The KEY to Self-Confidence | Trauma and Self-Confidence

If you have been struggling to build self-confidence or wondering how to build self-confidence then this episode is for you. 

In this episode of the Permission to Love podcast we explode the concept of self-confidence, particularly for those who have experienced trauma. 

My hope is that you will find insights and practical steps on how to rebuild or build self-confidence for the first time. 

This episode emphasizes that self-confidence is not merely a feeling but a core belief that must be nurtured and developed through consistent actions and trust in oneself.

Key Topics:

Self-Confidence Defined:
- Self-confidence is the ability to trust oneself.
- It's a core belief, not just a feeling.

Building Trust with Yourself:
- Importance of showing up for yourself consistently:
- Keeping promises to yourself to build self-trust.

Practical Steps to Build Self-Confidence:
- Start with small, achievable commitments.
- Ensure consistency in actions.
- Use corrective experiences to reinforce positive behaviors.

Challenges for Trauma Survivors:
- How trauma can dismantle self-confidence.
- Strategies to rebuild trust in oneself.

Action Steps:
- Choose one small commitment to yourself this week and follow through.
- Reflect on past experiences and look for ways to create corrective experiences.
- Keep a journal of your commitments and track your follow-through.

Chapters:
00:00 - Introduction: Defining Self-Confidence
03:17 - Common Challenges with Self-Confidence
05:24 - What Self-Confidence Truly Is
06:39 - Confiding in Yourself: Building Trust
08:29 - The Impact of Trauma on Self-Confidence
10:55 - Building Self-Confidence Through Experiences
12:09 - My Journey with Self-Confidence and Starting a Podcast
14:15 - Execution: The Key to Building Self-Confidence
16:56 - New and Corrective Experiences
18:02 - Consistency and Repeated Experiences
20:15 - Keeping Promises to Yourself
21:02 - Trusting Yourself: A Core Belief
23:34 - Self-Betrayal and Its Impact on Self-Confidence
25:36 - Making and Keeping Commitments to Yourself
28:14 - Practical Steps to Start Building Self-Confidence Today

I am grateful you are here,
Jerry

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Transcript

Jerry Henderson: 0:00

Once again, I want you to continue to think about self-confidence as the ability to trust yourself, that you know you're going to be able to show up for yourself right, because if you walk in that room with a track record that you show up for yourself and you do your best, and it may not always turn out the way that you want, but you know that you're going to bring your best to the table, that is what's giving you that self-confidence, is your core belief in your ability to show up for you. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Permission to Love podcast. I'm your host, jerry Henderson, and I'm so grateful that you're here, as always, I'm actually here in Germany. I'm here with my daughter, my son-in-law and my grandson. I've just come off of the Camino de Santiago 30 days of walking, almost 500 miles or 800 kilometers, and so a beautiful, amazing journey. A lot of time to be reflectful, really think through a lot of things. I'm in a transition season in my life and so that walk, that journey, was absolutely incredible, and I look forward to sharing more about that journey, some of the thoughts, some of the reflections, some of the insights, over the next month to six weeks, but today I'm going to talk about a specific topic that keeps coming up, that people continue to ask me about, which is how do I get more self-confident, how do I build self-confidence or really, it usually comes in this form how do I feel more self-confident, and so I want to talk about that today.

Jerry Henderson: 1:38

Now, just a quick reminder if you've not had a chance yet to pick up my book Returning a collection of meditations and reflections on self-love and healing, I want to encourage you to do that. I've really designed it to be somewhat of a daily devotional or a daily meditation guide, where you can take a phrase, reflect on it and help integrate that thought as a part of your healing journey, and so getting a lot of feedback about how people are using it to really do that, to do the meditation, to do the reflection, and a lot of healing has been coming through people picking up this book and using it to allow their own soul to speak to them as they read those words, to feel seen, to know they're not alone and to know that healing is possible. So you can go to Amazon, pick up your copy, and if you have picked up a copy already and you've read it and you've really enjoyed it. I'd love if you would leave a review. That would mean a lot to me so you can leave a review on Goodreads or on Amazon. But thank you, thank you for picking it up, thank you for being here and thank you for being a person who is prioritizing your healing journey by engaging with this podcast and other resources that are helping you, helping you become that authentic person that you already are right, overcoming the lies of trauma that have told us that there's something wrong with us, and learning to see yourself as the beautiful person that you are to us, that there's something wrong with us, and learning to see yourself as the beautiful person that you are, to understand that there's never been anything wrong with you, that you are love, you've always been love and you will always be love. So thank you, thank you for being here.

