You don't need to be more confident

We’re constantly told to be more confident and to “fake it til we make it”. We are never encouraged to ask questions like: Does it make sense for any given being living in this bizzare and beautiful universe to be confident in themselves in the first place? Is the problem only that not enough people are confident or are there also problems with confidence itself? What is the relationship between colonialism and confidence? What if the colonizer had been less confident? Why are we treating a symptom as though it’s the cause?

I’m feeling super hard on myself and I tried to record this many times. It’s funny-strange because I’m grappling with the exact phenomenon I aim to discuss in this podcast. Even as I type these words I feel there is much else I could have said or explained and I’m fighting the urge to add new ideas or caveats that I failed to mention. Do I need to be confident in this to post it? Should I be? Is a world where everyone only shares what they are confident in a better world? Does confidence matter as much as we are told? Part of what keeps me from posting more is this feeling of being unacepptable and being afraid of people all disposing of me in a catastrophic way. Instead of fleeing from that, I’m trying to find ways to sit with it and create from that place. I hope that this helps you in some way. Do let me know if it does. I’m sending you love, light, and sunshine.

Sources mentioned

• Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey

• On the coloniality of Being by Nelson Maldonado-Torres

• Moving Toward Ugliness: A Politic Beyond Desirability by Mia Mingus. Listen to our podcast episode in conversation about Beauty and Ugliness on Spotify here and Apple here.

• Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-fatness as Anti-Blackness by Da’Shaun L Harrison

• Subscribe to Ismatu’s incredible Substack and podcast at The Garden Space and see Self-love cannot and will not save us.

• Leaning into Insecurity and Ugliness As An Essential Politic by Da’Shaun Harrison

• Welcoming the Unwelcome: Wholehearted Living in a Brokenhearted World by Pema Chodron

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Hello precious beings on this earth, I hope that you are well, I'm sending you lots and lots of love and sunshine and sunlight and just the best of hugs and energy because I know that this is such a difficult time for so many different people. And I just wanted to say that you will be loved in ways that you cannot yet imagine, you are precious and you are divine and you are exactly as you should be, you are a human being. And that is all we were ever meant to be. Everything else that we feel ashamed of is so often a product of a culture that wants to shame us out of ourselves. And so I wanted to, on that note, discuss confidence, because I think it's something that I've been thinking about recently and that I posted about recently. And essentially, what I want to say is that you do not need to be more confident. I think so often our society pretends to be addressing the causes of things, but he's actually simply addressing the symptoms. And so since we have a society that is set up, to make specific people feel confident, and others unconfident, we are then sold the solutions to that problem, but the culture itself created the problem. And so the culture itself, and thinking in line with that culture is not going to solve that problem. What I mean by this is, if we are made unconfident by this society, if we think in the ways and in the terms of that society, we will not become confident, and we will not even question with a confidence is something that we ought to be at all. So I want to talk through this issue. And I also want to bring in the work of people like ­­Da’Shaun, Harrison, who I think is such a great voice on this topic of confidence and insecurity and self love. I mean, in general, such an amazing voice, I highly recommend the book belly of the beast, which I won't shut up about. But I also just wanted to share other perspectives, based on coloniality. And based on other things that I have been thinking about. 

And so where I want to start is kind of with my own experience. So I've felt unconfident so many times, basically every single day. As a people pleaser, I live in fear of people's negative opinions of me, I'm terrified of being perceived as not doing a good job, essentially, more than that, I just crave confirmation that what I'm doing is beneficial to someone. And this fear of people's opinions has definitely kept me from posting riskier ideas on social media, I have like 250, tick tock drafts, and a Notes app full of ideas that never make it because I just don't believe in them. And I'm always really surprised in a way to receive positive feedback. And it also don't me, I'm always scared that I'm going to disappoint people that may be like the best days of my content journey or behind me. And so I guess what I want to say with this is that I really have embraced and confidence as something that's not necessarily a core ingredient that I need to have in order to do the things that I'm trying to do. Because my goal is not to serve my ego, it's to serve others, right? And so if I can create content that serves other people, then does it really matter whether or not I feel confident in the process? I mean, yes, of course, it would be nice. But I think that it's not necessarily as required as we're taught. It is. 

