How to Be More Confident: Gain Real Confidence From Within

Sara Anderson: I sometimes would be really incredible as a speaker. I’d win, I’d take home all the trophies. And other times, I would stand in front of everyone like a goldfish with no thoughts in my brain, and I had no idea. I was just, like, blank.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: If one of your goals is to feel more confident in yourself, here’s what to know. Becoming confident isn’t something that happens. Becoming confident is a developmental growth process. Confidence is something that you earn, and there is a path of growth when it comes to feeling truly, authentically trusting of yourself and confident in every area of life.

Sara Anderson: There’s a white tiger at the zoo, and they really wanna give it this beautiful enclosure, ’cause it hasn’t had that. And so they go through this effort to create these rolling hills, and grass, and all these things. And the tiger never leaves its enclosure. It just keeps pacing and doesn’t even realize that the door is open.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: By the end of today’s episode, you are going to have a roadmap that you can apply to your own experience to help you begin moving forward to this confident, self-trusting place that I know you wanna be in. If this is your first time tuning in, welcome. I’m Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby. This is Love, Happiness, & Success. My background, I’m a psychologist. I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist. I’m also a board-certified coach, and every week, I’m here with you to talk about growth, love, happiness, and success, the key ingredients for a life worth living, and I’m so glad you’re here.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Today I’m talking with Sara Anderson, founder of Lead Out Loud and creator of the Resonance Method, a framework that helps high-achieving leaders stop performing confidence and start embodying it so that their presence and communication actually land. And she is here today to share her tips and strategies with you so that you can stay calm and really show up as being confident and in charge when it counts. So Sara, thank you so much for being here today.

Sara Anderson: Thank you. I’m so excited to be here.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Yeah. So we have so much to talk about because I feel like so many people, myself included, have these moments where they’re just riddled with self-doubt, and it does stuff to us. We start talking too much. We over-explain. Sometimes we withdraw. What is that about? Why is confidence so hard?

Sara Anderson: You know, one thing that I notice a lot about confidence is a lot of us, we think of it like it’s a byproduct. Like, once we achieve, and everyone comes from a different background, so we can fill in the blank differently for different people, but once we achieve X, then I will feel confident. And what I found too, with a peek behind the curtain, is that that only compounds the higher you climb if we don’t address that from the inside out. I think of it as less about situational or competence or experience-based confidence, but building more of that real embodied confidence in yourself.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Yeah. That’s a good point, and gosh, isn’t that true? I think I’ve probably fallen into this. It’s almost subconscious, isn’t it? It’s like this belief that when I achieve some kind of imaginary ideal, then I will magically feel confident, but that’s not really how it works, and we keep striving and doing and maybe someday. But you’re saying that there’s actually deeper inner work that’s the real path to confidence.

Sara Anderson: When I was in university, I was a competitive public speaker. I stumbled into it. It was not on purpose. I started off in a community college, and I wanted to go to the business program at Cal Poly, and there was a prerequisite called Forensics. And I was like, “That’s weird, forensics?” So I show up, and when I show up, they say, “So this isn’t really a class. You travel every weekend to compete by being on stage public speaking.” I went the first weekend and I won, and I like to win. I was like, “Okay, I really like this.”

Sara Anderson: Well, I sometimes would be really incredible as a speaker, and I would win. I’d take home all the trophies. And other times, I would stand in front of everyone like a goldfish with no thoughts in my brain, and I had no idea. I was just like blank. And this was so long ago, I had no idea about nervous system regulation or that it, it was just I couldn’t really trust in myself. I was like, “Okay, I’m really good except for when I really have nothing to say.”

Sara Anderson: And then in my career later on, I was naturally really good at shape-shifting, so I can walk into a room and really quickly identify who I need to be to move the conversation forward the way that I want to. It’s just, that’s an innate thing for me, but it’s more of a survival instinct, and it really was erasing my authenticity. So I didn’t really feel a true confidence. I just could kind of shape-shift in that room but lose myself in the process.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: What I’m hearing you say though in your story is something that I think so many of us can relate to, which is like sometimes it feels like you’re on your game and you can do the thing, but then other times it’s almost like feeling flooded and like your brain just goes out the window, and that you had a coping strategy, like pretending to be someone else or going into a character. But to your point, that creates this disconnection from self, like it’s sort of inauthentic. When we talk about confidence, it sort of seems like magic, right? Like, you have it or you don’t, or that it’s somehow going to be bestowed upon you.

