When you make a conscious choice to cultivate confidence and express yourself, you decide to take conscious control over your unconscious ways of being. This is a process of unifying your mind with how your body responds, and create a new way of thinking, doing and being.

Your mind processes ideas that you have not yet experienced; a potential for some future time. As you consider doing something different and being someone different in service of a new outcome when the opportunity presents itself, you will have a new experience. Without the experience of being different and doing something different, your knowledge of “confidence” and “self expression” is just philosophy. It is like calling yourself a doctor when you intellectually know about medicine without having any medical experience.

Create new experiences and actions through the tips below. You can let go of old, insecure thought patterns, interrupt your habitual reactions and emotions, and remind yourself of the confident, expressive being that you want to be.

Challenge yourself:

Hidden potential is locked in your genetic code. There is good biological evidence that if you put yourself in new situations, new genetic codes for new proteins build new neural structures and new nervous system structures. When you put yourself in new situations, the situational stress unlocks those genes and builds new parts of you. You’re building your capacity to handle different situations. As you do this, more and more of you becomes informed because you’re doing more and more difficult things.

Dance

Movement to the beat of the music we love can translate to the outer world as an expression of what’s in our hearts, in our minds, and in our lower sex chakras. Almost all movement is wonderful for the body. I have lately noticed how dance is a more vulnerable practice than other forms of movement. For example, yoga feels safe to me. Everyone is doing the same movements at once, and same with other fitness classes. To dance ecstatically in your own expression is vulnerable because no one else is dancing how you are dancing. No one else has the same expression that you have. 

Sing

Singing can be a very edgy action to take for so many of us; we have stories that we don’t have a nice singing voice, that we sing off key, or out of tune. Singing is vulnerable because no one else has our voice, our interpretation of the notes or the words. If you’re writing a song, no one else has your creative idea for the combinations of words. 

Align with your cycles

We are all connected through the cycles we experience: waxing and waning moons, seasonal shifts, and hormonal shifts of the menstrual cycle. When you working with these cycles, you will find that you are naturally supported by the magnetism of the moon and nature.

See how you are intertwined with the fabric of life and you matter to the “big dream.”

Reveal

In our society it is customary to hide what is really going on in our lives; to keep it together; to create the facade that all is well and under control. This custom of hiding finds its way into other parts of our lives; our friendships and relationships with family and lovers. Instead of pretending, and creating a mask which can be an incredibly exhausting way to move through life, consider expression.

Reveal your feelings in a moment: Are you bored? Are you excited? Are you embarrassed? Simply revealing one feeling that is happening in your world can help people feel more connected with you and also help us feel more expressed. This practice of revealing can help us to connect with the heart chakra of the body, as well as the throat chakra of expression.

In all of these forms of expression, the mind and personality follow what the body does. Each of these practices is a way to flex the muscles of confidence and even find comfort in vulnerability.