And also to flee my unconfidence would be to flee myself. So I wish I could be someone who doesn't get nervous or anxious about being perceived and being judged. And yet, even though I have all the theory to challenge this view at my disposal, like I can tell you about confidence, and I can tell you about, you know, so many different ways that it's rooted to all these evil systems that we're living in, in terms of feeling unconfident, and I can tell you about self love and all of these things, but I know what I'm supposed to believe. But I so often fail to believe those things. I know that I should love myself through my own confidence and post the video and believe in my voice, and so on. But this thinking has only got me so far. So I wonder if instead, I can learn to sit with my own confidence. And let it be something that my heart opens up to something that guides me to a more honest and enriched orientation to myself and to other people. And so where I've landed on this is that I don't need to be confident as a creator, I just need to keep going. And I just need to ground myself, in you and in your consciousness and in ways that I can serve you and connect to you. For example, I love love loved having the calls that I had with six of you that one Sunday, that was literally one of the best days of my life. 

And having some follow up conversations, I just want to do that a lot more because I think social confidence, like the form of confidence that's rooted in being in community with others is so much more of a richer form of confidence that we're never really taught to seek. We're taught to seek a very hyper individualistic form of confidence and to pose as confident even if we aren't, and I think that there's a lot of beauty and confidence to be found in each other and in togetherness. So if you're like me, you at this time of year have been feeling hard on yourself. Maybe the end of the year as a reminder of goals you haven't reached or have gone holes that you plan to reach next year. And so if you're filling yourself with ideas of what you'll do differently, if you're feeling drained or energized, which are often the two sides of the same coin, I will say, like sometimes when I feel so excited to like do something or or change something, it's actually a symptom of feeling extremely drained and kind of tricking myself into a certain form of energy that I then crash from, because I don't actually feel that energy, I feel the performance of it. So if you've been told to fake it till you make it to pretend to be what you aren't, and that, you know, we're in this culture that tells us we must be more confident. Every time I've been told to be confident, I've just been told to embody to pose as a powerful man with the ultimate confidence, essentially, a powerful cisgendered white man or even a powerful cisgendered black man, depending on which country I've been existing in. But in general, that embody power and embody desirability and embody just self confidence and self love and self assertiveness, right? So we should mimic these people pose that that poses them at all costs,

even the cost of our authentic selves, we should pretend to know things we don't know, we should overstate the importance of what we do know, above that which we do not, which is of course, so much more. As in there's so much more we don't know, right? Like, we should speak confidently on things that are doubtful because everything is in a sense, doubtful. We should stand and imposing ways and never sway we should do our power poses, we should remove all nervous Tech's even if we are truly nervous. And even if there is humanity to be found in our nerves, we should never say sorry, even though we have so much to apologize for, unless we are to blame. And even so we should be careful of taking on blame, we should avoid saying like an arm least we betray that there are moments in time, when we do not know what might come out of our mouths. Next, just like this one, we are surrounded by the messaging of confidence from all directions, we should be confident black woman in my case, we should never let anyone stand in the way of our confidence. So since we are surrounded by people telling us to be confident, I kind of wanted to offer a case against confidence, like is confidence, even something we ought to be? So often I think that there's this thing in our society, and in response to that thing being embodied by only the most privileged in our society, we are told we need to make this thing more accessible to all people. So for example, the people who are the most confident in the world tend to be depending on where you live. There's many countries where there are no white people. So white men in countries with white people, white cisgendered wealthy abled men, and then in other nations powerful men. And these people are the people were meant to kind of emulate right powerful cisgendered men. And so I just think that like why it's interesting that it's never questioned whether that thing is a good thing in and of itself. I don't know if people listen to my episode with Kalpana Mohanty, but she speaks about like questioning whether beauty is an innate good, is it inherently a good thing? Like is it only just the problem that not enough people are confident? Or is there something problematic about confidence in itself. And so I wanted to make the case that there is something corrupt, often about confidence in and of itself. So let's start with number one. So I think I have like three or four reasons I can't count at this time. But this is basically a case against confidence. So number one, from nature's standpoint, like this universe that we live in, right, which we are of we are a part of, we are not separate from we are of nature, we are beings, we are part of a planet part of a world, we have a lot more to be unconfident than confident about, I want you to really sit with that for a second, like, let's abstract from this human centric view of the world that we've been imposed, we've been taught to take on and just think about ourselves, like, zoom out, zoom out of you know, those pictures of the globe and see yourself as the speck on a planet, right? And should this speck be confident, you know what I mean? We're part of a universe we do not fully understand, we are such a miniscule part of that universe. And we have a limited understanding even of those things that keep us alive on a moment to moment basis, we not only don't really fully understand ourselves, that's why we you know, that's kind of also where a lot of obsession with like self help and all of this stuff, I mean, that's a very individualistic take, again, to a societal problem in the words of Da’Shaun Harrison, but as in, we're consumed by trying to learn more about ourselves. And that is a response to not knowing so much about ourselves. We are one of 8 billion people on our world. We are one of 8.7 million species like thinking about that 8.7 million species, we are one of those species, and then we are an individual of a billion of those members of that species, right. So these species and these beings exist in complex, interdependent relationships that we do not fully grasp. Does it make sense for some to a being to be confident in itself. 

