Confidence
So people used to tell me to be more confident. I often get quite defensive about this. Because frankly I feel quite a lot of confidence. As I look back over myself I think I acted with loads of confidence. I went and did a Law degree with little to no evidence I would be able to do well in a subject that is not geared towards my strengths. I showed up a board games club I had never been to alone not knowing anyone there and made friends. I have done the same with kink events. Pretty confident thing to do if you ask some people. So what was encouraging people to suggest this? Well, my hang ups about my body were a significant part. I ended up wondering what people were referring to and listening to audiobooks and online Youtube videos about how to meet their expectations. I wondered if a person could write a pathway to confidence.
I have been confident in my career I think. I totally changed my career when I was in a dead end and felt held up by people. I up and left a job where they failed to honour my contract properly with nothing to go to, but I successfully got another job within 3 days. I have led sprint reviews and sprint planning sessions. Hell, I started a company and this was after Brexit and it was going to depend on tourism. Thinking about it that might have been a dumb action if it weren’t for the minimal start up costs, but it worked out and it definitely took guts. I have thrown myself into a shitty costume with mild make up skills and performed in drag despite reservations about my skill. That took guts too!
So what exactly am I doing that makes people think I’m not confident? Should I even care? My inability to accept compliments about my body was a huge part. Interesting how it is something we think of as so vain and superficial, but it is the only part of myself I used to be not confident about and people focused on that. Are we that shallow as a society? Perhaps it was just me, but it is them as well. I think it is the one thing I have been pulled up about since before my age was double digits. Their focus on the physical and visible. I could work on my body and I am doing that, but I should I really be pandering to what other people think? Is that even confident at all?
I am a big guy and not very physically fit, but I took up a martial art which I kept at for quite a while! I climbed to the top of the tallest mountain in Wales with little evidence I would be able to do it and I was scared I was going to end up needing to be rescued somewhere, but I felt the fear and did it anyway. We didn’t even do the easiest route to avoid the crowds. I am fat and despite continually failing to lose weight since I was a child, guess what I am doing? I’m trying despite all the evidence technically suggesting that I will fail like nearly every attempt before. I am ignoring my prior failures and going for it. Is that not pretty damn confident? But apparently I don’t come across that way because superficially people focused on my difficulties with my body. One small and insignificant part of me, the head of the iceberg.
Despite being overweight I am posting provocative pictures in certain places where some of my peers can see them. Suddenly, people think I am confident. It feels so superficial, but it does help me, but I feel like it shouldn’t.
I went through an audiobook and came to the end of it really wondering if “confidence” as far as some people see it, is something we truly need. James Smith the author of the audiobook “How to be confident” describes a time he had nearly sold out an entire room of people for a seminar he hadn’t even written yet. Now I have left things to the deadline before, but I would never do this. I would be concerned that those people deserve better than a half-arse written seminar done at the last minute. I am confident in my ability to deliver high quality and I hold myself to that standard because I believe I can do a higher than average standard if I put my mind to it. If cobbling a talk together in an hour and charging for it is what the world defines as confident, I do not want any part of it.
My mind instantly goes to the number of difficult situations caused by sales guys who over sold a feature that wasn’t finished yet and suddenly a development team needs to rush to put out a low quality product. Some people call this confidence. I call this lack of confidence in the product to be suitable for the customers needs as it is, followed by anxiety of losing the sale. That anxiety and lack of confidence caused the salesperson to lie. If this is what the world is calling confidence then I don’t want any part of it. I am confident being supposedly “unconfident”.
I recognise that I am not what other people want to call confident some of the time. Their honest views of me, not being confident no longer affects me. Their opinion before bothered me that I wasn’t what other people expected for a time. But as I investigated, I discovered that sometimes they can’t agree about what is needed to be confident, sometimes their idea of confidence is superficial, or acted rather than felt. Sometimes their idea of confidence is actually what I would call short changing people and something I don’t want associated with my brand. Sometimes it is being so anxious, and de facto unconfident, that you have to lie about something with the confidence that other people will make up the gaps later thereby dropping other people in the mud. I have decided that I am good how I am and if that is what they think of as confident, it is not something I need. Shirking off other people’s opinions rather than trying to live up to them, is me finally, truly behind confident.
I have one last effort to vamp up the supposed confidence impression I leave with people and that’s the Teach Yourself Confidence Workbook and I might see if I can write a coaching course off the back of it that I can use with clients, but frankly it’s at the back of the pile right now. I am confident I don’t need it!