Jerry Henderson: 3:17

So let's go ahead and get into this topic of self-confidence, or how do I feel more self-confidence? Well, let's talk about that concept in and of itself of feeling confident, and that's where I think a lot of people maybe get stuck or have some challenges because they see self-confidence as a feeling, and it's often something that people think they're just going to get zapped and have all of a sudden right that they're looking for some magic solution that's all of a sudden going to give them self-confidence or the feeling of confidence in themselves. Well, I find that that doesn't happen, and I work with people around this topic quite a bit on how to build self-confidence, especially as trauma survivors. Right, because we had self-confidence basically dismantled in our life and it was often done in a very strategic way to keep us trapped, to keep us dependent, to keep us feeling broken, and so the strategies and the pain and the things that we experienced really did cause us to struggle in the area of self-confidence. And so if you're struggling with self-confidence as a trauma survivor or as just anyone know that, it is common that there's nothing wrong with you because you struggle to have self-confidence. And so I want to encourage you that, even if you've had all of your confidence stripped away through childhood trauma, religious trauma, relational trauma or even just life trauma, and you feel like you're never going to get your confidence back and you keep trying and you continually feel like this insecure person who just doesn't feel a sense of confidence, I want to let you know that it is possible to get that self-confidence back. I've worked with a lot of people and they've been able to find that confidence in themselves, as they've healed, as they've understood what self-confidence really is and they've begun to show up for themselves. So there is hope, it is possible, and I hope in this episode you'll be able to see how you can build self-confidence for yourself.

Jerry Henderson: 5:24

So if self-confidence is not a feeling, what is it? Well, I believe that self-confidence is a core belief that you develop. It's something that you build and it's something that you maintain. You can build self-confidence and you can destroy self-confidence. You can have people who help you build self-confidence and you can have people who will strip your self-confidence and you can destroy self-confidence. You can have people who help you build self-confidence and you can have people who will strip your self-confidence away from you.

Jerry Henderson: 5:49

And so here's the challenge if we think of it just as a feeling, feelings are just too darn fickle to be dependent upon, right? So you might wake up one morning feeling confident, you go through your day and you wish that that would be repeated every day, and then the next day you wake up and you don't feel confident, or you've started out your day feeling confident, and then one word from one person or one event. All of a sudden, you feel like your confidence has been stripped away from you. So when we put self-confidence in the category of feeling, it's just way too darn fickle, it's just too fragile. So we want to move away from it being a feeling into a core belief, a way that we carry ourselves, something that's inside of us. So how do we do that?

Jerry Henderson: 6:39

Well, let's start by defining what self-confidence is. If you break the word down, it means the ability to confide self-confidence, to confide in yourself. So what does it mean to confide in yourself or to confide in somebody? It means that you've built trust. You have trust in yourself. So if you confide in somebody and you share with them a struggle, or you're confiding in somebody about something that's going on in your life, you're trusting them to hold that information. You're trusting them to be there for you, to support you in that process. It's no different in your relationship with yourself.

