You want to become the CFO of your life, start a budget, manage your spending, and work towards your financial goals. However, when you step onto the "Confidence Scale," the needle is not getting past a four, and you wish you were closer to a 10.
I'm curious as to how you are rating yourself and why you arrived at that number. When I ask my clients this question, this is what they say:
I never budgeted before.
I'm used to living paycheck to paycheck even though I have a very healthy income.
I'm not good at it. I tried budgeting before, and it didn't work.
Nobody taught me how.
My husband or partner has always been the one to take care of the finances in my home.
I'm busy with life, raising my kids and too many diapers to change got in the way of making it a priority.
What all of these answers have in common is that these women went into the past and thought of past experiences related to managing their money. They looked for evidence to label themselves as confident or not confident enough, based on their past performance (failures or successes), and their involvement in their financial lives.
What kind of evidence did you find? Notice how you may be looking outside yourself for proof that you are capable, an expert perhaps, to label yourself as confident.
What if I told you that your past does not determine how confident you are and how confident you can feel when managing your money? If you are one of the skeptics who believe it's impossible to be confident without a track record of past successes, you must read on.
The type of Confident CFO that I want you to be is not the one who focuses outside of herself and relies on historical evidence to prove so. I'm not talking about confidence in the skill of managing money, but the CONFIDENCE in YOURSELF; this is Self-Confidence, which is the ability to believe in yourself.
We can't deny that the more you practice a skill, your capability increases, and you can ultimately become confident at that skill. But how do you get to the point where you find yourself practicing and nurturing that skill in the first place? You must exercise Self-Confidence. It is a practice that is developed by working on yourself from within.
Here are your four principles to becoming Self-Confident:
Your willingness to FEEL any EMOTION.
Your ability to MANAGE your THOUGHTS about yourself.
Your ability to HAVE your OWN BACK.
Your ability to TRUST yourself.
1. FEEL ANY EMOTION
Emotions are nothing more or less than energy in motion. They are vibrations in our bodies created as a result of neurons firing together in our brains after we think a thought. A chemical reaction takes place, and we feel it in our bodies. Each emotion may feel different in your body. Also, how I experience frustration in my body may be different from how you experience it in yours. Because we create our feelings with our thoughts, we could agree that even when we think the worst thought, the worst that can happen to us is that we feel an emotion.
When we commit to managing the family budget, for example, we'll feel all kinds of emotions, and we get to decide how to respond. You may feel frustrated at times. You could resist this emotion, avoid it, react to it, or process it. You are Self-Confident when you have developed the skill to process that frustration and all the other feelings you experience. I think of this as a superpower. Your willingness to feel any emotion will keep you from quitting when you feel frustrated, spending money when you feel the urge or arguing with your spouse when you feel upset after he decided to buy a new iPad just because it was misplaced somewhere in the house.
2. MANAGE YOUR THOUGHTS ABOUT YOURSELF
Think about the current thoughts you have about yourself as a mom or mompreneur. Now, add the title of CFO of your home to your resume...guess what? You have just multiplied the number of thoughts that you have about yourself. You may tell yourself, "I'm terrible with numbers," and I'm not the right person for this role." When you can identify that these are thoughts, sentences that your brain is offering, and you have a choice whether to believe them or not, you are much closer to being Self-Confident because you are not letting disempowering thoughts create your life experience. You can now make room for more empowering thoughts.
3. HAVE YOUR OWN BACK
When you start a budget for the first time or try a new approach, you will experience a learning curve. How you experience this journey is up to you. You may choose to be your worst critic and judge yourself every step along the way, or you can be kind and curious when things don't go as planned. When we understand thought work and are aware that we create our results, we may use it against ourselves. We beat ourselves up because we should have known better. Giving ourselves room to make mistakes and learn from them is part of accepting that we'll experience negative emotions fifty percent of the time in our lives. When we are mean to ourselves, we are only compounding the negative effect and creating more pain.
4. TRUST YOURSELF
This is the ability to trust that you can feel your emotions, manage your thoughts, and love yourself in the process. You believe in yourself!
So now, I want you to step onto the Self-Confidence scale. How are you rating yourself? Is your number different? Why? Don't worry if you are still rating yourself low. I have good news for you! Self-Confidence is an inside job, which means you are in charge of creating change to move that needle in an upward direction.
And why does all of this even matter? Because when you are Self-Confident, you are going to show up as CFO, stop procrastinating, and take massive action. It will propel you forward, and you won't give up. Your growth becomes inevitable.
If you are ready to commit to taking charge of your finances, but you are not fully confident that you can, don't worry! I've got you! In my one-on-one coaching program, I give you the tools to turn self-confidence into a daily practice. Sign up for a free mini-session to discover the biggest obstacle that keeps you from becoming the CFO of your home.
Xoxo,
Silvina
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