Do you know what I mean? Like is that a sensible way to orient oneself to oneself, when I could die at any moment when everything I do not know and do not see and do not understand and do not feel will always overwhelm massively. That which I do, like, even in this 11 minutes, there's things I've overlooked, there's things that I will never see. Because I'm, you know, limited. You know, when I had no idea what word would come next out of my own mouth, when I must surrender my confidence in myself, to allow for the space to be wrong. You know what I mean? Like, in order for me to appreciate, in a full sense that I can be, I don't like the word wrong, but that there's so much that I do not see that's important. It's not just that I don't see it. And I should be confident that it doesn't matter, that there's so much important and truths, multiple truths, so many complex truths, that I can't wrap my head around my body around my arms around, why should I be confident? We are told to be confident, be confident, be confident, and I really want us to, like turn that on its head, and ask like, why, you know, there's this societal critique, right, that our confidence is rooted in your unconfidence is rooted in the social structures? Like Absolutely, yes, we're going to go there. But first, I want to take a planetary critique to this or planetary lens. And just ask, like, why is that not a symptom of human supremacy, and our own arrogance, that we feel that self confidence is something that we ought to be, you know, does a does the tree need, like, I know that we we just, I don't like that, you know, I think that often, we are just taught that we are the supreme beings with all this cognitive excellence. And I just think that there is so much to be found in rooting ourselves in nature and in ourselves as part of nature, and really asking, is it a bit of species if 8 billion of us are confident in ourselves, or actually can a lack of confidence facilitate a kind of connection and a kind of collaboration, that confidence makes difficult. So I think this lens of really grounding ourselves in the complexity of our universe helps to reframe confidence, and turn it up, turn it on its head and really ask, like, is that something we ought to be? So I wonder what you think about planetary perspectives on confidence and whether it makes sense to be confident. The next thing I want to say, which is related to this whole being of nature thing is that you are not a machine, you are not a machine, these words will never cease to be magical, even though you've heard them multiple times. Each time you hear them, you will probably overlook how important they actually are. You know why? Because so much of what we're being told, adopts a subtle approach to ourselves as like to us as human as human machines, right? That we can be optimized that we are in fact waiting to be optimized, you are not the tweaks that you make to your behavior to produce better outcomes, you are not your outcomes, you are not measurable, you are not quantifiable. And even if you could measure yourself, there is so much complexity as to how you impact the world and those around you that you would not even begin to know how you could measure yourself in a meaningful way. 

Number two, you are not a machine, sit with these words, as though it's the first time you're hearing them. You are not a machine, you are not something that is waiting to be optimized, you are not your optimization, you are not the tweaks you made to your behavior that day, that you can then check off a list such that you can feel proud of yourself for your existence, you are not your outcomes, you are not your output, you are not your productivity, you are actually not measurable. You are not measurable. I want to be clear what I mean by that, even if even as your society gives you tools to measure yourself, those are not even the real things that you can that can be measured about you do your I mean, like think about it. If you are posting on social media, there's times that I've been so deeply moved by a post but I haven't commented on it. Or there's times when a post has completely changed my life. But even if I have commented, I can't capture in that comment how much that person has affected me. So can that person really measure that video by how many views or likes or comments it got? Even if it got millions? Is the millions of views actually what is quantifiable or worth quantifying sorry? Or are there these deeper things, deeper effects that we have on each other that simply cannot be measured? That person cannot measure the changes that they made to my life? You know what I mean? And that's what I struggle with as well. I want to read these words from the book rest as resistance by Trisha Hirsi. I wish you rest today. I wish you a deep knowing that exhaustion is not a normal way of living. You are in enough, you can rest, you must resist anything that does not center your divinity as a human being, you are worthy of care. You are worthy of care. The next quote is I'm dreaming of a world that includes justice for all of those sleep deprived, exhausted, and caught up in the hustle and shenanigans of white supremacy and capitalism. May we have space to navigate our lives from a liberated rest state? May all of culture slow down? May we rest together? Mm hmm. I just love those words. So