Jerry Henderson: 7:21

You have to come to a place where you can confide in or you can trust yourself. What does that mean? What does that begin to look like? Well, it basically comes down to a core belief in yourself that you're going to be able to show up for yourself. You know when you go on that date and you want to feel confident on that date, what you're actually hoping is that your most authentic, best version of you will show up right when you go on that job interview or you do that presentation. What you're hoping for is that that best version of you is going to be able to show up, that you can depend on yourself, that you will show up for yourself. Well, how does that happen? Well, you have to build trust with yourself. You have to come to a place where you trust you, and that is very difficult for trauma survivors Because, once again, the ability to trust ourselves was strategically stripped away right Through abuse, through confusing us, through the whole system that we lived in that felt safe, unsafe.

Jerry Henderson: 8:29

We never knew what was going to show up, what we were going to have to deal with, and we would often lose trust in ourselves because we would think that we were responding right in a certain scenario, but then, all of a sudden, that had consequences attached to it. So we would change our behavior and go a different path, but yet then we'd still get consequences for that, and so we never had the ability to really know how to depend on ourselves, how to trust ourselves, how to look to ourselves for answers. All of that was strategically stripped away, and so it's no wonder that trauma survivors really struggle with self-confidence. I mean, if you've been in a relationship with a narcissistic person, you're a trauma survivor, right, and a narcissistic person will gaslight you, confuse you, keep you from being able to trust your instincts, who you are. I mean.

Jerry Henderson: 9:20

All of it becomes a blur, and so the inability to trust yourself is absolutely linked to your ability to have self-confidence, because self-confidence, once again, is going to come from that place of having a core belief that you are going to show up for you and that you're going to show up with the best version of yourself that you possibly can. So what does it look like to get to the place where I can trust myself that the best version of myself is going to show up, right? How do I get to a place where I have a core belief of self-confidence? Well, it's no different than any other relationship. You're trying to build trust with you, and, fortunately, there's only really a few things that you're gonna have to do in order to build that trust with yourself, and then that trust that you're building with yourself is gonna allow you to confide or to have confidence in yourself, and you're gonna be able to prove to yourself that that best version of you is actually gonna be able to show up in those scenarios when. So let's talk about the first thing, number one in order for you to have trust in yourself, you've got to realize that it is something that you build, no different than any other relationship, as I've talked about before, and you know, in this podcast we talk a lot about the fact that you have a relationship with yourself, and that relationship is the most important relationship that you have in your life and it's determining every other relationship.

Jerry Henderson: 10:55

It's determining what you're manifesting, and this is especially true in the area of self-confidence. Nobody else is going to be able to give you self-confidence. People can support you, people can encourage you, and that's often something that's confusing for folks, right? It's like I have all this encouragement, I have these people who believe in me, but yet I can't believe in myself. Why is that? Well, it's often because you're looking for that external validation and you're hoping that that external validation is somehow going to get inside of your system and you're going to believe it. Well, while it can help, it can be additive. It is not the primary way that you're going to build self-confidence. You're going to build self-confidence when you realize that you've got a relationship with yourself and you're going to have to learn how to trust yourself. And we have to realize that building trust takes time, especially when it's been dismantled, and even more so when it's been dismantled right, but you can. You can do this, but you've got to realize you're going to build it. It's going to take time, you're going to have to have patience. And let me share a quick example of building trust. That might be helpful, or building confidence that might be helpful, and it's me doing this podcast.

Jerry Henderson: 12:09

Right, when I first started this podcast, it was super scary for me, right. I had zero experience in doing a podcast, didn't know how to do it, didn't know how to get it out there, or I felt like people would think that I was crazy for doing it or that I really had nothing to say, that it wouldn't be helpful to people. But I felt like I needed to start it. I felt like I needed to take the lessons that I had learned, the experiences that I've had, and offer it out to the world. And so when I first started it, I mean I'm fumbling through it. I've got a lot of anxiety around it and I remember when I first launched it, first went live, published the episodes, I had a lot and a lot of anxiety. I didn't think anybody was going to listen to it and it was a very difficult thing for me in learning to build confidence around doing this podcast.