Sara Anderson: Yeah, absolutely. And there is this — people do feel like with confidence or charisma and these qualities that, gosh, that person has it and they’re so amazing, and how do they have it? But they don’t really realize that it’s buildable. There are actually ways that we can build this. A lot of the people who come to work with me have been in therapy for a great deal of time, so I have the benefit of them having that foundation, and we’re able to just take it further from there.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: So help me understand then, so you went through this growth experience in your own life where it seemed like confidence was something that you wanted, but it kinda showed up or not on its own volition. What was your trajectory like when you began thinking about, “Wait a minute, what’s going on when I am on versus when I’m somewhere else?”

Sara Anderson: Funny enough, I didn’t really unpack that at all during those experiences earlier on with public speaking. It was really more so that in my tech career, I did a lot of presenting. I was also opening public speaking clubs at different organizations and mentoring them. And I got more comfortable, but I would say that often it was more of that situational kind of confidence where it’s like this is a familiar situation, so I feel more comfortable in this situation, but might get thrown off if other kind of things came in that I wasn’t expecting.

Sara Anderson: So when it came to discovering how to move through this, it was that I was experiencing a lot of anxiety, and I was experiencing a big misalignment in who I felt like I was and who I was presenting. It was that I was noticing this internal friction that I wasn’t in control over that I wanted to try and get to the bottom of.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: What did you uncover?

Sara Anderson: Well, I went through burnout maybe in like 2014 or 2015, and for me it was very like a clinical burnout. I was having a lot of physical issues, and I was noticing that the way that I was able to operate before, I wasn’t able to operate. I was falling asleep at 3:00 PM. I had rashes and hives and gastrointestinal issues, and I’m like, “What is happening here?” It wasn’t until I was experiencing that, that I really started to think about, “What am I gonna do about this?” I was going to different doctors, and their literal words were, “Your adrenals are shot. You should take $400 worth of supplements, and you should probably work on your stress.” But what does that mean, work on my stress? I have no tools. I have no idea what to do.

Sara Anderson: I was sitting in my car outside of a doctor’s appointment on a weekday, and I remember having this fantasy where I was realizing, you know, if I were to leave my career today, no one could fault me for it. I am experiencing medical issues, and I could do that. And what would I do? I don’t know, maybe I could go sit on a beach somewhere, and wouldn’t that be nice? But then some very wise part of me stepped forward. Maybe my future self stepped in, and I heard this quote in my mind, “Wherever you go, there you are.”

Sara Anderson: I think the call is coming from inside the house. I don’t think I’m gonna be less stressed or anxious just because I change my environment. But I also made a deal with myself. If I feel truly happy, healthy, and I still wanna leave, then I will give myself full permission to do so, but not until, because I’m not running from, I only wanna run towards things. So that was a huge pivotal moment for me.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Wow. So wise, because many people, through no fault of our own — I mean, nobody would have faulted you for buying a one-way ticket to Aruba. But what you were noticing is, “I have some work to do,” and to stay where you were and challenge yourself to do what work existed there in order to change how you experienced the circumstances rather than removing yourself from the circumstances, that’s really powerful stuff because that’s a huge growth opportunity. That says to me so much about you for rising to that challenge and seeing what there was to discover and change.

Sara Anderson: Yeah, that was a really big moment. I’m very grateful to my former self for having that moment of wisdom.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: That’s so awesome. Then what happened? It sounds like you went on a hero’s journey as you decided to do things differently.

Sara Anderson: Part of my journey was leading a podcast that I had a season of called “That’s Different,” where I wanted to learn about people doing things differently. But that was after going, seeking mental health support, which also just wanna name that it’s not always a straightforward path. I went to a psychiatrist, and after paying out of pocket, like $250 a session, multiple sessions, she was like, “If you don’t want medication right now, I don’t really have much for you here.” And I’m like, “Oh, I didn’t realize that that’s how this worked.” So I went on this journey of seeking out different support and working on myself and taking care of my health. And then one day, I was now working at a different company, and I woke up and I was like, “I feel pretty good. I feel pretty good these days.” It was two years later. It took a long time.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Well, may I ask what changed that allowed you to progress from being so burned out that you were physically unwell to waking up and being like, “No, I’m good. I don’t wanna do this anymore, but I’m all right.” What changed?

