Expose your shame.

Self-affirmations and tackling challenges and the such can be helpful, but they will have no lasting effect if you don’t first consider the root cause of low confidence; toxic shame.

Shame dampens your affect. It makes you feel sluggish in mind, body and spirit. It creates an inescapable sense of not being good enough, a ‘knowledge’ that you are incapable and unworthy which you feel in your bones. Your shoulders slump, your head drops, your face loses all expression.

Shame arises when you are ridiculed, compared to others, yelled at, dismissed, rejected, ignored, neglected, abused, and the list goes on. If you have enough of these experiences over a lifetime, including in childhood, they string together to form an identity based on shame. In the worst cases, ‘toxic shame’ becomes you, and you feel it all the time: when you turn your attention inwards, when you are in a social setting, when you perceive yourself to be out of place, when your crush rejects you, or when any of the above list occurs. The smallest injury can blow up and make you feel deeply flawed and unworthy.

Each person is unique in how they experience shame on the spectrum. Some feel it as a passing sensation once in a while, some experience it often, and some feel it so strongly that it crushes them for days.

Confidence can never be lasting until you address this core emotion. Learn to spot it, to shine your awareness onto it, and to stick with it. Pay attention to what kind of situations and what kind of people cause it to arise. Label how uncomfortable it is on a scale of 1 to 10. Meditate on it. Over time you gain the conscious power to not only see it, but to see it out the door until it fades out like a lamp running out of gas. It stops being your identity and becomes an emotion which comes and goes. You learn that it has nothing to do with your worthiness. As you outgrow it, you become more able to act with a sense of legitimacy and confidence without being weighed down.

A lack of confidence is a lack of capacity to withstand shame, or in many cases, to even be aware of it. You want to act, but something holds you back, causing you to shrink into your shell. The aim is not to eliminate this something, but to transcend and outgrow it so you can feel deeply rooted within yourself. It’s a big step in personal and also spiritual development. Once you achieve this, it becomes far easier to stake your place in society and to have a deep, unshakeable sense of confidence.