Ep #87: Confidence and Badassery Part 1 – How to Take a Compliment

Welcome to The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. If you’re a woman who is midlife and plus sized and you want to start running but don’t know how, or if it’s even possible, you’re in the right place. Using proven strategies and real-life experience, certified running and life coach Jill Angie shares how you can learn to run in the body you have right now.

Hey rebels, you are listening to episode number 87 of The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. I’m your host, Jill Angie, and today we are talking about owning your badassery. Now, April is self-confidence month in Run Your Best Life and we have been focusing on it daily. What self-confidence is, how to create it, how to maintain it, why it’s so important, why you need to own your badassery.

And because this concept of confidence and figuring out how to get it is such a game changer for women and for my community members, I decided to just do a whole podcast series on it. So we’re starting out today with how to take a compliment and why it’s important to learn that skill.

But before we dive in, I actually have two pretty awesome announcements to make. The first one is that we have a winner in the Instagram poster contest from episode – I think it was episode 84. And the winner is – drumroll please – Amy, a.k.a. @thispeachruns. So Amy, if you are the Instagram account @thispeachruns and you’re hearing this, to claim your poster, please email support@notyouraveragerunner.com with your last name and your mailing address and we will hook you up.

Now, I also want to share what she wrote on Instagram as her entry because basically it made me cry. And she posted it with a full body selfie in her bathroom mirror and I just think this is such a great thing to post on confidence week or confidence month here.

So here it is. “So I have been listening to The Not Your Average Runner Podcast basically non-stop for about a week now. And one of the things that I am learning from her is to love myself no matter what and also that other people’s opinions of me are none of my business. So, as much as I really do not want to do this, I believe that it is needed to be able to start changing my mindset and learning to love myself with the body that I have. When I took this picture a few minutes ago, I took it in hopes to post a comparison picture next to it later down this journey wearing the same outfit, but with a better-looking body. But then Jill’s words came flooding to my brain about how I shouldn’t care what people think and how hiding behind a camera doesn’t make you not fat. People who know you in real life know you are fat, so if they see a picture of you, they are looking at what they already know. Me being fat isn’t a secret, it’s a fact, so here I am, about to work out and here is my picture. I’m just me. And one day, I hope soon, I will not cringe at the site of me in a photo because I will love myself. That’s what I’m working towards. I don’t have to lose weight to love myself, although, I do hope to lose weight in this process, it is not my main goal.”

Amy, I love this so, so much. It’s so real and so honest and I just love the work you’re doing on yourself. You are amazing. True Georgia peach. So again, email support@notyouraveragerunner.com. Let them know you are Amy from Instagram contest and we will hook you up with your running poster.

Now, our second big announcement is Run Your Best Life is now $39 a month. Yes, that is true. This is not an April Fool’s joke. We lowered the price permanently. We want as many women to be able to use this amazing service as possible. So that means that now you can get all the community coaching and accountability that you need to become the runner you want to be for about the cost of a gym membership.

Except unlike a gym membership, there are no expensive trainers, no random strangers looking at you funny if you’re on the treadmill too long, no sweaty locker rooms, no creepy dudes in the weight room. Just women exactly like you. Coaches who understand what you need and aren’t going to give you ridiculously stupid workouts that don’t make any sense for you, and tons of training programs and support and accountability to help you reach whatever goal you want.

I’m serious, this is not a leftover April Fool’s joke. We have seriously lowered the price of Run Your Best Life to $39 a month. There are no sign-up fees, there’s no monthly contract. It’s just $39 a month for as long as you want to be a member, which of course, we hope is forever. Now, head over to runyourbestlife.com to sign up. Hit the pause button. Go now, I will wait. Go, I’m not kidding.

Alright, let’s talk about confidence now and I want to start with something that everyone can relate to, and I know you can. Even if this is not you now, it might have been you five years ago, and that is getting compliments and feeling uncomfortable with just saying thank you.

So if anybody’s ever complimented you on something like maybe it’s your hair, your clothes, your outfit, a race you just finished, and you say, “Thanks, but,” and then you give them all the reasons you don’t deserve the compliment. So, “Oh thanks, but I’m just having a good hair day, this isn’t normal,” or, “Oh thanks, I rarely wear these pants because they make my butt look big,” or, “Oh thanks, but I actually had to walk part of that race so I’m not really a runner, I’m more of a walker.”

Why the fuck do we do this? How easy is it to just say thanks? It’s fewer words. But we have this verbal diarrhea after we get a compliment that we just try to convince this perfectly nice human that although we might appear to be amazing, we’re actually a total and complete train wreck. And I swear to god, if I accomplish nothing else during my time on this earth, helping women to own their own accomplishments and their beauty and their amazingness will be my legacy.

Fucking swear this to you. Anyway, I think partly the reason that we do this is because we’re kind of taught, especially girls, we’re taught from a young age not to brag or boast about ourselves and then somehow that gets all twisted up into I need to argue with people when they tell me I’m awesome.