many of the words in this book are so healing, you know, and she speaks about just being treating ourselves. As machines being treated as machines, it's actually not really about you treating yourself but like we are being treated as human machines. She says, our everyday behaviors and false beliefs about productivity, drive us into behaving in a robotic machine like way, the way we hold ourselves and others to the lie of urgency is white supremacy culture. And we will never be able to rest or be liberated from oppression, while we are honoring and aligning with it. Oh, my word isn't that so beautiful. As we continue to treat ourselves in this machine like way, as robots, as people who can be measured at the end of the day, who fail to check off things off their to do list as if we are that list. You know what I mean? And this does not seek to erase or ignore that there are things to be done. And that it's not simply, you know, what I don't even this whole idea of like me being able to capture all the nuance, like I can't do it. I'm so so so exhausted. It's okay, you sit with those words, and understand that, of course, everything is nuanced. But I'm going to move on because I always do this. And then I try to make space. And I really think that that's important to do, but I'm tired, so I'm going to move on. So by tired, I mean, like, I find like I'm always critiquing myself as I'm speaking. And then it leads to all of these like, caveats that I do think are important, but also sometimes really drained me, so I'm just gonna continue speaking, and trust that people, hopefully will be moved by these words, or will release them if they're not moving to them. So, for example, what makes me valuable as a content creator, it's not how many people follow me, like that actually, is doesn't even matter. In a sense, it's the lives that I can touch, and that I have touched in ways that I cannot see or understand. And again, this goes back to the confidence point, I cannot fully grasp myself, and I cannot fully grasp the impact I'm having on others. What I can do is route myself and what people are telling me and seek out the type of feedback that will help me feel like I have the energy, or we could call it the confidence to keep going. But what I do need to what I do think that that reveals to me is that a better confidence is a social confidence. It's a confidence rooted in our orientation to each other, and in our relationships with each other, that that has the confidence that we are seeking, but that so many of us are alone and lonely and don't have access to that. And so I think community really is the not the answer but an A an approach to confidence that I think is so much more grounded in the types of things that make people feel a meaningful sense of confidence. Anyways, back to the whole machine thing. You are not one and I think it's easy to underestimate how often we treat ourselves like machines, we anguish over goals and met or productivity unpredicted unproduced. We hate that we can't push our bodies to do things they don't want to do. We look at ourselves through eyes that are already critiquing us, we are not machines. 

So if we are telling ourselves to be more confident, we are telling ourselves to be something we are not an only a machine can be programmed into new favorable traits. When we embrace the fullness of our humanity, we see that we actually should not need to pretend to be anything, but what we are. The third case against confidence is that confidence and colonialism and capitalism cannot be separated. There is something called coloniality that I think is really important to understand. And it's something that I think is such an awakening kind of theory, because a lot of people and want to believe or even educated to believe that colonialism is something in the very distant past. Okay, so I want to read these words to you. And let me know if you would like me to do a whole separate post on this because I think it's so important. But basically, Nelson Maldonado Torres is a Puerto Rican philosopher, and he studied Latin American and Caribbean philosophy. He has this paper called on the coloniality of being which I really love and what Be happy to do an episode on if it's useful to you. But what he says in this paper, which I'll link to below is that coloniality refers to long standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism. But that define culture, labor, into subjective relations and knowledge production. well beyond the strict limits of colonial administration's. 

Thus coloniality survives colonialism, it is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self image of pupils, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience, in a way, as modern subjects, we breathe coloniality all the time. And every day. I truly think that those words are so powerful, and there's so many ways that we can dig deeper into them, I think that the language here, it really evokes this notion of the colonial matrix or power, which is also spoken about, which is basically that we are living in a matrix in the matrix, right? I mean, many of us know that I think many of us know that we are living a constructed reality, specifically a clonally constructed reality, but this language are being maintained alive. I also like I like when people use metaphors, I think it is so powerful, and makes us really grasp the kind of diabolical nature of these events, right? But what I want to highlight for the purpose of this conversation is that it is maintained alive in our self image. And in our aspirations of self, who and what we aspire to be, is what maintains colonialism and coloniality, rather alive. So when we think about aspiring to be confident, and when we think of some people who look at themselves as confident, we see how colonial coloniality is maintained alive, in the self image of peoples and in aspirations of self. I think that when we aspire to be more confident, we have to think like what do we actually aim to embody? What would that look like and feel like in our bodies, you know, moving through the world as though we are sure of our own importance, as though we have no reason to be extremely skeptical of ourselves? Is this a better world?

