Summary 

We all love the feeling of confidence—standing tall, knowing without a doubt that we’ve got what it takes to hit our goals. But what happens when confidence feels out of reach? In this episode, I’m diving into our relationship with confidence and exploring why waiting to feel 100% sure before taking action might be the biggest obstacle standing between you and your epic goals.

Discover how to break free from the "confidence trap" and learn to take powerful steps toward success—one moment at a time.

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Get on the email list: https://www.burnstressloseweight.com/magic 

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

• Why our love affair with confidence starts young and how it shapes our behavior as adults.
• The hidden cost of waiting for confidence before taking action.
• How perfectionism and overthinking can keep you stuck in a loop of inaction.
• The importance of focusing on small, actionable steps instead of linear solutions.
• A simple yet powerful mindset shift that helps you create confidence through action.

Listen to the Full Episode:

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Download the full transcript here.

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  I have been thinking about this topic for quite a long time and it comes up for me time and time again, depending on the season that I'm in, it comes up year after year. And I wanted to share my reflections on how to feel more confident in hitting your epic goal for this year. This can be a weight loss goal, a body goal, a wellness goal, a relationship goal, maybe a professional goal. I'll be talking about setting epic goals and how to guarantee you hitting your goal this year in a future podcast episode. So make sure you're staying tuned. But one of the things that I think is essential to talk about is before we get into strategizing and planning and. Even picking a goal is to talk about our confidence in ourselves hitting the goal. I don't know about you, but I can take a guess. I love, love, love, love feeling confident. I would say that my love affair with confidence started when I was about six years old. I was in Miss Block's first grade class and I was one of the best at board races. Our class would basically get split down the middle into two groups and the teacher would call up one kid from each side and she would give them a math problem and you had to be, this was like old school chalkboard, chalkboard times. Like I know now they have technology and all kinds of electronic boards, but we had old school chalkboards. where each person from either side of the group would have to go up and do the math problem. And then the moment you finish the math problem, you need to quickly sit on the ground. The first person to sit on the ground, having completed the math problem correctly, would win. The winner was always between me and this other kid, Jerome. Now, Jerome was fast. But guys, I was faster. I felt so confident that I was really good at math. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I was going to help my side of the classroom, my team win. I could feel my side of the classroom rooting for me. I could feel that gust of excitement and energy and belief in myself because I knew that I was really good at this. I realize now, as I've been reflecting on this, that I had no concept of, of course, when I was six years old. I mean, even when I was in my thirties, I had no concept of this, but my brain was being trained at a really young age to seek external validation, to feel confident.

  I was seeking external validation to measure my value and my worth with my class, to measure my capabilities, to measure my ultimate success. Now, as a six year old, and as I was growing up, as I'm sure is true for so many of you, this is not something that we're actually conscious of. I just noticed that the peers on my team wanted me on their team. I noticed the twinkle in Ms. Block's eye, and I noticed the feeling that I got when I won the race. What I learned at the age of six was that performance with confidence was a surefire way to feel good. I felt invincible. This is what we learn as little people. So very naturally, I got hooked on confidence. This might be you too. You might've found yourself feeling really hooked on having a love affair with confidence, wanting to feel confident, wanting to feel completely sure, completely certain that you can hit a goal, hit an Epic goal. Before you put in your full effort to achieving it. Hey, unstoppable friend, you're listening to the Burn Stress, Lose Weight podcast..

  I'm your host, Dr. Priyanka Venugopal. A physician turned a stress and weight loss coach for professional working moms and the founder of the Burn Stress, Lose Weight, Feel Unstoppable small group coaching program. This podcast is going to inspire change at the root for you on and off the scale. I've lost a little over 60 pounds while being a busy physician mom with two young kids and an unpredictable schedule. And along my journey, which was full of many, many imperfect moments, I have learned how to skip past the fads and the gimmicks. I am on this mission now to share with you how you can have a real strategy and mindset skills to really have more of the life you want that you have worked so hard for. Let's get into it. Here's what our brain learns when we continue our love affair with. Feeling confident, feeling sure, feeling certain before we start taking action. We start to believe that we have to feel confident or some semblance of confidence or control before we can put in our full effort. And I think that part of the reason is because, especially as professional women, we are so busy. We have so many things going on in our life. It's very normal to have that story in your mind. Why would I put in my full effort if I cannot be completely sure and confident of my future success, but I want you to see how this can create a really downward spiral in actually hitting the goal. If you have to feel completely confident and completely sure in hitting your goal to put in your full effort. You can never put in your full effort. Can we see like how not putting in your full effort then by default starts to not create the results that you want? The other thing that we learn when we continue our love affair with confidence and certainty and control is we inadvertently learn that feeling doubt or a flicker of disbelief or feeling nervous is a problem. The trouble with this is if we are villainizing or making our moments of doubt or nervousness or uncertainty a problem, we end up really holding back massive results because we hold back taking consistent action today. My love affair with confidence started to become a problem as I got older because I started tackling harder and harder problems. I wasn't just doing board races with Jerome in first grade. In school, even as I entered high school and college and medical school and residency, the problems started to get harder. When we're really little, when we're in elementary school or middle school or even high school, the way that our educational system is set up is We start to think about all of our problems with this linear trajectory.