If we admit that maybe, just maybe we actually are totally fabulous, other people might feel less than, they might feel less good about themselves or they might think that we’re bragging and then they’ll have opinions about us that we’re like oh my god, people think I’m bragging and then we have all kinds of bullshit drama about that.

Or you know what, they might actually just disagree with us. We might think we’re fabulous, other people might not, and they might think we suck, and then we’ve got other people’s opinions to deal with again. Or even worse, people might think we’re amazing and we’re like oh great, now I have to keep on being amazing and that’s going to take so much effort.

Or we might actually be wrong and delusional and people are laughing at us behind our backs. Does any of that sound familiar because I’ll tell you, I’ve gone through all of that in my mind. And why is this shit so freaking hard? I don’t know. Well actually, I do know. Because you’re not taught to own it and it takes practice. Owning your badassery in life, owning your fabulousness takes practice.

You have been taught that nice girls are modest and humble, which means you don’t take credit for your accomplishments and I call bullshit on this. Do you know any men that will not accept a compliment? Neither do I. Imagine this; you tell your husband or your boyfriend that, “Hey, your butt looks really hot in those jeans.” Now, does he A, say, “Thanks baby,” and then grab you for a kiss, or B say, “You think so? Because I kind of thought my butt looked a little saggy this morning.”

I have never met a man that would choose option B. Men are not conditioned to be humble and modest. If you pay them a compliment, they happily agree with you whether or not you’re sincere, whether or not you’re right, whatever. They’re just like, fuck yeah that’s right, that’s me, I got an awesome ass.

And this is not a diss on men, by the way. I don’t believe in dissing entire groups of people because of their behavior. Why? Because the reason that most men have high opinions of themselves is the same conditioning, it’s the flip of that coin, that conditioning that causes women to have low opinions. They’ve been given a different belief system their whole lives.

So this is actually great news because belief systems are simply thoughts we have practiced over and over and over. And that means because we practiced them and installed them one time, we can practice different beliefs and change our beliefs by practicing new thought patterns.

So owning your badassery, owning your fabulousness, especially when it comes to being a runner and I’m just going to say, owning your identity as a runner means that you need to decide on purpose what beliefs you want to have about yourself as an athlete and then practice them and practice accepting compliments about your accomplishments.

If you want to be a confident person, someone who can just move through the world feeling like everything is under my control, this is shit that you got to practice. Now, we’ve talked about the self-coaching model before and it’s basically circumstances in our lives happen, the data, the facts of our lives. We have thoughts about those circumstances and then those thoughts create feelings, which drive our actions and subsequently our results.

Now, most of us believe whether we are confident or not is something we’re born with or like, you’re either born with it or maybe it’s Maybelline. Something we’re born with or something we get to have as a result of accomplishing a bunch of stuff. In other words, we think that confidence is either a circumstance, something we already have, or a result of taking a bunch of actions.

And I completely disagree with this. I think that confidence is a feeling, it’s an emotion we create with our thoughts. It’s exactly like motivation and I’ve talked about how motivation is a feeling we create with our thoughts, and confidence is the same thing. We don’t have confidence. It’s not a thing you can get. Can’t get it on Amazon Prime. It’s not genetic. It’s a feeling. It’s an emotion that we create with the thoughts that we repeatedly think.

So if you don’t feel confident, it’s not because you haven’t accomplished the things you need to or it’s not because you don’t look a certain way. It’s because you don’t believe in the qualities that you have. It’s that you don’t believe that you can get the results you want to get. It’s because you’re thinking thoughts that make you feel doubtful or hesitant or apprehensive.

Just as a funny side, a few hours ago I was actually coaching my Run Your Best Life community members on this concept and I was trying to show them that just like their thoughts can create confidence, they can also create unconfidence. And I’m like, is that a word? I’m writing it on my little white board, I’m like, I don’t think that’s a word.

And so Ellie, one of our members, I think it was Ellie. It was either Ellie or Louanne, I can’t remember which one of you it was but basically went off really quick, did a Google search to find out what the antonym was to confidence and it was apprehensive or hesitant. And in the process, she also discovered the unconfident actually is a word.

So really in Run Your Best Life, you get more than just run coaching and life coaching. You get all kinds of fun facts. So anyway, confidence does not require you to accomplish anything or to prove anything to other people or yourself before you can experience it.

And I know this is kind of mind-blowing and on that earlier coaching call that we had today, most people said once I finish this race distance, then I’ll know I can do it. But I completely disagree with that and I know this is mind-blowing, but thoughts create confidence. Actions do not create it, circumstances do not create it. Your thoughts are what create it.

And I have a great example. Think about somebody like Elon Musk. He is a confident motherfucker. He said yeah, I’m going to make an electric car that can go from zero to 60 in like, three seconds, drives itself and also looks really sexy. Oh yeah, and I’m also going to start a rocket company and we’re going to take payloads to the space station. I’m just going to do that.