Sara Anderson: A lot of self-awareness work. Rather than where did I go and who did I see, more like what transformations occurred, I was way more self-aware of myself and my thoughts and my critic, and created more space between myself and the critical voices. And I learned more techniques to calm myself. And I did things like The Artist’s Way, where I really got to learn more about myself in these different creative ways, and that built a different kind of self-trust in myself.

Sara Anderson: I started to wake up to what I’ve heard called the escalator that we step onto. Sometimes there’s a relationship escalator, but sometimes there’s a career escalator. I think it first started from people describing romantic relationships, but it really applies to career as well, which is that you step onto this escalator at some point, and you just kind of fall from one thing into the other. You’re just rising along it, and there may be some point where you look around and you go, “What floor am I on? Where am I going? How did I get here? Is this where I wanna go? Do I wanna get off here? Maybe I should be on a different one.”

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: That makes a lot of sense. What you’re describing, the transformation is, at the place where you weren’t well, a lot of stress, but also that disconnection and that the work that you did was really getting self-awareness, creating more psychological distance between the parts of yourself so that you felt like you were in more control. But really cultivating a different kind of relationship with yourself and maybe creative parts of yourself that just sort of felt more like you.

Sara Anderson: Yeah, that was a big piece. And another big piece in retrospect was that for a long time I was feeling these feelings of angst or agitation or frustration with — I was thinking, “Things should be different. Why is everyone operating this way? I don’t like this.” I had a lot of opinions about how we should be living and working and doing things, and I was waiting for everyone else to have the same insights as me before owning them for myself and my own life. So there was also a permission slip I wrote myself somewhere along the way where it was like, actually, people don’t have to agree with you. You can still own your opinions, and you can choose to live your life in accordance to those.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Wow. So really a journey towards congruence, getting clear around who you are, what you care about, your values, recognizing that it’s out of alignment with your career, but that also there is this step forward into confidence that even begins with permission to own my own opinions is its own type of confidence. So Sara, you’ve been sharing with us this journey that you went on, this quest for wholeness in some ways that began to restore your health and your emotional wellbeing, but also began building your confidence, and then what happened?

Sara Anderson: When I left my career, I didn’t know where I was going. It was really a leap of faith. My business plan for myself, I made a business plan for myself over a winter break before I left, and it was really, like, how much time do you need and how much runway of cash do we have to fund this not knowing period that you’re wanting to embark on? So once I did that, then I started my podcast. I was like, “Okay, I know that I want something different. I don’t know what that is. I know other people are doing different things with their lives. Let me find them and talk to them and figure out what this is about, and how do you have the confidence to do that?”

Sara Anderson: And I was also just continuing to do my own work. There was still more work to do for myself. And then COVID happened right about the time that I had planned to figure it out and what I was gonna do. And that was actually fine because it was such a powerful time period for me. I don’t know that I would have been as focused had there not been this external thing happening. I took a course on mindfulness, and it was a six-week course. At the end of it, they pitched us into a two-year mindfulness teacher training. And I didn’t wanna be a mindfulness teacher, but I couldn’t stop thinking about this. My intellectual mind was like, “One plus one equals two. If you don’t wanna be a mindfulness teacher, why would you spend thousands of dollars to learn to be a mindfulness teacher?” And another part of me was like, “There’s something there. There’s something there. You have to follow it.” And that was another trust-building exercise where I followed my intuition, and it’s a large foundation of what I’m able to do today.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Wow. You know what you’re describing, Sara, is this doing the experiential work, this embodiment of confidence, which is in ways both small and large, trusting yourself, that quiet voice inside of you that says, “You know what you could do.” And then, “Yeah, I think I do need to do that. I don’t know why, but I’m going to anyway,” and that you trusted it, and that it helped build and develop this trust in yourself. Over time, it’s like these layers and layers of self-awareness, self-trust, consolidating your identity.

Sara Anderson: Yeah, it feels like at first it was really hard to trust and it was kind of like switching from this more masculine or cognitive kind of way of looking at the world into this more embodied, felt sense way of looking at things. But the hard part about that process in the beginning, this part does get easier in my experience, is doing that and being in relationship with other people while you’re evolving and going from making sense to people to not making sense to people.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: I totally understand because what we’re talking about right now, especially early in your journey, is still fragile. It’s almost like a soft shell crab or something, and you’re still trying to figure it out and develop it and trust it, and then to have other people who might have strong opinions maybe challenging it or being like, “Why?”