Jerry Henderson: 13:00

But how did I build the confidence? How do I continue to sustain the confidence to do the podcast? Well, let me just be really transparent. I still struggle with it. There's times where I'm recording, re-recording, going through all kinds of processes to get this podcast out, because there's still some insecurities there. There's still a lack of confidence that people really want to hear what I have to say about these things. But what I have seen through this journey is what was once a big lack of self-confidence has gotten lesser and lesser and lesser as I've shown up, recorded them consistently, got rid of the excuses and followed through on what I said I was going to do. So doing this podcast has been a real lesson for me in building self-confidence of being able to listen to the inner critic and examine how it's trying to keep me safe and yet still setting it aside to keep the commitment that I'm going to follow through with doing this podcast. Now, I wouldn't have any more self-confidence in doing this podcast if I had still kept the idea of doing a podcast in my mind and have never executed on it.

Jerry Henderson: 14:15

And it is the execution of doing the podcast that is building the self-confidence, or the ability to trust myself that I have the skill set, that I have the ability to do it, that I can get in front of this camera, I can get in front of this microphone and share my story and share my journey. And so every time I do it and every time I release an episode, I'm building more and more confidence and over time it begins to compound. And, once again, self-confidence isn't something you get zapped with simply because you think you want to be more confident or you keep talking to yourself about the desire to be more confident or even doing positive affirmations. I could have done positive affirmation after positive affirmation about how I have a podcast. Well, at some point I got to get in front of a camera, I've got to get in front of a microphone, I've got to record the darn thing, I got to put it out there and I've got to take the risk of how I'm going to feel, the feedback that I'm going to get. Is it going to do good? Is it not going to do good? I'm going to have to pivot, I'm going to have to adjust. All of those things are building self-confidence. It's allowing me to continue doing this podcast.

Jerry Henderson: 15:28

So, getting to the place where you have more confidence or you believe in yourself, you have a core belief that you're going to be able to show up for yourself, you have to build it and you build it over time, and the way that you build it is through experiences, and those can be new experiences. They can be corrective experiences, and what I mean by corrective experience is that if you've had a painful or a challenging experience that's kept you from doing something or has limited you, you find ways to do that experience in a positive and loving environment. For example, if you've had a really negative experience in relationships and they've been unhealthy, one response is to shut yourself down and never get into a relationship again. Response is to shut yourself down and never get into a relationship again. Another response is to find ways to have corrective experiences, have experiences with healthy relationships and begin to feel that. What does that feel like? What does it feel like to have somebody who loves you genuinely and positively and begin to find a loving relationship that then becomes a corrective experience for the negative relationships that you've had. So there's new experiences, there's corrective experiences, there's repeated experiences. Whatever those experiences are that you need to do in order to build that confidence, it's really important that you have those experiences and that you stay consistent at them. You keep showing up at them.

Jerry Henderson: 16:56

So, for example, if you're trying to get into a relationship, a healthy relationship, you're going to have to go on dates. That's going to have to be an experience. I mean, you're not going to find a relationship by hiding in the house, right? And I know that we can be hesitant to get back into relationships after some of the trauma that maybe you've experienced. I know what that can be like. Believe me, I know. But the reality is there are beautiful people and beautiful relationships for you. But in order for you to get into those relationships, you can't just go on one date and then say, you know what? I met with another Looney Tune or a person that's, you know, toxic I'm just going to give up. No, you're going to have to continue to stay at it. You're going to have to get a little bit better on your chooser. Stay at it for a while. If you want to be good at dating, you're going to have to go on dates, right. If you want to be good at giving presentations, you're going to have to give presentations. So you're going to have to give yourself the experiences that you want to build self-confidence in, and you're going to have to give yourself those experiences repeatedly, right.