He had no reason to believe this was possible based on his past experiences in life. If you’ve ever read his biography, this is a big leap for him. But neither of those things existed. The Tesla car, the self-driving super fucking fast Tesla electric vehicle that gets, I don’t know, 400 miles on one charge, it’s crazy, did not exist and Space X, his company that is taking rockets with stuff and he’s shooting rockets off and sending them to the space station to take them supplies, none of those existed before he said fuck yeah, of course I’m going to do this.

And now they exist. He literally used his thoughts to create confidence, which drove him to take the action of creating those things. I mean, it is mind-blowing. If you just walked around in your life and said fuck yeah, of course I’m going to do that, what do you think you could create if that was the attitude you had?

And now he’s like, fuck yeah, we’re going to Mars. And you know what, I believe him. I’m pretty sure this is going to happen. He’s so confident that I’m confident he can make it happen. No human has ever been on Mars. We’ve only been to the moon a few times. And before we went to the moon, we had no reason to believe that was possible either, but the United States is nothing if not confident.

And without it, we would still be riding horses and living in log cabins. Everything in the world that we have, our iPhones, Netflix for fuck’s sake, everything in my office would not exist if somebody had not thought fuck yeah, I can do that, and made it happen.

So there’s been a lot of swearing in this particular episode and I’m not going to apologize for it because you know, we’re all adults here and you know what you signed up for when you started listening to my podcast. But let’s kind of apply that whole concept to running.

So if you want to do a marathon and you’ve never done one before, you need to believe in yourself ahead of time. And now, maybe you don’t even have to believe you can do the whole marathon but maybe you need to believe you can do 10 miles. And then you got to believe yourself to the point of doing 10 miles. You don’t do 10 miles and then say oh yeah, now I believe I can do it.

You have to believe it before you do it or you’ll never do it. And it sounds circular, but that’s really how it works. And you may have moments of doubt but overall, to be successful, you need to feel confident more often than you feel doubtful. And how do you feel confident?

You think to yourself fuck yeah; I can do that. Or if you’d rather, you can think a much more polite version of that. But that’s the basic – it’s got to be all in like yes, that is something I can do. Now, even if you have no reason to believe it will happen, if you have that belief in your mind, you will believe it into existence. Even if you have no evidence in the past that you can do it, you can actually do some pretty epic shit that way.

And here’s the deal; the best predictor of future results is not what you’ve done in the past, it’s what you’re thinking right now because what you’re thinking right now creates confidence that you can do it. So the only way to predict what you’re going to do in the future is to start looking at what you’re thinking about it right now.

Okay, here’s what I want you to do, rebels. I want you to start thinking thoughts, create thoughts for yourself, and you can totally steal fuck yeah, I can do that because everybody on today’s coaching call in Run Your Best Life was like oh yeah, I’m writing that down, it’s a good one. But seriously, I want you to start coming up with what are the things that you need to believe and think on purpose so that you can feel confident.

Confidence does not come from what you’ve done in the past. I mean, it can, what you’ve done in the past is a circumstance and you can have a thought that says I did that so I can do this other thing, for sure. But if you’ve never run a marathon before, you don’t have a marathon in your past to rely on.

That’s how I’m getting myself through this marathon that I’m training for. Never done a marathon before. How the fuck am I going to cross the finish line of a marathon and feel confident that I can do it if I’ve never done it before? It’s because I’m just going to think fuck yeah, I can do that. I’m going to figure it out. I know I’m a running coach, I know how to do this, I’ll make it happen.

I think those thoughts to myself, I feel confident, when I feel confident my action is to get my ass out there and train, and when I train, I know that I’m going to get that result. So your homework is to decide what do you need to be thinking to feel confident.

And then here’s what I want you to do. First of all, actually what I really want you to do is to go sign up for Run Your Best Life already. I know you haven’t done it yet, I know you didn’t hit pause, so I want you to hit pause right now. Go sign up for Run Your Best Life, $39 a month, runyourbestlife.com.

But seriously, go to the private Run Your Best Life Facebook group or go to the public Not Your Average Runner Podcast community and join if you need to and then I want you to use #confidence and give me the thought that you’re going to think to make yourself feel confident because I know that confidence is available to every single person on this planet.

It is not a special unicorn thing. I am not special because I am super confident. I have just practiced thinking all of those thoughts so much that confidence is like, my standard way of being. You can have this too.

Alright rebels, that is it for this week. Everything I mentioned in this episode, which is basically Run Your Best Life, so seriously, go join it right now. Everything I mentioned in this episode can be found in the show notes at notyouraveragerunner.com/87. You can find Run Your Best Life and join at runyourbestlife.com. I’ll talk to you next week.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. If you liked what you heard and want more, head over to www.notyouraveragerunner.com to download your free one-week jumpstart plan and get started running today.