Should we be aiming to mirror confidence or flee from it? What if the colonizer had been more unconfident? What if the colonizer had been more ashamed? You know, I think I'm not trying to say, you know, I think that there's a level of shame that certainly is healthy, right? I know that we it's a shame is an awful emotion. And I'm not saying that you are deserving of shame. I'm not saying I'm deserving of shame. But I think that shame if it's an emotion that's produced in our bodies, it means that there are conditions under which we would experience shame. And I think that the colonizer ought to feel ashamed, you know, they ought to feel ashamed for the fact that what they did for what they did to us, and also, I think that if they had felt more ashamed, they wouldn't have colonized, you know what I mean? If if their shame was something that moved them to act, we would be living in a different world a better world. So since we are all beings capable of harm, it is important that we doubt ourselves often, you know what I mean? The notion that self doubt is an inherently bad thing is antisocial as an it's anti, a society that must sustain itself through mutual and reciprocal relationships with other people. So the question of like, should I be doing what I'm doing? 

Should I be saying what I'm saying? It's not necessarily that we must always run from that questioning, the colonizer embodied this huge level of self confidence. So basically, when we see emotions that are reflected in a colonizer mindset, like should we be aiming to emulate them? When we see who is the most confident do we want to be more like those people, like, if I think of some of the most confident people I've met, and like, what underlies that confidence, I'm not sure that something that I should be aspiring to also be. So I want to lean on the amazing work of Da’Shaun Harrison to say the following. So Da’Shaun’s work on self love and insecurity, I think are super helpful. So they say that self love and Da’Shaun is a abolitionist, black trans fat theorist, and they're an incredible, incredible writer, their book, Belly of the Beast is just sensational. And I highly, highly recommend it. So what they speak about in this book is that self love is a individualistic approach or solution to a structural or structural problem. So essentially, it won't work. And my mutual is my two has amazing essays and podcast episodes on de Sean's work, and I think, and they're just amazing in general, both of them, but um, imatu’s. Quote, The smartest quote where they're saying that self love even a radical sorry, where self love cannot save us, and they show us quote says self love, even a radical one cannot and will not disrupt or bring an end to systemic violence. So similarly, society has set you up for unconfidence. 

You can't and shouldn't solve that on your own. You know what I mean? If the if the unconfidence is rooted in a structure in a society, we need to change the structure and the society not just tell people to be more confident. So they Sean says that insecurities are not a moral failing of the individual, but rather an inadvertent critique of a society that seeks to punish harm and abuse. Ugly people who did to name that are perceived flaws aren't flaws at all, in many ways, and in other words, they are a response to the daily violence is that capital you are ugly people are forced to endure. You cannot beat people down forever and expect that they never feel the effects of that continued beating. insecurities are not a personal indictment. They are an indictment of the world. Being that this is the case, we should run towards insecurity. I think that this is beautiful. I'll link to this piece below and also to the book. Just want to quote one last thing where they shone says that we can learn ugliness and insecurity more intimately as part of who we are, particularly and especially under this imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. In a speech she gave in 2011, titled moving toward the ugly politic beyond desirability, which is by Mia Mingus, who was on my podcast, I hope he listened to that episode. She prefaced some important questions with a very important introduction. The excerpt is as follows. And I do think that these words are so important. And I always always come back to this essay, and I come back to me and manga says words on this, I'm going to quote it. We all run from the ugly, and the farther we run from it, the more we stigmatize it, and the more power we give beauty. Our communities are obsessed with being beautiful and gorgeous and hot, and I would add unconfident. What would it mean, if we were ugly, and I would add unconfident, just as a shown is adding insecurity. What would it mean if we were insecure? So that's what they shown is asking, what would it mean if we didn't run from our own ugliness or each other's? How do we take the sting out of ugly? How do we take the sting out of insecurity out of unconfidence? 