  Like if I do step one and then I do step two and then I do step three, I will guarantee that I'm going to hit this goal or I'm going to have the success. It's like one plus two equals three. So as a really young person, when I was six years old and seven years old, I just trained my brain to think very rigidly in the form of linear patterns. I started to believe that everything, all of my problems, all of the obstacles that I encounter should also follow a linear pattern, but the reality is in real life, as we get older, as we encounter more complex problems and harder problems, and we have more dynamics with other people being a part of the obstacles that we're trying to navigate. It isn't always so linear. As I got older and started living more of my quote unquote adult life outside of the educational system, I started encountering obstacles and challenges and problems that weren't so linear. That weren't just one plus one equals two. I started to feel a lot of uncertainty. I felt doubt and unsure and nervous as I was encountering problems specifically with weight loss. I remember thinking that if this was just a linear problem and a linear solution, why am I not solving this? Why is it that I keep gaining and losing the same five to 10 pounds? Why is it that I feel so frustrated with this struggle? It's because I was trying to apply my linear problem solving strategies. worked when I was a student into the construct of a much more complicated life. And because I had this love affair with wanting to feel completely confident and certain and sure of my strategy that I was 100 percent going to hit my goal, I never would put in my full effort. So I would have a strategy that sounded pretty good on paper. I would have a strategy that I'm like, if I just follow the strategy, I should lose weight. I shouldn't be able to keep it off. I shouldn't be able to hit the body goal that I have. But there was always this flicker of doubt because I had never actually fully solved the problem in the past. A small part of my brain thought, well, you didn't do it before, so you can't be completely confident. That this time is going to work and it was that seat of doubt that what if it doesn't work this time? It didn't work last time, so it might not work this time. Like all of that inner monologue that drove me to create very convincing, compelling, and convenient stories to not put in my full effort on a day to day basis. So the moment that I had any life obstacle, the moment that my kid had a temper tantrum or I got into a fight with my partner or something unexpected came up at work, I would be so fast to throw in the towel on a winning weight loss strategy because a part of my brain had already decided it might not work anyway.

  When we have this love affair with feeling confidence, and sure and certain, and we villainize that feeling of doubt or uncertainty, you might find yourself, especially if you have overachieving tendencies, type A perfectionist tendencies, you might find yourself trying to solve your doubt and your uncertainty with a lot of overthinking. You might find yourself ruminating on a plan. You might find yourself researching a lot. You might find yourself in indecision. I call this the sneaky procrastination tactic of a professional working mom. We think that we can out think. Our doubt or that we can out plan our uncertainty when the reality is, all this does is it perpetuates more waiting and waiting and waiting, which keeps that feeling of confidence also on hold. So if I'm describing you, if you're someone that really loves that feeling of confidence and control and feeling certain, and you. hate feeling doubt and uncertainty. You are in very good company. You're not alone in this. This is across the board, but I've personally experienced and what I see with professional women in every industry. But here's what I also noticed. I started to realize that if I keep waiting to feel completely confident, if I keep waiting to feel completely certain and completely sure, if I kept thinking about the future. Without acting on it, I was going to perpetually keep waiting. And in fact, the longer that I waited, the longer that the days and the weeks and the months and even years passed me by while I was waiting to feel completely confident, the more that my uncertainty and my doubt grew.