Sara Anderson: Yeah. And I also think it’s important to name too for people who are going through this and might be listening, that the people who love you are often the ones who are kind of creating this stress that we feel in this arena, and not because they don’t love us and not because they aren’t well-intentioned, but because they have an idea of who we are, and our new self that we’re creating is kind of threatening the old self that they loved.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: What happened to Sara? What happened to Lisa? I think we can all project onto other people what we view as being the right way to be or normal or the happy path that’ll lead to good things, and when somebody deviates from that, it’s easy for people who care about us to fill in the blanks with all kinds of catastrophic things. Then that turns into emotional caretaking, and that is also hard when you’re in a space of development.

Sara Anderson: Yeah, absolutely. I think that reminder, the projection reminder, is always helpful for people because when we feel criticized or we’re taking things personally, it’s always helpful to remind us that if someone says, “Oh, you’re gonna wear that?” then you know that they wouldn’t feel comfortable wearing something as bright or loud. It just means that they themselves would feel very uncomfortable making that move.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: That’s another important part of that confidence — this differentiation. I get to be a different person than you are, and it’s okay to be you, and it’s okay to be me. Reminiscent of giving yourself that permission slip, that there doesn’t need to be sameness between yourself and other people I think is an important dimension of confidence.

Sara Anderson: Honestly, I think that I have been so different than people around me, even from my childhood and my family. It was more so this identity of being the driven one, the smart one, the high achiever, the one that makes sense, not the crazy one, the good girl. And funny enough, it actually wasn’t even other people keeping me in that box or it was me thinking that I needed to keep myself there for them. Because when I did start to step out and I felt like the wobbly horse and shaky and like, “Okay, I’m gonna tell my mom that I left my job at Uber.” I didn’t even tell her until after all these moves. Nobody reacted in the way that I feared under the surface. Everyone was fine with it. And it was me.

Sara Anderson: Did you ever hear that story that they tell about the white tiger with the enclosure at the zoo?

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: No?

Sara Anderson: Okay, this is such a good one ’cause it’s exactly what we all experience. So there’s a story, I’m not sure exactly where the zoo or the details, but the gist of it is there’s a white tiger at the zoo, and they really wanna give it this beautiful enclosure ’cause it hasn’t had that. And so they go through this effort to create these rolling hills and grass and all these things. And when they are finished, they place the cage there and they open the door and they’re like, “Go. We created.”

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Be free.

Sara Anderson: The tiger never leaves its enclosure. It just keeps pacing and doesn’t even realize that the door is open. And that is in a nutshell what can happen for us. We don’t even realize the water that we’re swimming in. We don’t even realize the ways we’re holding ourselves back.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Right. So you’re saying that we can, because of our expectations and our beliefs about what is, fail to see that the doorway to a new possibility or new opportunities is wide open, and we just have to walk through. We trap ourselves, but to your point, though, it’s also easy to talk yourself into believing that other people are trapping you, because it’s gonna upset them if I do X, Y, Z. But in reality, when you did make some of these big, bold moves, people were like, “Cool.”

Sara Anderson: Yeah, it can go either way too, because it’s not like I’ve never had detractors. That’s an important part of confidence too, is to be able to navigate that. So often we might think like, “Oh, I can’t do that. I can’t do that.” It’s like, well, you could. I think a lot of times we’re not looking at the sacrifices that we are currently making. We only look at what we would be sacrificing should we make this scary move that we really wanna make, that we’re not factoring that in, which is important.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Yeah, like there’s an opportunity cost for staying the same, you’re saying, that maybe we’re not indexing as much as we should be.

Sara Anderson: Right. And especially if it’s more socially acceptable, the current path that we’re on, and the other one is something that we might actually deeply value, but society might not value, and so we might be risking reputation, and we might not trust ourselves to be able to handle that. But really what we would gain would be so much more valuable for us personally.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: If somebody listening to this is in that time before — maybe they aren’t feeling good at work, maybe they’re feeling burnt out, or maybe they’re feeling that incongruence between what they have and who they are and what they want, and like there are big gaps, but they don’t even know how to start closing that gap — I’d love to start talking to them about things that they might think about or experiment with or do to begin building some of that strength in themselves. Where do people begin?