CBT Certificate
My old CBT certificate had expired so I worked through a Udemy course to get a new one. Not the best course in my opinion, but it newed my certificate so I am pleased.
When I first approached Cognative Behavioural Therapy I was originally put in a group session to learn about it back in 2012. It was going to take some time before I could get 1-2-1 CBT and in the mean time I wanted to get a headstart on the process. I had really enjoyed working my way through many books “for dummies”, many “Complete idiot’s guide to” books and many “Teach Yourself” books so I looked through the options. Satisfied with Teach Yourself Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, I began to work through the exercises and had huge success. By the time I was in 1-2-1 CBT, I knew a vague outline of the process and could make the most out of the sessions focusing on the stuff that could not be dealt with by knowing a basic outline of CBT, the stuff that really needed a therapist. I saw other people who were annoyed that they were put into group therapy. They sadly became despondent and did not want to engage. By the time they were in a 1-2-1 session they had already declared that CBT didn’t work for them.
I never actually finished Teach Yourself Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and my 1-2-1 session led me to focus on more specific exercises to my needs. Trying to clear out my bookshelves, I thought after finishing my recent course, I will skim my way through the book as well to cement my knowledge and just enjoy the parts of the book which were helpful before. More than anything I hope this to be an exercise in celebrating how far I have come by engaging with the tool that Cognitive Behavioural Therapy has given me.
As I run through I’m going to leave a trail of notes here. THESE ARE NOT MEANT TO BE COMPLETE BY ANY STRETCH OF THE IMAGINATION.
What is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy?
- Often it is not the events in our lives that makes us happy or sad, but instead out reaction to them.
- Some of the happiest people on earth don’t necessarily have circumstances that reflect this.
- CBT is a combination of Behavioural therapy and Cognitive or learning approach.
- Sometimes the Behavioural approach is almost like fake it till you make it when it comes to the practice. Changing the behaviour which impacts the internal.
- Cognitive is more focused on learning.
- In CBT it is common to look at how Beliefs impact the consequences of our experiences. Frequently we go from an experience to an emotion, but the emotion is impacted by a belief. If through the cognitive approach we can change the belief our emotion can be impacted. For example, if a persons believes “many people ignore me because I have low value” when they experience a person blank them, they will likely fall into low mood. If however they regulate that thought by saying, “maybe they blanked me because they had headphones in and didn’t hear me.” “Maybe they were too focused on something so see me” “maybe they just didn’t see or hear me” then the belief is assuaged. Suddenly the emotional reaction is more realistic because it might not be that they were deliberately ignored due to a perceived low value, but it could be any number of situations. Now the belief is changed. This might be done in a diary session afterwards so the initial emotional event might not be avoided, but the process can teach the patient or coachee to use the new belief if they face a similar event in future.
As part of this book I covered SMART Goals, but this seemed worth putting down as a separate article since as it stands alone quite nicely. See SMART Goals.
The next chapter looks a little bit at cognitive distortions. Cognitive distortions are ways of thinking which are prone to errors. This is a unique area because sometimes thinking like this is actually helpful or accurate for us, but you know what they say about a broken clock, it too is accurate twice a day. It’s important to unlearn unhelpful habits otherwise our emotions will frequently reflect information that is inaccurate or prone to errors.
Normally examples of this are mind-reading (presuming the subject knows what someone else is thinking), catastrophizing, negative filter or negative automatic thoughts (NATs), Overgeneralization, Exaggeration, Misfortune telling (assuming you know the future and particularly making it negative), black-and-white thinking and more.
I noticed one which is really important, but I hadn’t noticed it as much before. It reads as follows “blaming other people for your feelings”. This is a special one for me. I often say to people “I blame myself for everything”. This can be terrible a lot of the time, but at least when I blame myself I look at what I could have done differently and I improve rather than not changing how I act and expecting the world to be different. I know other people who never change because they always blame the world. A lot of the time I get very upset with the council for the stuff I am dealing with where I live because I feel the council “should” act a certain way, and I continually surprise myself when it doesn’t. I let the council constantly affect my mood by setting unreasonable expectations of it. That’s my bad. Now the council is truly terrible and should be doing certain things, but I do not have the power to change them and well if we think about the serenity prayer… It should be acting with the wisdom to know that the council will not change unless it is forced to and so I need to have the serenity to accept the things I can’t change.
Serenity prayer – This is a prayer which is addressed to god, but it need not be a request to god only a recognise of health attitudes. It is said as follows: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the power to change the things I can change and the wisdom to know the difference Amen. This means not messing around trying to change broken systems which we are powerless to change and focusing on the things within our power.