  One of the things that I realized, which is not a new realization, but it's something that I've known this for a while, but it like really hit a head for me this past month, is I abhor failing. Hate it. I don't like it. If I could unsubscribe from it, I would. But the reality is being a human, just being a human is messy. It is going to be full of moments that we go off plan, that we have a fail, that we don't, you know, it's not the linear path that we maybe had in our educational system. So it's okay if you don't love failing. It's okay if you hate it as much as me. But what we really want to start catching is what if hitting your dream body goal, your weight loss goal, your wellness goal this year, wasn't a linear line. What if it didn't have to be a linear line for you to gain massive momentum and hit that goal this year? But what if it was simply an exercise of courage? If you didn't need to feel completely and totally confident that you were going to hit your Epic goal this year. Actually, what if you could feel a few moments of doubt and a few moments of nervous and a few moments of uncertainty? What is the thing that you could completely focus on? One of the examples that I have been sharing with my clients in the Unstoppable group is I have a personal goal to be able to do An hour on the Stairmaster at level 10. If I attempted that right now, I feel like I'm losing a lung. I feel completely out of breath. I can just do at the start of this year, I could only just do a few minutes on the Stairmaster because my endurance is so, so, so terrible. And I realized that this is a perfect example and an analogy that I want to use for today's podcast episode. I am not at all confident that I can do an hour on the Stairmaster without losing a lung. I have zero confidence because I have not done it yet. I can theoretically imagine it, but it's so far away for me. It's such an epic goal for me that I have no confidence. But what I can be confident about is my next step today. I'm completely confident that I can actually do five minutes on the Stairmaster today. And I'm completely confident that next week I can add A minute. I can do six minutes on the Stairmaster next week. And once I do that, I can be completely confident that I can add a seventh minute. So sometimes, especially overachievers that have type A perfectionist tendencies, we have this desire to flash forward. We want to feel completely confident that we can hit our epic goal. But this is virtually impossible because you haven't done it yet. So rather than putting on the pressure of needing to feel completely confident and certain, imagine that you simply practice feeling complete confidence and certainty in this next moment, in this next step, let yourself have doubt whether you're going to hit the epic goal. Don't make the doubt a problem, but just focusing on the next step is going to help drive your brain to take more action this year. One of my favorite examples in this is just like another example. The Stairmaster is a good example, but another example, I remember when I started in my OBGYN residency as an intern on day one, I didn't really know how to hold a scalpel.

  I had no idea how to treat certain medical conditions I had not performed surgery. I'd never done the c section. I hadn't delivered a baby. There were so many things as an intern that I had not done. I was full of doubt and uncertainty and not being sure of myself. I didn't have any footing in place to navigate learning how to become an OBGYN physician. But over the course of four years, By just focusing on the next step of being a student, of learning how to hold a scalpel, learning how to do just the next small piece of the procedure. Over time, one step at a time, one foot in front of the next. Over four years, I started to create confidence. This is true, and I even think back on that first grade example of me feeling so confident that I was the best at math, even against Jerome. I don't think I actually started out feeling confident. The very first time that I went up to do board races, the very first time that Ms. Block created this game to begin with, I'm fairly certain that I walked up to that Chalkboard, feeling uncertain and nervous and my heart racing and doubt. It was only after I started performing, after I started taking action, started doing the board races and showing myself that I'm actually good at this, that I started to feel confident.

  So my biggest lesson over the past many years and the thing I've been reflecting on so much and why I wanted to record this podcast episode is because I really want to normalize that it's okay if you only feel confident. After you have achieved your goal, you don't have to feel completely confident beforehand. Imagine that instead of wasting time, forcing ourself or waiting for confidence on the big epic goal, we just focused on being confident in the next small step in how you show up this week, today, now, and then imagine that you've repeated that next step a hundred times. Where do you think you would be? I am guessing that you would absolutely hit your epic goal this year. One of my favorite things about this concept that we're talking about today is you get to teach this to your kids. I know that there are so many moments that our children feel doubt and nervous and they're unsure and they're uncertain about navigating a sticky situation or a problem or an obstacle and rather than placating them with you've got this or feeling like you're just fake, falsely cheerleadering them, which they can feel and we feel too, imagine that we didn't have to placate their doubt or their uncertainty anymore. Imagine that we helped them simply focus on their next step. So the way to feeling confident, how to feel confident this year is to give yourself permission to not feel completely confident at first. Just take the next small step this week. Today now and I promise if you just do that again and again and again You will start to create so much self trust and eventually even confidence I hope that you loved this conversation and this reflection that I have been having with myself I have this with myself usually at the start of a new year. It's something that I think about Often, but it is one that I love to remind myself on because again, I still do love and have a little love affair with feeling confident and certain. I think a lot of professional women do, and I don't ever make myself wrong for loving that feeling of confidence, but I've stopped making it be and feel wrong.

  When I have doubt, I have stopped letting it. Hold me back from taking action today. And there has been something incredibly freeing and very, very, very powerful in that experience. I hope you love this conversation. And if you love topics like this, if you love concepts, and sometimes we talk about skills and tools on this podcast, then I want to encourage you to get onto my email list where I share Even more, you can head over to www.burnstressloseweight.com/magic and you will get even more value and concepts like this into your email inbox. I hope you have an amazing week and I will see you at the next one. Thanks for spending this time with me on the Burn Stress, Lose Weight podcast today. I hope that you are leaving today's podcast episode feeling a little lighter and more inspired than when we started. It turns out that you don't need to have a stress free life to hit your goals. on and off the scale, but when you feel more empowered to respond to your real life stresses with true strategy, we will game change how we show up and how we hit our goals. If you want to take what you're learning here on the podcast and put it into real life implementation, it might be time for us to work together in the Burn Stress Lose Weight Feel Unstoppable group coaching program. Head over to burnstressloseweight.com and you can learn all of the details, the nuts, the bolts, when the next group is starting and exactly how you can join. Okay, friend, I'll see you next time.