Sara Anderson: One area — it’s always starting with awareness, right? Even being aware. So one thing is opening the door to it being better. And the second starting point I wanna start us at is a lot of the people that I work with now — I’m not a therapist, right? So they’re not coming in to heal. They’re coming in because they’re already very successful, and they usually fit into two categories. One, they have this deep yearning to be bigger, to see what it would be like to be on bigger stages. Maybe they have a message. They wanna do a TEDx. They wanna write a book, and they’re grappling with the desire to be seen and the pain of being perceived. Or there are other people who don’t really want the spotlight, but they’re starting to notice that even though they’re in an executive position and they have a seat at the table and they speak in front of people, they’re expending a lot more energy than they need to be because of this internal friction. So they wanna be able to build that confidence that matches their exterior from the inside out.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Internal friction. What would be an example of that in the second category?

Sara Anderson: I used to think of myself as largely introverted, and the way that they describe introvert versus extrovert is like, if you gain energy from being around other people, then you’re extroverted, and if it drains you, then you’re introverted. But then I did all of this work, and I remember the moment after I was in a situation that would have absolutely drained me previously, and I was ready to keep going. I was like, “Wow, I feel so good.” And then I realized in that moment what the difference was, which was I was present with the people that I was speaking with. I was not overthinking, and I was not spending extra double the energy by also being in a very judgmental witness seat above the conversation.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Isn’t that important? Wow, you had found a way to quiet that critic — like, “What are you doing? I can’t believe you said that.” That that was the part that was draining.

Sara Anderson: Yes. And so that is when I realized, oh, okay, this is actually taking so much more. It’s already hard enough to do your job and do all the things that you’re already doing, but if you’re also doing that, then that is very difficult. And it compounds, because if you know that each time you’re gonna go do something courageous or you’re gonna go be in public or you’re gonna speak publicly, that you’re gonna also beat yourself up on the back end of that, you’re not really gonna feel confident or energized to do it more.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Yeah. If you have that pattern or habit of ripping yourself to shreds about what you do or if you didn’t do it, that any time you try to put yourself out there, it is so exhausting, not because of the thing itself, but because of this really toxic relationship that you have with yourself. That’s the hard part.

Sara Anderson: Absolutely. Right, because even if you do experience external criticism, it’s really most painful if it’s already hitting a bruise or a wound that you already have.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: And that internal critic knows all the soft spaces. Ugh.

Sara Anderson: Right. So starting with that awareness — like, okay, so if someone is listening to this and they’re like, “Oh, well, I guess maybe I do do that.” Thinking about those stressful situations, the ones that do keep you up at night, that’s another symptom that I hear from people a lot.

Sara Anderson: I was thinking about a metaphor for my work. It’s kind of like someone hears that I work on cars, and so they come to my shop and they say, “Hey, I really wanna know about the shiniest wax for my paint job. I was on TikTok and there was this really shiny wax.” And as we’re talking, I’m like, “Yeah, sure, I’ll tell you about the wax.” And I’m hearing a ping, and I’m like, “Hey, your car didn’t turn over the first time.” That’s the equivalent of when leaders I’m speaking with are like, “Yeah, no, I feel confident. I’m very successful. I have a great title. I mean, yeah, if people ask me questions I’m not expecting, then that really throws me off. And yeah, I can’t really fall asleep at night.” And I’m like, “Okay, wait, there are some things here.”

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Your car’s on fire.

Sara Anderson: There are things that we might be able to address for you. It’s not a problem in the sense that you could never address it if you’re fine with it. But also it’s not personal. We all experience different versions of this. What people reflect to me too is that that’s been really helpful in my containers, that nothing really shocks me. And I’m not coming in with this “Oh, yeah, okay, sad for you” kind of energy. It’s like, no, this is what we experience. Let’s get in there and let’s see what we can do to shift it for you.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: I could see it helping particularly heavily defended people who might also really not have a lot of self-awareness at the beginning to sort of put language to their experience and be like, “Oh, yeah, I haven’t slept in three years.” So that they can just begin to connect their own dots, and just say, “Yeah, maybe I am disconnected from myself. Let’s notice what that internal voice is saying to me. Oh, it’s pretty ruthless and abusive. Huh.” And starting to unpack that. I think people can push that away if they worry about being judged or being vulnerable or that there’s something uniquely wrong with them.

