Having confidence is one of the most powerful tools to perform at an elite level in our every day lives. A confident mindset helps us excel at our jobs, day-to-day interactions, and our decisions involving the future. When beginning a program with our personal training and life time fitness coaching clients in Napa, we interview them about what goals they would like to improve upon. A frequently seen goal is to improve confidence after having success in their program.
Elaborating further into that topic, we ask “what does improved confidence look like to you?” Common answers include:
- “How I feel in my own skin.”
- “I need to be at the top of my game at work and life.”
- “I’m training to apply for a position at a job, school or academy. If I’m capable, healthy and strong, I’m more likely to get the position.”
We make sure to check in through monthly interviews with our clients. A very common improvement we see in their lives is the increase in confidence. A helpful tip that significantly improves confidence in our clients consistently checking in to ensure exercise is performed 2-3 times per week.
Why is that so good for you? Having some form of physical activity for 10 minutes throughout the day will put the body past its comfort zone. This promotes adaptations in the body to increase lean muscle mass and burn calories from fat. Even if you’re tired and can’t get a full workout in, any challenge to the body will give a physiological response throughout the body to improve its performance. Ensuring to perform physical activity 4-6 weeks consistently means that conscious decisions are being made to improve oneself. Struggling through the comfort out of low physical activity to completing a challenging workout will improve confidence in stressful situations. For these reasons, situations that might appear intimidating or create anxiety will not seem as bad by exposing oneself to some form of challenging exercise.
Physical activity throughout the week can be as simple as performing the common plank exercise for 15-30 seconds, taking a 10-20 minute walk, or stopping by a local health club do a few of the resistance training machines. Ensuring to do these simple activities 2-3 times per week puts the body and mind in challenging conditions that it may not be used to. Once there is competency achieved in ensuring at least 2 challenging physical activities on a weekly basis, we can confidently manage even more challenging interactions in our everyday lives. When giving this tip to our clients, we see improvements in confidence and reductions in stress almost immediately. We get reports that these tactics are ingrained after a few weeks of checking in to ensure clients are adhering to challenging physical activity 2-3 times per week. Transforming the mindset of understanding what is too easy and comfortable to asking the question “what’s next?” is a critically important factor to improving confidence in everyday life experiences.
If you struggle with feeling depressed, insecure, or insufficient somewhere in your life, then why not get up and move around a little bit? Moving past your comfort zone will improve positive thoughts, feelings and actions throughout your everyday life. Most importantly, situations that pose a challenge can be handled with confidence because you have trained yourself to endure stress with regular physical activity and exercise.
Sean McCawley, the founder and owner of Napa Tenacious Fitness in Napa, CA, welcomes questions and comments. Reach him at 707-287-2727, napatenacious@gmail.com or visit the website napatenaciousfitness.com.
