Amy smith is a highly experienced life coach dripping with authenticity and style. At The Joy Junkie, she endeavors to help her clients gain self-confidence, stand up for themselves and live a more joyful life.
“The nucleus of everything that I do is helping people stand up for themselves without being assholes.” It’s two-fold really: it’s the internal component of believing in your own self-worth, believing you’re valuable enough to speak up for your thoughts, opinions, stances and beliefs, and the external component of what that looks like. How does it sound to establish a boundary?
Without a doubt, Amy has found that the most common reason that people struggle to stand up for themselves is because they are afraid of what other people are going to think. People's’ fears are shrouded in a number of topics: they’re not going to accept me, love me, they’re going to think I’m stupid, etc.
“It’s all about what someone else might put a brand on you as. ‘If they think something about me, then that must be true,’ and somehow that that will equate, or negate, your own self-worth.”
“What I see people do most of the time is people-please, and silence who they really are, what they really think, and what they really feel.” Amy believes there is a huge fallacy around what it means to stand up for you and stand up for your convictions. In many situations we silence ourselves, because we have convinced ourselves that speaking up is rude or aggressive.
As a basic jumping off point, one of the things that you can start doing as a sort of check-and-balance in the different relationships in your life, is to always ask yourself: is my silence making me a liar? Is my silence giving me a false sense of compliance? Amy helps her clients realize:
“I don’t have to be a dick. I can decline that sort of conversation with the utmost kindness and grace.”
Amy has another tool, which she calls, “If this, then that,” and it’s where we take a circumstance and we create a truth from it. The idea is to take the negative stories we tell ourselves, such as, “If I don’t get this job, then I’m a failure,” and remove their charge: “If I don’t get this job, then I didn’t get the job.”
She also has a quick and dirty tip for building confidence: “One of the fastest avenues to confidence is to start really doing things that you’re proud of.” Start looking at what you need to do today, or how you can conduct yourself today, that you will actually be proud. We need little wins that create a compound effect.
One of the biggest shifts that Amy believes we can make to alter our relationship to confidence is unpacking our concept around self-worth. The idea is conceptual. Currently, most of us evaluate our self-worth based on accomplishment, adoration or accolades from other people. It’s not just something that we have. Amy advocates that that worth is inherent. It is something that we already have.
“What if you were already worthy, you were already valuable and enough as is, and everything else in life were simply experiences?”
Through her own experiences, Amy has developed a new management system: the way in which she manages self-talk and hardship. One major piece is her allies, what she likes to call her soul tribe. She knows that, when something happens in her life, she will need to tell that story to a few people in her soul tribe to process it.
There’s another element: core value system. Amy teaches that your core values are elements that you need in your world in order for it to be fulfilled. “Am I honoring the things that I know bring me joy?”
If you head over to Amy’s website, TheJoyJunkie.com, you’ll see a free e-workbook and audiobook called Stand Up For Yourself Without Being a Dick. It’s nine different, very actionable challenges that are designed to help you catapult your self-love and self-confidence.
Amy and The Joy Junkie stand for everything that I stand for here at The Bold Life Movement, so I’m really excited to share her message with everyone. Listen, enjoy and check out The Joy Junkie!
SOME QUESTIONS I ASK:
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:
DON’T STOP HERE…
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES: