To use the authors words... if you’re ready for the "loving bitch slap" that’s going to help you get out of your own way... then this is your book.
Erika Cramer the ‘Queen of Confidence’ wrote her best seller ‘Confidence feels like shit!’ during the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown. And while she’s fabulous and wildly impressive in her confidence, not to mention what she’s overcome in her lifetime (which she shares in her book), she’s also incredibly down to earth.
Erika has a genuine and personable way of writing. It feels like you’re sitting with her over a coffee, listening to your bestie vent and preach her passion – empowering women to be confident.
A key takeaway from Erika’s book is that confidence doesn’t have a point of arrival. You can’t tick off a list. It's a process. She explains how to apply confidence building strategies to your life day in, day out, highlighting that it's a choice to be confident in everything you apply yourself to. It might look easy for Beyonce, but she started somewhere too, right? and she still has to choose to step out in confidence daily. It's an ongoing practice.
Erika shares her 5 C’s process (Choice, Courage, Create, Consider, Continue) which is designed to help you level up in a clear 'step by step' way. In fact… when you keep pushing yourself to step out in confidence (aka stepping beyond your comfort zone), it’s hard NOT to grow into a better, more confident version of yourself.
Another key in this book is detoxing your fixed mindset (things you believe are true about you, things that may well be holding you back, e.g. "I'm not confident"). If this book is going to helming you at all, it’s necessary that you believe you can grow as a person. You've got to ditch the fixed perspective because it's going to tell you that you can't.
In her book, Erika explains that it requires courage to apply the confidence process, to keep putting your hat in the ring, even when you miss the mark. You’ve got to be ready to get yourself back up, to dust yourself off, to not care what others think, to learn from it and to keep on putting yourself out there. This key part of the confidence building process takes guts. Hence… confidence feels like shit.
Confidence may feel like shit, but you know what else? It develops your resilience and it helps you to grow as a person.
'Confidence feels like shit' provides a neat package of a number of coaching concepts focused on confidence and I would happily recommend it to my coaching clients. It’s always helpful to have this kind of easy to digest knowledge and strategy in your tool kit!
I know there will be many individuals out there grateful that Erika knuckled down at such a wild time in recent history to produce a book that will help many to lean into confidence practices.
Steph Edmunds
About the Author:
Steph Edmunds is a Tasmanian based Certified Professional Life Coach, Speaker and Facilitator specialising in Work/Life Cohesion and Sustainable Excellence for driven individuals and teams. Visit the Success Coaching Tasmania website for more information.