How to Be Confident Everyday with Rebecca Hawkes

Is it possible to be confident everyday?

Can you feel confident all the time?

What’s the quickest way to feel confident in yourself?

I recently spoke with my friend, Rebecca Hawkes on The Social Brain Podcast about all things confidence, including how to feel confident in just 90 seconds.

Prefer to listen to the audio version of our conversation? Listen to Episode 29 on the podcast. 

When people come to me asking about their social media marketing, it’s generally because they lack confidence in their own ability so they’re ready to learn more about mastering social media or they’re ready to outsource to somebody who knows what they're doing.

But is there a way that we can become more confident with our marketing and in everyday life in general? 

Rebecca, a former social media manager and Confidence Coach believes so.

The difference between fake confidence and real confidence that sticks around daily

I’m sure we’ve all heard the phrase “fake it till you make it!” and whilst, yes, faking confidence can help you feel confident temporarily, creating real confidence is what you want to aim for.

Fake confidence is exhausting. It’s like wearing a mask. You pretend everything’s fine, you feel amazing, everything’s going swimmingly but secretly, you’re really struggling. 

Whilst it can be beneficial in the moments you need to share a presentation, hop on a sales call or go live on the ‘gram, it’s not a sustainable way of being. 

Deep, unwavering, real confidence is the kind that sticks around no matter what. Even if you’re having a low day, you still have an inner knowing that everything’s going to be ok. You can trust yourself, you can be kind to yourself and you can continue to believe in yourself and your ability. 

Real confidence is with you through the highest highs, the lowest lows and everything in between. But how do you create that? 

How to be confident every day

When you think of being confident everyday, most people believe that you need to feel confident all day every day. But that’s not the case at all. You don’t have to feel confident 24/7 to be a confident person. 

Rebecca shares: “I created this concept called the 90/90 Mindset Concept, and that concept consists of three core principles. Principle one is that you only need to aim for 90% confidence 90% of the time. It doesn't mean that you’re confident from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed, but you’re still experiencing confidence every day. 

The second principle is the idea that you only need 90 seconds of confidence to actually propel you forward in life. You don't even need to be confident all day, every day. You don't even need to be confident for hours on end every day. You just need 90 seconds of confidence, of bravery, to make a decision that can launch you forward, to bring a new opportunity into your life or to take action on something that will change your future for you.

The third core principle is the idea that there are three layers of confidence that you need to master in order to be able to be confident every day, to be able to have that 90% confidence, 90% of the time.”

When you learn how to embody this concept, you can experience daily confidence. 

How to shift into feelings of confidence, FAST

Whilst it’s important to work on increasing your confidence regularly, there are moments where you’ll want an instant confidence boost. Perhaps you want to lift your mood, you're about to go on a live video or you're about to go into a presentation and you need to be confident in those moments.

There are an abundance of exercises to help you become more confident in yourself instantly, but the best techniques for shifting fast are practical actions. Subtle shifts like changing your posture, for example, mean you take up more space and that has such a dramatic impact on how you feel. Try it now: Roll your shoulders back, sit up straight and lift your head up so your chin’s parallel to the floor. 

It takes seconds to do but the result is instant. Rebecca also recommends putting on a song you love and dancing around, shaking off negative energy and removing any stagnant energy that’s stuck. Just by moving your body you're shifting your physical state out of one that's perhaps feeling low, self-conscious or shy. You’re taking up that space and bringing better feelings into your body. 

You may also choose to repeat affirmations. Set a timer for 90 seconds and get louder and louder and louder until you feel the confidence flooding your body.

Rebecca shares: “We have to be mindful that these quick shifts are things to do alongside your daily work on your confidence levels. Shifting into 90 seconds of confidence isn't going to dramatically change your life, but it's almost like reminding yourself to get back into that state again and again and again. And the more you practice that, the more it'll become just a natural part of your being.”

