My life is a patchwork of marginalized identities.
I’m a woman. I’m the daughter of a BIPOC immigrant father from the Philippines, a developing country with its own complicated, oppressed history. I’m also the daughter of a mother who grew up in rural America, an often overlooked sector of our country that comprises about 18% of the US population. Additionally, I’m below average height, which poses challenges in various settings like restaurants, movie theaters, kitchens, and anywhere I’m required to sit in a chair.
I was raised as a member of a historically persecuted Christian church: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Furthermore, I’m a professional performing musician, an identity laden with assumptions about socioeconomic status. Additionally, being born in a country outside the USA, with a veteran father, adds layers of complication to my identity.
To top it off, I have often found myself as the youngest person in the room. You’d think that this would give me added confidence in my capabilities but more often, my experience has been the opposite.
Answering basic questions like “Where are you from?” or “What do you do for a living?” has always been frustrating. When I lead with one aspect of my identity, people—be they new acquaintances, bosses, coworkers, professors, or fellow students—often follow with gross generalizations and conjectures about the kind of person I am. I’m sure I’m not alone in my frustration.
Needless to say, I’ve been the target of racist, sexist, heightist, and ageist comments throughout my life, and unfortunately, I don’t expect them to stop anytime soon. Stereotypes run deep, and I’ve learned to accept that. For much of my life, I’ve also faced strong criticism against my religion. I rarely share my personal spiritual views, opting instead to live my religion rather than preach it. It’s a unique challenge, as the customs and culture of my religion require strict modesty, chastity, and abstinence from alcohol and recreational substances—a lifestyle that contrasts with that of a world-traveling performing artist.
However, I wouldn’t change a thing. I love who I am and the person I’ve become because of my unique package of challenges. One of my mentors, Brooke Castillo, Founder of The Life Coach School, had a saying: “Life doesn’t happen to me. It happens for me.” While I wholeheartedly believe this phrase, it doesn’t negate occasional encounters with imposter syndrome. As I mentioned, stereotypes run deep, and undoing social programming is a gradual process. Our brains often feed us outrageous lies to keep us safe, which is why developing self-awareness is crucial—both regarding our own social programming and how our brains function.
Once we’re aware of our conditioning and human nature as a whole, we can leverage the gift of our prefrontal cortex to override internalized oppression and overcome any challenge or goal we decide to pursue. Dorothy Delay, a famed musical pedagogue and violin teacher to leading concert violinists such as Itzhak Perlman and Sarah Chang, once said, “Given enough time, I could do anything.” I believe this applies to every human being on the planet.
So, how do we accomplish this in the least amount of time possible? The answer lies in the Self-Coaching Model. The Model, succinctly designed by Brooke Castillo, helps make sense of the five things that exist in the world: circumstances, thoughts, feelings, actions, and results. If we want to cultivate unshakeable confidence in our work, regardless of age, gender, experience, race, or background, we must work backward through the Model.
First and foremost, it’s essential to define for yourself what unshakeable confidence looks like to you. If you have a pen and paper handy, I urge you to stop reading and write this down now. You’re here for a reason, and it’s crucial to know what result you want to achieve.
I define unshakeable confidence as an energy created by a deep conviction to one’s personal values and life’s purpose, regardless of the opinions of others, adversity, challenges, failures, or contrary evidence.
The next step is to determine the thoughts, feelings, and actions that would create this result. Many people start with actions, but everything originates in our brains, our thoughts. If we habitually take action based on fear, guilt, or shame instead of conviction, our results will reflect that energy. Over time, we may find ourselves living a life that doesn’t align with our true selves, hindering progress toward becoming a person of unshakeable confidence.
The exercise is simple.
First, write down the outline of the Model like so:
Circumstance – “Your Work”
Thought – ______________
Feeling – ______________
Action(s) – ______________
Result – I am a person of unshakeable confidence
Brainstorm multiple thoughts before settling on one to plug into your model. When you find one that resonates with you, write it in the Thought line. Remember, pay attention to your feelings throughout this process, as they indicate whether you believe a thought to be true. Based on my definition of unshakeable confidence, I would write down my personal values and create a thought based on my beliefs about life’s purpose centered on those values. For example, if my values were “Lifelong Learning,” “Growth Mindset,” and “Creating value,” and I believed that the purpose of life’s existence is to evolve into our limitless capacity for growth, then I would create a thought like “I will always be growing and learning.” I would then plug in the feeling of “conviction” or something similar in the Feeling line, based on how the thought I created made me feel. From there, I would honestly assess the actions I would take based on this conviction. My Model would look something like this:
C – My work
T – I will always be growing and learning.
F – Conviction
A – Take criticism with humility; question actions that may or may not be serving me; read often; study often; take excellent care of my body; grow myself financially; pile up failures; use adversity and challenges as a way to develop valuable skills; use contrary evidence to strengthen my faith in myself; listen to the opinions of others while continuing to form my own opinion; work disciplined on the the things I come to care about; expand my influence and impact; create meaningful value; become more involved in my civic responsibilities; become well-informed on current world events….
R – I am a person of unshakeable confidence
Becoming a person of unshakeable confidence certainly requires committed action, but that’s only a small part of the picture. Without our minds being on board with our actions, we’ll experience cognitive dissonance. Our brains don’t like cognitive dissonance, so when willpower runs out, we often change our actions to match our beliefs, or we change our beliefs to match our actions.
Regarding oppression, it’s no surprise that our beliefs, based on our primitive instincts to survive and our adaptive reactions to trauma (including generational trauma), might surface during this exercise. If you share any of the marginalized identities I spoke about earlier, you likely experienced the same social programming as I did, telling us that we weren’t capable of achieving our full potential because, well, history speaks for itself.
I know for a fact that my own fear-based actions and self-preservation instincts have held me back from pursuing many of the goals and dreams I’ve had in my life thus far. I often wonder how my life would look differently if only one thing had changed sooner for me—that I believed in my own ability to succeed at impossible goals.
Until you’ve developed unshakeable confidence in yourself, lean into the 100% unshakeable belief that I have in you. Create your definition of unshakeable confidence, develop a thought based on your convictions, plug it into the Model, and practice living your Model while redirecting your old programmed thoughts to the new, intentional thought.
I promise that by learning the skill of managing your mind, you’ll be unstoppable. Today is the day we stop accepting all our thoughts as true and start questioning everything. Just because we’ve always believed something to be true about ourselves or our identities doesn’t make it so.