Sara Anderson: Yes. So whenever I’m leading a workshop, something that I always say is, “We’re gonna be scientists, and we’re putting on our lab coats, and we’re putting on our goggles, and whatever we discover is perfect because it’s reality, and that’s where we’re starting.” Because what I do notice is that one of the things that can really stop people from completely transforming their lives is that they discover or they start to take a peek, and they see some pattern, and they make that pattern mean something about themselves, and they don’t like how that feels, and so they close that box, and then they don’t get to change or shift anything because of their own judgment in that moment.

Sara Anderson: So I really want to support people in seeing that and also seeing that it’s not personal, and then also the power of relationships and being in a group where you hear other people name very [similar experiences].

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Yes. Oh my gosh. I am obsessed with group work. It is so powerful. I’m a psychologist. I do therapy, that’s great. I do individual work coaching too, also great. But I tell you what, if I am working with a group — like one of the things I do, heartbreak recovery work, so people dealing with a traumatic relationship loss and working through that. I can facilitate change in weeks, months, that would take years in one-on-one work because of exactly what you’re talking about. The visibility that you get when other people are telling their stories and you recognize something about your own experience in somebody else’s story. It moves the whole thing so much faster. In my group, when I present to people the idea of, “You know, we do these intensives with a group,” they’re like, “No, no, no, no, no. No groups.”

Sara Anderson: It really is so powerful. And it’s so funny too, because sometimes the people who are the most not wanting to be in a group, that’s what they need. That is the thing that would unlock it for them. The thing that makes them not wanna be in it is the thing that would make it help them. I’m such a nerd for all of this work and experiential work, and even things around perception. When I do an immersion in person as a part of my cohorts, I’ve seen this happen with so many women. They stand in front of the group and we do an exercise where they actually don’t speak, and they’re just perceived. And then they get reflections back to them. And for some of them, who they think people see themselves as and who they actually are showing up as are such wildly different worlds. It’s such an eye-opening thing for them to hear from other people. Like, “I see you as powerful, and I see you as so thoughtful, and I see you as fun.” And it kind of shatters this illusion of how they thought people were thinking of them in the best way.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Oh, that is so cool. Man, you’re doing like ’70s-style encounter groups. I love it. That’s what it is, it’s experiential. I also wanted to hear you speak just a little bit about something that I think is very interesting in your work, which is the relationship between confidence, the kind you earn, and the ability to regulate yourself and have that nervous system self-management. Take us into that.

Sara Anderson: Let’s say we’re talking about one of these stressful situations that we’re unpacking and wanting to shift. So when we walk into that room, maybe it’s speaking with their boss or in front of the company, whatever it might be, a job interview. And if we just go in and we take our affirmations and we’re like, “I’m confident, I’m good, I’m confident, I’m good,” but our body is activated in the way that it gets activated, so that’s like sweaty palms, your heart is racing. And what’s happening in our mind in those moments is that our prefrontal cortex, the most modern part of our brain, doesn’t connect to the rest of our brain in the same way when we’re in this activated state.

Sara Anderson: So in essence, we’re doing things on hard mode because we’re trying to solve — sometimes it’s sitting at your desk on your own trying to solve really stressful, hard problems in business, or sometimes it’s in person with a person, and then we’re beating ourselves up after because we’re thinking, “Who was that that walked in that room? I know the answer to those questions. Why did I stumble? Why did I stutter?”

Sara Anderson: And then, and then we go, “Ah, I don’t know. I guess I’ll do better next time. I’m gonna work on those affirmations.” But what we do with the nervous system is similar to like a CBT style when you’re looking mentally and at the thoughts. We’re looking at what’s happening with zero judgment in our nervous system, in our physical experience, and then we’re learning little tools that we are using outside of those experiences, but also that we can use in those experiences. So we’re training ourselves to be able to regulate in that moment so that we can be more connected.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Yeah, as opposed to trying to muscle the thoughts, you’re saying that by learning how to bring your body back down to a calm state, you’re able to bring your brain back online essentially, and have more control over what you say and what you do, but that it starts with the physicality of it.