What would it mean to acknowledge our ugliness for all it has given us again, our insecurity for all it has given us as a show and says, how it has shaped our brilliance and taught us about how we never want to make anyone else feel. That gets me every time? What would it take for us to be able to risk being ugly slash unconfident in whatever that means for us? What would happen if we stopped apologizing for our ugly stopped being ashamed of it? What if we let go of being beautiful, stopped chasing, quote unquote, pretty stopped sucking in and shrinking and spending enormous amounts of money and time on things that don't make us magnificent? Where is the ugly in you? What is it trying to teach you? So I think that's so so beautiful. Where is the unconfidence? And you? Where's the shame in you? What is it trying to teach you? I think that's a moving towards and I love that Da’Shaun is encouraging us to move towards insecurity. And I think that that is so so so tied to relate it to rooted in or connected to unconfidence. Maybe insecurity is more like the root, and then unconfidence is the stem. So I think we should dream of a society that is rooted in social confidence and together confidence, not in self confidence. And I know we can have the both and but I think when we are surrounded by people who truly believe in us, we become more confident. What does that tell us? That confidence is rooted in the US. It's the togetherness, it's the knowing that you mean something to someone, it's what I just it's what I said about getting on the phone with people who can reassure you. That's the kind of confidence that I think we were designed for, I don't know if we were even made to be are meant to be self confident. The fact that we have to like Coach ourselves into it may just be a testament to the fact that it's not something we ought to be. And I don't think that we should all just try to embody the colonizer or embody the people who occupy these roles in our society. I think, actually, there's so much to be learned from the unconfident. So the final place I want to end on this topic of confidence is that you are here. I really have felt so many times throughout this recording that I should stop that this isn't good enough, and that I'm not confident that this can be of service to others. And so I really believe that in if you are reflecting on that and thinking like, How could you think that I think that that's such a reflection of like your own unconfidence in that you are my other me, I am your other you if you are here, benefiting from the words of me as an unconfident person like this is like the 15th time I've tried to record this. I've gotten to like the 18th or 20th minute and I've started again, and even as I say that I'm embarrassed to admit that because I don't feel that this kind of conveys the work of someone who's tried 15 times to Recorded because I know that there's things that I've maybe said that are mistakes, or things that are, you know, not good or whatever. So as someone who doubts herself daily, perhaps my unconfidence can be a mirror into the acceptability of your own. You don't need to be confident, because you're posting the thing or doing the thing, even from a place of unconfidence. You can still move people and you can still help people and you can still be grounded in each otherness. Often My best friend is perplexed and saddened by my unconfidence because he says to me, you know, you've helped so many people, your content helps me You inspire me. And he sits with me, and he really helps me. And I do that as well. But I'm, like, just ashamed of myself in many ways. And maybe that's the point like, maybe that's what I was put on earth to communicate and to be, and to work through. And not really work through in the sense of overcome, but work through as in do the work through that, you know, what I mean? Like, as in what do I mean by that, I think I'm onto something, as in work through, not work out, not not get over, you know, what I mean, as in working through something as a lens as an approach as a tool as a resource instead of as something to flee from. So, you know, I think that we're all living so many delusions as to what will feel like when we reach this or that milestone, that it's going to feel amazing that we're going to feel so sure of ourselves that we're going to be confident, but I think that unconfidence lies within how our society is set up. But that also, like it's not just that there is a structural lens to our own confidence. But as I've said, that it's not necessarily the case that we should be super confident.

So anyways, let's connect over our unconfidence. Let's keep trying to build confidence in each other, if that's something that we do find ourselves needing to be. By that, I mean, it's easy to theorize around unconfident and say, We should move towards it. But I do recognize that there are some things that sometimes you need to feel confident in in order to keep going. But I do think that our own confidence has so much to offer us and if we can learn to sit with it, and to be with it, and to connect through it, and to relate through it and to not flee from it, I think we can reach such a deeper connection to one another, and just stop pretending like I'm just think that, you know, releasing that facade and just being in the truth of what we're experiencing, can help us reach a deeper place. Okay, so let's communicate our doubt and let it be a glue that connects us together that connects me to you. I think that that is just something that I want to share the words of Pema Chodron, in the book welcoming the unwelcome because I actually think that that is that that this idea of moving towards is so so so connected to that, she says, shielding ourselves from the vulnerability of all living beings, which includes our own vulnerability, cuts us off from the full experience of life. Thank you so much for being here. I wanted to say thank you and I'm sending you lots and lots of love. I hope this helped you in some way and and I'm sending you so much love, and I am with you and let me know if this has helped you. Because that helps me keep going. Okay, let's see lots of love. Have a great, great, great day. Okay, bye bye.