Heart 2 Heart: Self-Confidence

Hey guys, it's Jen and today I wanted to do another heart-to-heart video. If you guys haven't seen my heart-to-heart videos I basically take a day where I don't wear any makeup and I just sit here and talk to you and share with you some of the things that I've gone through in my life and basically just wanted to be honest and vulnerable with you guys for five or ten minutes. In the past I've talked about a few different things, acne, body image, the idea of makeup. If you haven't seen those I'll link those down below and leave the annotations on the side here. Things that are good to have people hear just because we don't hear these things enough, you know. I'm not perfect. I think I kind of start off all of these videos like that because it's just so obvious and necessary to say. I am 29. I'm not super young like a lot of other youtubers and you know, I still have acne on my face. I have a lot of hyperpigmentation scars. Oh, this one was really, really painful. I don't know if you guys have had the ones that are like right by your eyes, but they are unpleasant and they stay there for weeks and everybody can see it and I feel like when people are looking at me that's like zero in, like right where they're looking because it's like by your eyes. So you don't know if they're looking at your eyes or your zit. It's probably the zit, right? So anyway, I'm not gonna talk about acne if you want to see the acne one, you can watch the other video on that. But basically, today I wanted to talk about the idea of self-confidence. It's funny because I almost feel like self-confidence is something that literally everybody deals with and nobody talks about because we always assume everyone else has more self-confidence than we do. It's like a universal fact. I mean like every single one of my friends that I've talked to, they all admit to this. They all assume everybody else is feeling way better about themselves than we actually are and I don't know why that is. Why we're so good at faking it. About faking that everything is wonderful and great and maybe, you know, I understand the whole fake it to make it thing. I do that too. When I'm having a bad day, I try to put on a smile and it makes me feel better. But I'm talking about long-term underlying things. For instance, me with my acne, because I had that kind of acne trauma in my past, I hold on to that into my adulthood and into, you know, my life and how I react to people and how I talk to people, how I feel when I'm outside of my house because I'm hyper aware of any acne that might be on my face. Now, I will say right now my skin is extremely good for me. I know for some people it's way worse than you've ever had your skin and some people it's like way better than you've ever had your skin. Everybody has their something. Whatever it is for you, maybe if you're, you know, a little bit heavier than you'd like to be. Every time you walk out, you feel like people are staring at you because you're overweight, you know. I've talked to friends about all kinds of things and I don't know if it's the same with you guys, but when my friends tell me things like that, I kind of think like, are you crazy? Like nobody else sees those things but you. I mean even the acne thing. There are some days where I will literally look at the mirror and tell myself like, you, you, you, you, you, those acnes, shut up because I know other people are not looking at those the way that you are and it kind of has to be something you proactively fight against and the reason is because for us, insecurities are so real. They're so real where they're so big and important and real we convince ourselves that everybody else is as obsessed with our insecurities as we are and the fact of the matter is it's just not true. Nobody else cares about your insecurities as much as you do and nobody else is going to be as deeply affected as you are if you tell yourself that you hate yourself because of the reasons that you're not perfect. I feel like there are sort of three separate pillars on being truly self-confident and not faking it to make it, like actually truly being self-confident. The first one, having courage and I don't mean like, oh you know, like jumping out of an airplane or like doing really cool things that other people are scared of like playing with knives. I just mean if you put yourself in a position where you're uncomfortable, the next time you're in that same position, you're not going to be as scared. For me, you know, I'm quite introverted. Sometimes I don't like being in really big crowds with lots of people. You know, I do get self-conscious sometimes and the more I put myself out there, the more I just do it, the less scared I am. I mean, I recently took these aerial arts classes and it's something I've always wanted to do. I love seeing circus performers and aerialists and I just thought it was so amazing and I've only gone a couple times but every single class I go, there is some trick that I learned. I feel like I'm going to fall on my face and die and I'm like leaning over. I know I can't hold myself. I know I'm going to fall. I know I'm going to break my neck like that's how I feel to the point where I'm like shaking and my brain is saying no no no no no no no no but then you just let go and you do it and then the next time you try it, it's like I don't even know what I was scared of. It's still a little scary and it still pushes