Sara Anderson: Yes. I think of it like there’s a wheel, and with any of these situations, some people are going to gravitate or some things will be more accessible or easy for them, so we’ll start where they are. We could start with the thoughts. We can start with the physical experience. We can start with the emotional experience, and then it’s all circular. So one will impact the other and make the others easier. But if you are super activated, it’s going to be very difficult for you to be able to do the mindset work to help you shift the confidence. So starting with that physical experience is huge for people.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Yeah. I appreciate the reminder that there are different ways to tap into that, and that what you are telling yourself impacts the way that you feel physically and your internal experience of stress, which then changes the way you behave, and it also changes the way that you think. So they’re all interrelated, and it doesn’t matter what your doorway is into that. But to not, at the very least, neglect physicality, because if you’re disowning that, that’s a big pillar of how all this works.

Sara Anderson: Yes. And it’s a big part of that reconnection to yourself, and it’s also relationally such a big part of our congruence, which is so important for us to connect with people. Because even if we talk ourselves mentally into thinking that we’re feeling confident, if our bodies are going haywire, if our vocal cords are constricting, we’re sending out all these incongruent signals. And those are often the things that for the people who are already successful and everything else is going right, but they’re like, “Ah, I’m just not getting the promotion or the deals or the sales,” it’s often these very subtle subconscious signals that we are sending in these conversations that they don’t realize that the body will likely help them with quite a bit.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Interesting. Wow. You’ve been so generous with your time and with your insight and your experiences and your wisdom. If we have a friend here with us right now, Sara, who’s been listening to this and who sees so much of themselves in the experiences that you’ve been describing, what would be the one thing you would want them to know, or even the first thing that you would suggest they try as they take the first steps in this direction of more confidence?

Sara Anderson: I will come back to the awareness piece without judgment. We can’t just do the awareness. We really have to work on the non-judgment piece. Even if they just start to take a moment right now in their mind or journal on this later — what are the situations where I’m finding myself either wanting more confidence or feeling insecure? And then let’s unpack — what is actually happening in your whole system, and particularly in your body? And then also for those people — there’s a lot of people I know who go to yoga and they do meditation, and they’re really calm on their mat. But then the moment they get into their life, it’s all out the window. So also finding little ways to integrate this presence with yourself into the moment.

Sara Anderson: One thing that I really like is even just noticing as simple as the back of your body versus the front of your body. The front of our body —

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Never thought about that before in my life.

Sara Anderson: Okay, so if we’re anxious, if you ask a person where they feel it, 9.9 times out of 10, I hear, “It’s in my chest, it’s in my throat, it’s tight, it’s clenching.” That’s because that’s where we feel that sensation. But if we intentionally put our attention into the grounding places, like I feel the weight of myself on the chair, I feel the back of my body touching there, that helps us to be able to access the less stressed part of ourselves. So there are so many different things, but that’s one example of one little thing that’s not spending 20 minutes in meditation. It’s just like, “All right. Deep breath. I feel the back of my body. Reconnect with the person.”

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Great. Small ways of reconnecting with physical reality, grounding yourself, calming down, and just gaining that awareness of yourself and how you feel. And can I just say one more thing?

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Can we all make a pact, everyone here with Sara and I today, that if, as you do this, you become aware that you are judging yourself or wanting to criticize yourself or being mad at yourself for not being different, thank you in advance for not judging yourself for judging yourself. It’s really, it’s all okay, and to develop this observer mind where you can just be like, “Yeah, this is what’s happening right now,” if you’re judging yourself and then annoyed that you’re judging yourself.

Sara Anderson: Yes, ’cause that’s a never-ending.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: I know. It’s like the mirrors into infinity. You can go with that one.

Sara Anderson: Yeah. So sometimes just the expecting it where I’m like, “Oh, right. This is what people do. We judge ourselves. How funny that I’m doing the thing that we all do,” and then break that spell.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Well, Sara Anderson, this has been such a fun and informative conversation. I’m so glad that we got to spend some time together today, and for our friends listening, they’re like, “I would like more Sara in my life,” where would they follow you or learn more about you and your work?

Sara Anderson: I do love a ’70s aesthetic. You can find me — sarahanderson.co is my website, sarah.anderson__ on Instagram or Sarah Anderson Coaching on LinkedIn.

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Amazing. Thank you again so much.

Sara Anderson: Yes. Thank you.