Jerry Henderson: 18:02

So, just having that experience one time, it not going so well, you giving up, that's going to break self-confidence, and we're going to talk about that here in just a little bit why that's so damaging to self-confidence. You're going to break self-confidence and we're going to talk about that here in just a little bit, why that's so damaging to self-confidence. You're going to need to keep at it until you find a sense of a breakthrough or until you find that that's not something that you want and you're choosing to walk away from having that experience because you've decided that it's not something you want, versus you're giving up on it because you feel like you just keep failing at it and you become afraid of it and you're breaking self-confidence and you're telling yourself stories like I can never do anything. You know, see, I'm always a failure at everything. As long as that narrative is there, it's going to continue to diminish your self-confidence.

Jerry Henderson: 18:48

So a little example of this is my time on the Camino de Santiago. You know that's a long walk, almost 500 miles, and there were days right where you put in 15 miles. Some days I put in 25 miles and it wasn't about the number of miles in one day, it was about the number of miles day after day after day. It was the number of days with those miles that actually got me to the destination. So I want you to think about it in that way.

Jerry Henderson: 19:17

You see, a lot of times we're trying to build self-confidence in an area and we just show up with everything we got for a day or a two or a week or whatever, and we start saying that you know it's not working and you know I knew it wouldn't work and I know I always mess everything up or whatever the narrative becomes. No, you've got to stick at it If you want to make progress. You really are serious about building self-confidence. You're going to have to stick at it for the long haul, okay? So not only is self-confidence built, it's through experiences, and it's repeated experiences that you stay at until you learn and until you build a sense of confidence in that area. So now that leads me to the final point of this podcast episode about how to build self-confidence and the most important part of it. In my opinion, build self-confidence and the most important part of it. In my opinion, the most important part of building self-confidence is that you are keeping your promises to yourself. Okay, so let's rewind a little bit.

Jerry Henderson: 20:15

If building self-confidence is about building trust and it's like any other relationship that we have that there's certain ways that you build trust and there's certain ways that you destroy trust right, if you're trying to build trust in a relationship, right, you know that you build it. It's over time. You've got to have certain experiences with that person and that begins to allow you to be more comfortable with them and you begin to have a sense of trust and openness. And then one of the big things in relational trust is that a person can count on you. They know that what you say, you're going to do that. When you say you're going to do X, you do X, you show up, and that is one of the key ways to build relational trust, and it's one of the key ways to build trust with yourself.

Jerry Henderson: 21:02

So, once again, I want you to continue to think about self-confidence as the ability to trust yourself, that you know you're going to be able to show up for yourself, right? Because if you walk in that room with a track record that you show up for yourself and you do your best and it may not always turn out the way that you want, but you know that you're going to bring your best to the table, that is what's giving you that self-confidence is your core belief in your ability to show up for you. So one of the key things is that you've got to follow through on the promises that you make for yourself. So I think this area is so important about you following through on the promises that you've made to yourself that when you say you're going to do something, I think it's so important that it's better to not make a promise to yourself than to make a promise and not follow through on it. Why? Because your brain is looking for evidence about what you believe right, and as your brain begins to see you saying you're going to do something and you don't follow through on it, saying that you're going to start this program or do this thing or quit drinking, or whatever it is that you're promising yourself that you're going to do and you keep not following through on it. You keep breaking your promise with yourself. Your brain's watching you and it's saying to you. So, at a subconscious level, you're reinforcing and building the core belief.

Jerry Henderson: 22:29

We really don't believe that. We don't believe that we're worthy of following through on our commitments to ourselves. We can't trust ourselves because when we say we're going to do something, we don't do it, and so you're eroding your self-confidence, your ability to trust in yourself, each time you make a promise to yourself and you don't follow through. So does that mean, if you've made promises to yourself in the past you haven't followed through, that you can't make new promises? No, I'm just saying that we dismiss the importance of promises to ourselves way too much, and I believe it's one of the key reasons why people struggle so much with self-confidence today. They're making promises. They say they're going to do something, they say they're going to show up for themselves, and then they don't. They say they're going to keep a boundary, and then they don't. They say that they're going to take care of themselves physically, and then they don't. And now, all of a sudden, every promise that they've made to themselves they keep breaking and they do not believe in themselves because they don't believe in their ability to show up for themselves.