What to do when you notice negative thoughts appearing

No matter how much work you do on yourself, you’ll always experience negative, unhelpful thoughts. Rebecca explains: “I've worked on my body confidence for years. But you never have a moment where you like to reach the top of the mountain and everything is perfect and you're confident about everything and you feel amazing in your body 24/7. We're human beings. We're constantly evolving, we're constantly growing. We're constantly healing things. So our self perception is always going to change.

And if we've been through things like breakups, for me that was a big one that massively impacted my body confidence, that when we go through those things, we sometimes forget the work that we've done or we've sometimes expanded to a new level.

So there's a new level of work that we need to do. Reminding yourself to come back to those practices again and again and again, and it soon becomes something that you just embody and just becomes your way of life.”

Whenever a negative thought comes up, remind yourself of your affirmations, shift your posture, dance around and make the choice to choose a different, more empowering thought. 

The 3 layers of confidence you need to master in order to be confident everyday

As per Rebecca’s 90/90 Mindset Concept, there are 3 layers of confidence you need to master in order to be confident everyday. These 3 layers are:

• Think Confident 
• Act Confident
• Feel Confident

The first layer, Think Confident, is all about your inner narrative. It’s about the thoughts you've got on repeat, the things that you're telling yourself daily, your general mindset and what's going on in your mind.

And that's where exercises like affirmations can help you change your inner narrative. There's also an exercise called a Mindset Monologue that Rebecca talks about in The Confidence Course. She explains: “When we’re in a negative mindset, we spiral into ‘I'm not good enough. I look bad. This makes me look rubbish.’

But the Mindset Monologue is the opposite. You spiral upwards into, ‘today is gonna be a good day. I'm feeling amazing today. Look how good I look. I'm gonna go and do this today. I'm so excited about this.’ And you spiral upwards into a really expansive, exciting place where your brain is flooded full of positive, confidence boosting thoughts.”

The second layer is Act Confident.This is all about the practical actions you can take that help you to appear more confident. And it's also about the idea that confidence comes from taking action because you can do all the mindset work, you can do all the exercises to flood your body with confidence, but until you actually do the scary thing, there's only a certain amount of confidence that you can create for yourself. 

The practical actions are things like, as we shared before, shifting your posture. It could be applying red lipstick or changing the way that you walk down the street. 

The third layer is Feel Confident. This is all about conjuring up the feelings of confidence in your body. You can do that with things like visualisation, EFT tapping, meditation - anything to get your body on board with feeling confident.

Rebecca explains: “You don't have to follow these layers in that order. It's not a case of work on your mindset, then do the action, then feel it in your body. You can mix it all up so that as long as you're covering all of those areas and you’re actively working on each of those areas every day, you're going to be able to feel 90% confident 90% of the time.”

You don’t need an exhausting morning routine to feel confident in yourself

When we think about mindset work and personal development, we think that it has to look like a one hour morning routine or sitting down for 30 minutes, 45 minutes a day, and it really, really doesn't have to be like that.

You could do a 90 second mindset practice. You could listen to a five minute visualisation to bring those feelings of confidence into your body.

A lot of people shy away from the work because they think it's a lot of work. They think it's got to be an hour, 30 minutes, 90 minutes, and people are like “I don't have time!”.

But even just five minutes a day working on this stuff can dramatically improve your levels of self-confidence, especially once you get to grips with the tools and the techniques and the strategies and you become aware of what works best for you. 

Rebecca Hawkes is a Confidence Coach, podcaster + content creator on a mission to help people around the world create unwavering self confidence and overcome the fears holding them back from the life they deserve. 

Follow Rebecca on Instagram, download The Confidence Kit for free here* and check out The Confidence Course here*.

Rebecca has gifted me one of the modules of The Confidence Course. Rebecca's module is really, really informative and I took loads of stuff away just from watching it. (I’ll be doing the homework soon!)

Links marked with a * are affiliate links. This won’t cost you a penny but if you sign up through these links I may receive a commission.