The Importance of Our Own Judgements
An important chapter notes how the same thing happens to 3 people. While no two people’s experiences are identical it provides a clear example about how our reaction to things can give rise to our feelings. 3 people are “chewed out” by their boss about some recent work. The first person was deeply unset. They believe their boss never appreciates the effort that went into the work or how difficult the work was. He only looks at the final result which they admit wasn’t great. They feel unappreciated and like their own work is poor, so they feel unable and inadequate to improve the situation. It feels hopeless. The second person blames their boss. They believe their boss has bad mornings sometimes, he did not pay attention to the work and needed to chew someone out. He did not think he deserved it and he was angry at his boss. He thinks his work is perfect, but his boss is unable to admit that, so he squarely blames his boss and feels anger. Finally, the third person has a more balanced thought process. They recognise that this is not their best work, but also, that their boss can’t read their mind, so their boss doesn’t know the difficulties they faced. They also know that most of the time they have a good working relationship with their boss and it is possible that this situation is not their fault as they have seen their boss “chew someone out” when it wasn’t that person’s fault before, so they are trying not to take it personally. They are disappointed in the situation but think they could make it better. They know should make sure their boss is aware of the hurdles they have overcome. They also recognise that their boss would like to know those hurdles are not going to be an issue going forward, so they also came up with a plan as a good way to overcome similar hurdles in the future. They hope to give the boss a few hours to calm down, they will then present to their boss the difficulties they had, and what they plan to do in the future to improve the situation. They feel disappointed in themself, disappointed that their boss did not ask questions considering how good their work normally is, but they don’t feel hopeless, they have a plan to improve the situation.
You see these three people had very different feelings about the situation that reflected their thoughts. The first and second person had very strong feelings and felt helpless/hopeless. The third person still had negative feelings that reflected the situation, but their feelings were more accurate because they were more aware of all the possible angles. They also had a plan to sort it out.
If I were person 1 who entirely felt the failure was theirs, but that their boss did not consider effort only results, I would need to sit back and consider the possibility that their boss might consider effort if they knew what effort went into it. They also need to remember that although the work might not be their best, there was still some effort in there whether or not it was recognised. The failure to recognise the work does not mean the effort vanishes. They also need to consider the possibility their boss might be wrong and hadn’t considered the positives. Then they might have a more balanced fully considered mindset and their feelings might better reflect this. They also would benefit from having a plan to approach this matter going forward.
If I were person 2, who entirely felt this was my bosses fault, I would question whether my work needed improvement and perhaps my boss might be right about somethings even though he doesn’t always get it right. This means my feelings would be more balanced and because I recognised that at least some of the failure was in my court then I could finally think about what I could do about it.
The Flow of Effect
When experiencing an event which gives rise to emotion there’s a number of stages involved. Firstly, an event happens to this often gives rise to thoughts from existing beliefs held. The person then forms their own personal judgement of the situation and what it means about the things important to them. This judgement then gives rise to feelings and Bodily Sensations, for example sadness and feeling tired, happy and energised, guilty and heavy or something else.
By altering our judgements of situations and making sure we select judgements which are helpful which consider a whole situation we can control the feelings and sensations we experience. This sometimes means taking a second to think about things. Over time as we practice this, forming better judgements becomes easier. We also form beliefs that better guide our natural judgements of the situation.
Identifying Issues
Often this exercise works as a diary entering rows into this table at the end of each day. This enables you to identify the bigger and smaller issues in your life. It is often considered bad advice to go after the bigger issues first. It is better to increase your CBT skills working with smaller issues rather than the deep-set ones first. You need to learn how best to perform the technique before tackling the more difficult situations and often removing highly damaging beliefs is like trying to pull up a tree with deep roots. Those deep roots are going to be very difficult to pull up, but if you can loosen some of the soil around them first then you’re going to find it a lot easier. In fact, you might spend so long removing all the small issues that there is nothing holding those big heavy roots any more than the tree just falls on its own. This is like when you remove all the small events which confirm your deep-set negative beliefs and then you begin to realise that you no longer actually believe a very damaging things any more and suddenly loads of emotional issues vanish at once.
I have provided an example of the table here.
| Feeling | Situation | Automatic Thoughts | Strong? |
Weight Loss
I recently hit my biggest weight ever. I was actually going hiking once a month and going to the gym three times a week, but I was still eating trash and I managed to weight gain. Some of it will have been muscle, but it feels like I would be kidding myself if I put down all my weight gain to that. I do seem to be loosing belly (albeit very slowly), but I was getting heavier. So I thought I would change up my diet a bit again try intermittent fasting and keep a track of it here.
