I'm not confident.

Ok, let's back up, I know what you're thinking... DECEPTION. Let me explain. In certain aspects of my life, I'm extremely confident. In work, I feel confident and fulfilled, my family life is a joy, I play sport and I'm pretty damn good at it (hello confidence). via GIPHY For all intents and purposes, on the surface, I 'seem' confident, but if I were to pick six words to describe myself, confident would not be one of them. On our weekly podcast Girls With Goals, that's exactly what we do, we ask each guest to describe themselves in six words or less. Seems harsh right? In truth people LOVE describing themselves, so it's all good clean fun. After forty or so episodes you do start to see a few words pop up regularly, 'loyal' is said quite often (not on the Georgia scale but we're in the neighbourhood) 'passionate' is another favourite and 'busy' also makes an appearance. A word that never seems to arise is 'confident', I would go so far as to say it's never been said, until this week's episode. For context, the woman who described herself as confident literally just wrote a book on it. Caroline Foran is a friend of the show, author of two books, interior design enthusiast and all round good craic. Her first book ,'Owning it: your bullsh*t free guide to living with anxiety', topped the Irish book charts for a whopping sixteen weeks, and now she's back  with the release of  her second offering 'The Confidence Kit: your bullsh*t free guide to owning your fear'. Listen to that CRUCIAL  part about confidence at 6.21 below, but honestly just listen to the whole thing and you'll have a heightened sense of self worth:   After the massive success of 'Owning it', you can imagine feeling a teensy bit of pressure when it comes to releasing another book. The irony I find with Caroline's situation, is that her original book was all about dealing with anxiety, and then she was thrust into a whirlwind of press, TV interviews not to mention giving talks to huge crowds. Basically, anxiety on a plate (for me anyway). The enlightening thing about  'The Confidence Kit' is that it really does feel like the next step in a journey. So, you've dealt with the fact that anxiety is an aspect of your life, how do you move forward and grow in confidence without fear? That is the question. Caroline insists confidence is not something you're born with:

'Confidence is domain specific, it relates to specific parts of your life, you might be very confident in one area and less confident in another. It comes from the latin fidere which means to trust in yourself, so it's to trust in your abilities rather than to trust the outcome. We can't know that things are going to turn out perfectly but you can trust that you're going to do things to the best of your ability and that's where confidence comes from.'

So what exactly is confidence? We tasked Caroline with laying down exactly what you need to feel confident and to debunk some of the common misconceptions:

'We talk about it so much and we don't really know what it is. There's a lot of misconceptions around it, people think that confidence is a personality type when actually you can be very extrovert and not have a lot of confidence. It's about trying to tease apart what fear is and the fear of failure which is something that we deal with so widely

Basically lads, it's not something you're born with and we 100% need to work on it.   The nature and culture of our country does play a part in all of our confidence levels, we tend to be self deprecating which is something Caroline can definitely relate to:

 'I grew up with girls where if someone calls you pretty you say ' no I'm not, I'm a horrible moon pig', you can't be seen to accept compliment, the whole self deprecating thing is so built into us.'

Caroline says that she is now embracing her confidence and she truly believes that people will benefit from the tool-kits and the step by step guides (13 steps to be exact) that she's laid out in her book. It's all about turning the mental road blocks we have into building blocks!

'I'm trying now to be less apologetic, but I'm also apologising for being less apologetic'.

So, we all still have a bit of work to do, but one thing's for sure we'll get there a lot quicker if we stop apologising TODAY. Sorry for shouting. Sorry for saying sorry. Crap. I'll start tomorrow. via GIPHY