Definitions and Questions

The internet is full of opinions on female confidence. Fulfilling your Inner Self. The Confident Woman. "Do You Have What it Takes?" And there is little evidence as to whether or not the traits listed hold true...because the actual Confident Woman doesn't spend time much effort or time reading and assessing the articles, questioning whether she is or is not as confident as she thinks. She just is and she's already well aware.

Should you choose to skim a few of those articles, you would find things like "confident women don't gossip." Instead, they spend their time discussing their own goals and visions. Confident women don't hold back, they set the trends, they are not people pleasers and they don't worry about much. They follow the QTIP rule: quit taking it personally. They welcome comfortable silence. Confident women don't glorify how busy they are, in fact, you'll rarely hear them speak about it. They are focused on their priorities and rarely allow themselves to get the point of being overwhelmed. Confident women are not defeated by failure, and peer pressure is not in their vocabulary.

As with all good internet articles, some of that is pretty on target...some of it might not be. Most of it gets too wordy to bother with, and a bit of it ends up pretty convoluted anyhow. And so, what is it we are really talking about here?

Confidence: (kanfedens) noun. a feeling of self-assurance arising from one's appreciation of one's own abilities or qualities. 

The question, then, is not "What does a confident woman look like?" The question becomes...

"How do I get there?" Because doesn't that sound amazing? Close your eyes and take a minute to breathe that in. It's a feeling. Like coming in from the cold to a nice steaming cup of cocoa, a cozy blanket, a fireplace with blue and red flames licking the crackling logs, a sleepy dog curled up at your feet and a good book to get lost in. It's self-assurance. Notice here the word "self." There is no one else listed within this definition. This is all you, baby. Your own appreciation of your own self.

So, how do I get there? As you can probably imagine, there are more answers than there are grains of sand on Lake Michigan beaches. There are habits to form and relationships in question. Dreams to follow and words to learn...mantras to create, values and morals to integrate...the list is nothing if not daunting.

However, those habits and values and morals all become simple by-products of a natural way of being when you begin to create experiences and opportunities for yourself. The experiences you will begin to crave creating will have one common theme among all of you...another potentially daunting idea (if you let it). Each experience will have the potential of huge failure involved. Not like "maybe I will lose this game of checkers and that would be really sad for me" kind of failure. Real world failure that has life-changing outcomes.

Those experiences, no matter what the immediate end result, are the confidence builders, the skyscraper foundations, the rock that builds itself into a mountain over time.

:) Looking forward to the journey.

Chocolate Failure Cake

1/2 cup boiling water

2 T cocoa

1 t baking soda

1/2 cup butter

2 cups sugar

2 eggs

2 cups flour

1 1/2 cups buttermilk

1 t vanilla

1 cup chopped pecans

Use cooking spray on a 13x9 baking pan, then line it with waxed paper. Preheat your oven to 425. Combine the water, cocoa and baking soda until well blended, then set it to the side. Cream the butter and sugar together (get all the lumps out!) Add the eggs and blend them in, one at a time. Alternate back and forth with the flour and the buttermilk, keeping the whole thing blended nicely as you go. Stir in the mixed up chocolate, the vanilla and the pecans (sometimes I switch out the pecans for toffee chunks...yum!)

Bake it for 30 minutes and let it cool completely before frosting it with something delicious...cream cheese frosting is always choice #1.