Episode 6: How to Finally Feel Like Enough with Alison Jamison

Hello friends:)  I’m SO excited to share today’s episode with the amazing Alison Jamison.  She’s a life & confidence coach who helps us understand the importance of cultivating our inner confidence.  She helps misfits slay their inner critics, create kick-ass confidence, and take action to be the heroes of their own stories. 

She helps her clients let go of their baggage, claim confidence, and complete the quest of making their dreams come true. We talk all about self-doubt...where it comes from, the inevitability of it & how what we do with it is what really matters.  Alison is a firm believer that teaching & modeling self-confidence is one of the best gifts we can give to our children. 

For her whole life, Alison never felt like she fit in anywhere.  There were all these parts of her which only seemed to fit in a little here, a little there.  She felt unaccepted.  Like she didn’t belong anywhere. She was always uncomfortable and never at ease anywhere.  But having her son changed all that.  

“I wanted to demonstrate for him how I want him to feel about himself.”

As she saw her son as pure perfection, she began to wonder why she didn’t think about herself that same way. She realized she was seriously lacking confidence and decided to do something about it. 

“I wanted to know who I was without reference to someone else."

She so wisely explains that we have this drive to belong (so we conform ourselves to fit in), yet we also have that inner voice saying, “this is not who you are”.  So we get confused.  Confused about who we really are.  I love this insight so much because it brilliantly explains why so many of us feel insecure.  We don’t even know who we are.  So, as always, the work starts with us. 

She says the path to self-confidence is shifting how you think about yourself, being willing to feel all the feels, and trusting yourself that you do know what’s best for you.  Trusting you do know how to show up for yourself, to have your own back. 

AMEN, SISTER.

And what happens when we don’t cultivate this inner trust?  Build this confidence muscle?

She says we miss the full experience of human life. We get stuck in our self-judgment and it “takes the shine off joy and adds spikes to the spare.”  But man, can it feel hard and exhausting to show up like that every day.

"Even though you think it's not that bad, what you're missing out on is great."

Alison encourages us to focus on and work towards really knowing that there is nothing wrong with us for having self-doubt.  It’s simply our brain’s way of protecting us from moving forward into the unknown (which our primal brain only sees as death).  Understanding this helps us to get out of judgment and into curiosity for curiosity allows confidence, while judgment creates self-doubt. 

I ask Alison to share how she stays in this “work” when it feels hard and she shares her 50/50 theory about feelings.

Sometimes life is just hard.  Be okay with hard.  Be okay with this season of life. 

Listen in to hear the rest of what has worked for her along this journey to inner trust & self-confidence as well as how her relationship with her partner has deepened because of it.  But for now, I leave you with the game-changing perspective shift from Alison:

That she is not broken. She believes there is no human on this planet that is not 100% loveable.  And though we all have actions that are unlovable, they don’t take away our worthiness or lovability.  Really accepting that fact, that you can't take away somebody's worthiness, no matter what allowed her to feel the love for herself in a real way. 

"If that is true, that I am completely worthy, there's nothing of me that I have to fix. How will that change how I think about myself?"

Oh! And (so many good nuggets in this interview)…  She suggests paying attention to how our kids are talking about themselves.  Is it a mirror of how we talk to ourselves?  Can we start modeling a more positive way?

Lucky us! Alison is sharing with all of us, her brief video: How to create more confidence in 10 mins or less, which is a quick jumpstart to start training your brain to think new things as well as her top 5 books that talk about emotional intelligence for kids. Grab those here.

To connect with Alison, find her here:

website: alisonjamison.com

email: coach@alisonjamison.com

Facebook: Alison Jamison Coaching

Instagram: @alison_jamison_coaching

Also check out Episode 3: How I know you’re NOT Failing

And join the community @ thriveinmotherhoodcommunity.com