you but the next time it's never as hard. The second thing I think is super important for self-confidence. It's kind of counterintuitive but I think it's so important to be humble. I believe that everything that we have, everything that we are is a gift and if you take too much pride in those things, if you value a feature or a face or an object more and more and more and more when you lose that thing, a part of your identity snaps off and gets broken and that can be really hard on your self-esteem. Say you're a professional dancer and you live and breathe dance but say on one wrong jump you twist your kneecap and you can't dance anymore. That would just crush your soul because when people would ask you, you'd say, oh yeah I'm Jen. I'm a dancer and now because you can't say that anymore, what does that say about you? It's a really hard thing to go through and I've had a number of friends actually go through that exact thing and I know it's just like it's really killer. So that's the times when you have to step back and remind yourself who you are outside of your talents, outside of your job, outside of your title, your degree, outside of your ethnicity, your friends, your family, your money, your things. Do you love yourself for everything that you are? When you can say yes to that, I can't tell you how much your confidence is going to increase. Not because you've made something of yourself but because you're just okay with what you have. I love that one Sheryl Crow song. She has a line where she sings, it's not having what you want, it's wanting what you've got and I think that's so, so, so true. The third thing for me anyway is faith. I mean, I'm Christian. I believe in God and God is a huge reason why I do anything that I do because he loves me so much that I feel like that guides me in my day-to-day life and without that faith in something greater, something beyond the things I'm scared of and something beyond the things I'm insecure about, I don't know that I would be able to see hope in the future. Like with my whole acne, you know. I went through that for 11 years. I mean, and that's not even saying that my acne stopped. It just became less hugely severe. But looking back on it now, like if I didn't have that story, if I didn't have that hardship, how could anybody else who's been through that relate to me? I mean, I found it so difficult when people would be like, oh yeah, no, I don't know. I've just always had perfect skin and it would just, it was so hard for me to hear that and I would have such intense jealousy and anxiety about myself because I just wasn't good enough. But when I saw that something that was so hard for me, you know, could be heard by other people and that you guys really loved and accepted me because I went through that, I mean, that completely changed my whole perspective on why I went through that, you know. And my reasoning for that is because of, you know, my faith that it is for something greater. Now, I mean, you guys might believe whatever else something that you believe, but I'm telling you, if you don't believe in anything, find something to have faith in. And maybe that's just having hope that something you do today can affect somebody else in the future. Maybe that is just caring and loving about others and listening to the people around you that really need an ear. Whatever that is, find that faith because faith will give you confidence. I just wanted to close things out by saying thank you guys. Thank you so much for all the love and the support that you've given me through all of my ups and downs. I want to apologize that I didn't do a heart-to-heart last year. I went through some really difficult times in my personal life with my sister and my father-in-law actually were diagnosed with cancer at the same time and that really overlapped with heart-to-hearts. I can't tell you how many times I tried to sit down and record and would just burst into a giant fit of bawling because it was just too hard. So even a year later now, talking about it, it's still a little bit difficult. But if you want to read about my whole situation with that, I wrote a blog post up. So I'll leave a link to that down in the bottom bar if you want to hear more about what happened with my family. Everybody's okay now, but it was an extremely difficult thing that really changed my perspective on what I was doing, why I'm doing it, and what's really important. For me, the hauls and stuff, they're wonderful. I love doing them. That's not why I'm doing it. The why is because I love you guys. I care about you guys so much that I want to share with you the things that were hard to me because I know some of you guys might be dealing with the same kind of things. I just want to let you know that hope is out there. You can be confident because insecurities aren't real. They're just in your head. So remember that. Remember that I love you. Remember that things going on right now aren't always going to be the same. So whether that's good or bad, try to love yourself because if you love you, other people will love you too. If you guys do your own heart-to-heart videos, I would love to watch them. Please leave a comment down below with a link to your video. Also, let me know in the comments if there is another topic that you would like for me to talk about in another heart-to-heart because I'm definitely open to suggestions. I love you guys, and I'll talk to you guys soon. Bye.