Jerry Henderson: 23:34

And so, if you want to build self-confidence, I'll tell you the best way to start is by making a promise to yourself, or making a commitment to yourself, and then following through on it. Because, think about it, if you don't follow through on your promises in other relationships, is that relationship going to last? Is it going to last and be healthy, I guess, is the right way to say it? Are you going to be able to have a connection with that person and feel some sense of intimacy? No, because you're continuing to erode trust. And so, as you're building trust with yourself, it's really important that you don't betray yourself, because it is the self-betrayal that sends the message to your brain that you're not somebody that you can trust. And because you can't trust yourself, you're not going to show up as your best self and therefore, you don't have confidence in yourself or your ability to follow through with something. Okay, now, I know I'm being super repetitive, and that's intentional, because I want to keep you seeing the connection and the relationship between confidence is trust.

Jerry Henderson: 24:50

Trust is built over time, and it is built over time through experiences, and one of the key experiences that we have in building trust is saying that we're going to do something, following through with it, keeping your promises and not betraying your promises. So you don't want to betray your promises to yourself and if you wind up doing so, you want to make sure that you are having a corrective experience afterwards, that you're now following through with it, that you go back and you make it right. You do what you said you were going to do. You show yourself that you are important enough to keep that promise to yourself. We keep promises to so many people.

Jerry Henderson: 25:36

If you want to keep your job, you've got to keep your promises. You've got to show up on time. You've got to do your work. If you said you're going to go to a meeting, you go to the meeting. If you said you've got to get a report in, you get the report in. I mean, all of those are micro promises, right. They're commitments that we've made.

Jerry Henderson: 25:50

Now, if you keep breaking those, your employer has zero confidence in your ability to follow through and you're going to be looking for a job real soon, right, and so it's no different with you and your relationship with yourself. You've got to make those commitments to yourself. Or don't make them at all, but make them and then follow through with them. Do not betray yourself. You have to see yourself as important enough to follow through with the commitments that you've made to yourself. Once again, we make commitments to the whole world, especially if you're a people pleaser. You'll make commitments to the entire world, but you won't follow through on commitments to yourself. And what is that saying to your brain? I'm not important. And if your brain is saying that I'm not important, how could you have any confidence in yourself when you don't believe that you're important?

Jerry Henderson: 26:45

So I hope you can see that it becomes very basic, very practical, real quick on how a person builds self-confidence. And it is in giving yourself the experiences, not just talking about it, not just thinking about it. And those experiences are coming from you saying that you're going to do something. You're going to follow through. You're not going to tolerate X behavior, you're not going to put up with this anymore, or you're going to start doing X, y and Z for yourself, or you're going to stop talking to yourself that way and then you're going to actually put tools in place to not talk to yourself that way or beat yourself up anymore. And, yeah, you're going to slip up. You're going to have challenges, and I'm not saying that we have to do things perfectly in order to build self-confidence. But what we have to do is have a commitment to keep coming back at it, to keep learning, to keep practicing until we get better and better and better. Your commitment to show up for yourself and then actually show up for yourself is the thing that's going to build the self-confidence, okay. So I hope that helps, because as long as you have it in the feeling category, it's very subjective, it's very elusive. You think you're going to arrive at a place of self-confidence, but when you put it in the core belief category, you can actually start to do things to develop that core belief, and so looking at that way can totally transform the way that you think about self-confidence.

Jerry Henderson: 28:14

So now I want to give you a very practical thing to do to help you start building self-confidence. Today and this week. We're going to get at it right away, okay, and it's a very simple thing. I want you to choose one area that you can commit to yourself about something. Just one area, one thing that you could do today or you could do this week and that you're going to follow through with it, and you put it on your calendar or you put it as a priority, you put a sticky note or on your phone whatever you've got to do, and you say that this week I'm going to do X, I'm going to do Y and I'm not going to betray myself in it.