I used to maintain 105kg while doing 2-4 hours of kung fu a week, so this seems like a good starting aim. If I got there and was quite muscular I would be happy with my results. Technically that is still obese according to bmi but if I have a low fat to body ratio it does kind of blow bmi out of the water.
My heaviest is 145kg after 2 weeks of intermittent fasting I am 141.2kg.
Who I am?
Okay so this is a blurb for the Life Coach page, but to describe myself in a nutshell here’s what I have to say.
What I can tell you about me is: that I am gay, I am pro-trans-rights and generally, my political leanings are left. You don’t need to be any of these things to use my services. I am neuro-diverse so I am very open to people being unqiue and different, in fact I often prefer people who are happy to present and enjoy what makes them special. I can be very logical and rational because of my unique brain so often I like to use CBT techniques to compartmentalise things, refine our mentalities around stuff and reintergrate them into a better holistic world view that supports us reaching our goals! You don’t need to be neuro-diverse to use my services, but if you are neurodiverse what better can you expect from a coach than someone who understands what it’s like to have your thinking so different from those around you.
I am a massive geek. When I was kid I played video games before it was cool. While I don’t do this as much these days, my youth was so ingrained in that culture that I still get it today and most of my friends draw me back into it from time to time! I have watched Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate and Starship Troopers, so if that’s your jam I might actually know what you’re talking about. Other coaches might go cross-eyed when you try to man-splain Battlestar Galactica’s politics to them, but not me. I am far more likely to talk to you in video game analogies than sports analogies, but I can still adapt to you if neither of these are your cup of tea. Life for me is about playing games and having fun. This seems to rub off on clients and their approach to life is a more fun one. Achievements are great, but not worth sacrificing your happiness for, otherwise what’s the point?
I am fat. I have been told I was fat since I was 13 years old and with a renewed effort I am doing something about it. I am what is called a bear in the gay world which means I am always surrounded by people who love my thicker figure (other members of the bear community), but I am still trying to better myself, mostly for my health. I have never been the best at this and I certainly can’t advise you on what’s the best gym routine, but I can help you keep on top of yours using the methods that helped me maintain mine. I can help you with your weight loss plan, but with 0 jugement when you de-rail it because I know what it is like to fail at this. During the pandemic, I put on an additional third of my weight. I used to weigh 75% of what I weighed a few weeks ago! Finally, I committed to lose it. So far I have lost 5%, but I have 20% more to go! I believe in me and in you and your ability to do it, but I can’t judge you if you slipped up, had a korma and missed two zumba classes, because I know I was probably there 3-4 months ago!
I love my old movies and television. I recently went to a Solve-Along Murder She Wrote and Golden Girls is one of my favourite background tv programs when I am cleaning. I have seen them all, but still love them. Nostalgic movies from the 80s is one of my most common ways to recover my energy. Don’t judge me, but Flight of the Navigator, Short Circuit, Batteries Not Included, The Haunting [1960] and Dune are DVDs in my house which never collect dust. (Yes I still have DVDs; not everything is on Prime quite yet).
I have done drag and love it, but the greatest fantasy I am already living. I love to sing, perform, give banter and my stand-up routines have nearly killed someone. They couldn’t breathe because they were laughing too much. Yes I you could say I totally slayed, but more like Buffy the Vampire Slayer than like Rupaul.
My spirituality is an important part of me, but I also recognise spirituality is not the be all and end all. I believe the universe is made of pure joy and we often have things in the way to stop us experiencing it. One of the things that can stop us is trying to reach for some more spirituality sometimes. I love the Buddha, but I think he was wrong… suffering is not the nature of the universe, suffering is the delusion we surround ourselves with that stops us experiencing the ecstasy of pure being. But what’s the point in experiencing pure being? It might feel good, but sometimes so does walking into the office in the most fashion forward outfit possible. Spirituality is just another experience why should it be treated like its better than other experiences? Frankly, it takes a lot of effort and if you would rather go Bowling with your friends, it’s your choice and just as valid an experience. Too many spiritual people are too hauty because of their belief or practices, they think they’re better. This is just another form of materialism… it’s spiritual materialism. In fact I rarely believe anything, I just practice to obtain different experiences, but sometimes when I see people really happy for wanting to collect every type of Nike sneaker then I wish I could be so easily made happy rather than committing to meditation and ritual.
Anyway. That’s me in a nutshell and there’s a whole lot more to love hunny. Come meet me and find out!