I should pick out my positive bits. So I did. "My boobs look pretty good in that bikini top" and "My legs look pretty toned and good too". I felt better instantly in myself for doing that, and I'm actually looking forward to wearing my bikini this summer holiday.

I've learnt a lot this month, and I feel a lot happier in myself because of it.

I'm proud of my journey and what I've achieved. 

This post marks the end of my Self Confidence & Body Image challenge for June. I won't be posting weekly about what I've learned or achieved, but I don't want to start July and just put this all behind me. It's a subject I've enjoyed exploring, and I want to continue exploring. I want to keep trying new ideas, speaking to new people and sharing their stories about their journeys. I want to inspire someone else to try this, to help someone else out there who's struggling. I've started a Pinterest board where I'll link some inspirational quotes/links on the subject, and I'm going to try and post something once a month on the topic.

If you'd like to do a guest post on the topic, share any ideas or help in any way drop me a message. I'd love to hear from you.

Thanks to everyone who's helped me this month. Thanks to everyone on twitter, the authors of the books and articles I've read. Thanks to my good friend Hollie for sharing her story on how dance helped her.

Sarah x

Self Confidence & Body Image: Week 2

For those of you following my June journey, you might remember that I set myself a bit of homework last week; to write a list of my strengths and weaknesses. The point being that if I can identify my strengths, I can build upon them, and if I can identify my weaknesses, I can learn to accept them and move forward.

Strengths

Willing to help others                         Can see the bigger picture

Trustworthy                                        Team player

Meets deadlines                                  Honest

Self-Motivated                                    Good with computers

Quick learner                                      Want to improve myself

Can look after myself                          Independent

Weaknesses

Decision making                                Don’t like to say ‘No’

Over thinks things                             Speaking in front of large groups of people

Trust people too easily                      Spend too much time worrying about what other people think

Unfortunately, I don’t think this exercise had as much impact as I hoped for. Listing my strengths and weaknesses is something I do every year as part of my work appraisal, and something I’ve done as part of job applications all through university. I found listing my strengths to be just as easy as writing a list of weaknesses, and none of the weaknesses I thought of were things that I hadn’t already realised over the past few years.

My challenge now is to move forward by accepting my weaknesses and building upon my strengths. Luckily I had an opportunity to do that this week.

Work's been...interesting....the past few days. As a result of something that was announced last Tuesday morning, I had a big decision to make. Do I apply for a new role within the company? Or not?

This gave me the opportunity to really test my ability to make decisions. I failed massively at over thinking it, spending 3 days arguing with myself over every little detail. I ended up overthinking so much I dreamt about the decision, and it's outcome, and as a result didn't get much sleep last week. I talked to a few different people to get their views and opinions on what the right decision was, and took on board their comments. But annoyingly no one would make the decision for me.

Amazingly though, I woke up on Friday morning feeling very relaxed and calm, something that I hadn't felt all week. And I'd made a decision.

I was so proud of myself for coming to a decision, and I knew it was the right thing to do for me. I went to work and told people the decision I'd come to and I didn't start to re-question it. Definite progress! Let's hope I can keep this up.

I’ve also tried this week to continue with my #ILoveMyselfBecause tweet challenge, but from Thursday I must admit I forgot about tweeting it. This week at work was a bit overwhelming and I just completely forgot about it. I'm still finding this challenge hard, I can't think of a new reason every day as to why I love myself. But I'm persevering.

Monday - #ILoveMyselfBecause it’s 7am & I’ve already been for a run & showered. I’m normally still in bed.

Tuesday - #ILoveMyselfBecause I am good at finding nice restaurants to eat at.

Wednesday - #ILoveMyselfBecause I try my hardest to do what is right all the time.

Thursday - #ILoveMyselfBecause I’ve found something I love to do. Dance. And it’s a brilliant distraction from the world.

Friday - #ILoveMyselfBecause I woke up knowing that I’d made the right decision.

Saturday - #ILoveMyselfBecause my hair is in good condition (felt so proud when my hairdresser told me).

Sunday - #ILoveMyselfBecause I'm the expert popcorn maker in my relationship.

This week I'm off to a colour me beautiful event. I'm not quite sure what to expect as it's an event through work, but I'm hoping to learn some tips on style and colours that suit me. I tend to dress in a very smart-casual style that covers the body bits I don't like, and is comfortable. But maybe I'll be able to find stuff that suits me better and build by confidence? We'll see how it goes.

Sarah x

Self Confidence & Body Image: Week 1

Last week I set myself a challenge to improve my self confidence & body image (if you haven't already done so, you can read the post here) and whilst I haven't had an over night miracle, I have made some progress in the last 7 days.

Realising that I needed to make some changes to my life wasn't an easy decision, but once I made it I had no idea actually how to do it. So after my post went live, I took to twitter to try and find some advice and inspiration. Luckily I found just that.

Blogger chats are something I was aware of, but never even thought to participate in. Last week I just happened to stumble upon one whilst it was happening and made the decision to take part. I'm so glad I did as a I met some pretty amazing bloggers.

As part of the #HappySelves chat, I shared my blog post and asked for some advice. I got a lot of responses with advice (big thank you if you were one of those who sent me something) and a challenge from @Lace_and_Grace. She challenged me to tweet one thing I like about myself every day for a week.

I accepted Lucie's challenge and began my daily #ILoveMyselfBecause tweets. It's not easy to think of something I love about myself. I did my usual on day 2 and tried to hide behind a joke (saying I look cute as an owl), but decided if I was to do this I needed to take it seriously. So since then I've tried to step it up a bit.

The challenge was fun to do, and I'm going to continue to do it for the rest of the month. Lucie's challenge taught me that I could easily write a list of things I don't like about myself, but finding things I do like is hard. That needs to change.

A few months ago I went to a Personal Branding seminar at work. It was held the day after my Granddad died, so I wasn't in the best frame of mind to take things in. But one thing I remember was a comment the Professor made about strengths and weaknesses.

He told us that if we spent 5 minutes writing a list of our weaknesses, we'd be able to write at least ten. But if he asked us to spend 5 minutes writing a list of our strengths, we'd really struggle. We spend too much time focusing on the weaknesses and always say we want to turn our weaknesses into our strengths, but actually once you've past the age of 5 (I think he said) you can't make a weakness a strength. So why focus on them? Just accept them and move on.

I've set myself the exercise for this week to come up with a list of my strengths and weaknesses. From there, I have to try and build upon my strengths, and accept my weaknesses. If I can do that, then hopefully I can build up my confidence from there.

Sarah x