Jerry Henderson: 28:53

Okay, just one simple thing, and don't reach for the sky on this one. Okay, it's like when you're in a relationship and all of a sudden, you've over-promised everything and you've actually set yourself up for failure. You know that you're not going to be able to follow through with it subconsciously and then what you're actually doing is reinforcing your core belief about yourself and you're trying to break self-confidence subconsciously. So we don't want to do that. We don't want to make a list of 10 things or 10 promises this week and we don't want to make the promise so big that we've set ourselves up for failure. So just something, one simple thing. You say I'm going to do this and you keep your promise to yourself about it. Okay, you follow through on it. So, as you do that, and then you're consistent on that one thing and you just stay at it and you keep proving to yourself that you can do that one thing, then we can start adding other things, right?

Jerry Henderson: 29:47

I mean, it could be as simple as I'm going to go to the gym one time this week, just one time Go. Or it can be as simple as you know what? I'm going to read that book that I keep putting off, that I know is so important. I'm going to get it, I'm going to read it. I'm going to do what I said I'm going to do. It might be you know what. I'm not going to allow that person to talk to me this week. When I show up and they talk to me that way, I'm going to keep the boundary. It could be. I'm not going to say yes to so-and-so. When they ask me to do the 100th thing and continue to violate my boundaries and my people, pleaser kicks in and I say yes all the time. At this time I'm going to say no to it.

Jerry Henderson: 30:29

And here's a little clue or a trick on this okay, if you find yourself auto-responsing or out of habit doing something you've promised yourself you wouldn't let somebody cross your boundary and all of a sudden you found yourself in a situation and they crossed the boundary and you didn't correct it, you can walk away and you can reflect on it and you can circle back around and correct it. Okay, it doesn't always have to be corrected in the moment, it just needs to be corrected at some point. I wouldn't put too much distance, I wouldn't wait like a month or a week. I would go back home, reflect on it, understand the words that you want to use to correct that thing, to correct the boundary that got violated in as much of a loving way as you possibly can. So I hope that makes sense, because a lot of times we'll think that, well, I set this boundary, it got violated, I didn't correct it, I totally ruined it. No, you can go back and correct it later.

Jerry Henderson: 31:27

Still, it doesn't always happen in the moment because we're auto-responsing, and then when we do go back and correct it, it's actually reinforcing our ability to keep those boundaries and we'll find ourselves less auto-responsive. So practice that this week, take time, make a commitment to yourself, follow through on it and then, as you do that, you can add other things, and then all of a sudden you'll find that you're beginning to build confidence in yourself, because you know that when you say you're going to do something, you do it, and that is a key part of having self-confidence. Well, thank you. Thank you once again for joining another episode of the Permission to Love podcast. I'm so grateful that you're here, as always.

Jerry Henderson: 32:12

Now, if you've not had a moment yet to subscribe, to follow or to turn on those reminders, please take a moment to do that, because that's going to keep you updated on when new episodes come out, and it's important, I believe, that, as you're healing and growing to stay consistent with getting information that's going to help you as a part of your healing journey. Now I also want to ask you a favor. If you've not yet had an opportunity to share this podcast with other people, I want to ask you to do that. That's one of the primary ways that this podcast grows and it's one of the key ways that people get introduced to the work of how they can learn to heal their relationship with themselves by learning to give themselves the permission to love themselves. So feel free to send them the link text it email, however it works for you, but thank you.

Jerry Henderson: 32:56

Thank you so much for sharing this with other people. I think it's such important work and if it served you in your journey, I know it'll serve them as well. And finally, I do want to remind you that if you need additional resources, you can go to my website at jerryhendersonorg and you'll find all kinds of information there, links to other resources. You can get a 30-day assessment guide about how you're doing with your relationship with yourself and how you can monitor that and make improvements in that relationship that you have with yourself. So, once again, feel free to go to my website at GerryHendersonorg and get a hold of some of those resources that can help you in your journey. And as I close, I want to remind you as always, you are worthy of your own love.