I tried the productive dancing today, and discovered that making big gestures is legitimately scary for me! As I tried to make my limbs extend as far as they could, there was a sort of terror and discomfort that made me want to curl up into a little ball. I thought this was a great discovery, and it only reinforced that dancing big is the right thing for me to do. My yoga instructor often talks about using poses as a metaphor for larger life challenges, and breathing through poses to practice dealing with those larger challenges. I’d like to try focusing on my breath to calm myself down during morning dance time. Also, after doing it once, I learned that it might actually be worth it to carve out the time to focus on this. I’ll try to do that tomorrow, even if just for one song.
Today at work, I was asked to attend a practice presentation for a project in the office in order to give feedback from an outside perspective. This was scary because I have a coworker on the team who is often very critical of my comments in meetings. I felt myself making excuses to get out of the meeting throughout the day, but eventually ended up attending. I spoke up with comments during each round of feedback, and was surprised to have my comments seconded multiple times by the critical coworker. As always, afterwards I replayed moments in my head that I felt hadn’t gone well, but while talking with another coworker over tea, I realized that he also had insecurities about his performance. It gave me some great perspective that everyone faces these challenges, everyone messes up, and everyone learns from their mistakes and moves on.
I’ll attach my dancing songs below for your confident enjoyment!
Designing Confidence 