lost-confidenceLook, I’m a pretty confident person, but there are days when finding my confidence is like trying to find the lost money in the sofa. I can’t find it for anything. I swear I lost money in that sofa, but I can’t find it.

Sometimes my confidence is so far gone that I feel like a woman trying to find her keys in the bottom of her purse. It happens to everybody. Nobody has their shit together all the time.

A lot of you will e-mail me and say, “You’re always so confident. How do you do it?” Well, it’s real simple. The moments that I’m not feeling confident — and the days that I’m not feeling confident — that’s when I take a vacation from life.

Why? Maybe I’ve got stuff going on. Maybe my kid’s doing something and I’m thinking about her. Maybe my business is a little slow and I’m a little tweaked about money coming in.

Maybe, who knows what? Maybe my confidence is just not feeling very great. Maybe something triggered me and I’m working through it.

So, the days that I’m not feeling my best are days that I take to reflect on the rest. I don’t force life to happen. I accept life as it shows up. So, if I wake up in the morning and I’m feeling a little funky, I ask myself this question: “David, why are you feeling funky right now?” I then allow my mind, my intuition, and my soul to come up with an answer. And I live in that answer. I live in that moment.

I don’t try to go out and force life to happen, because I know if I’m feeling off or I’m not feeling confident, other people I try to communicate with are going to read my energy and nothing good is going to happen from it.

So, I just allow myself to be in a funk because that’s what life’s all about. There are some days that you just don’t feel your best. There are some days you just don’t feel great. So, on those types of days, I’ll kick back. I’ll read. I’ll watch Ray Donovan or some other show on TV. I’ll watch a movie. I’ll go to the gym.

I’ll have what I call an introvert day, where I just kind of deal with my shit. I wallow in it. I allow it. It’s feelings. I allow it to happen. And what happens is it usually passes. As a matter of fact, yesterday I had a not-confident day. I didn’t feel very great. I went out and I tried to make myself feel better and I remembered I tried to talk to this beautiful woman and she wasn’t feeling me at all because I wasn’t feeling me.

So, I avoided business calls. I avoided people the rest of the day because I knew I was putting out a non-confident, feeling-funky vibe. And if I meet somebody for the very, very first time, I want them to see the best of me instead of the worst of me.

So, I just accept it. I accept the fact that I’m not feeling my best. I accept the fact that I’m not feeling confident. I accept it because it’s part of life. Nobody has their shit together all the time. There are moments that I don’t feel confident, and if it’s just a moment, I do this exercise: I breathe very deeply three times. Take three breaths, very deep into my body, which calms me down instantly.

I then ask the universe, God, and myself, “why do I feel the way I feel right now?” I breathe again, very deeply. And I allow the answer to come. And the answer is usually a voice that’s whispering inside of me, something that my intuition says, you feel off right now because of that phone call you had earlier. Because of the words someone exchanged with me or whatever it might be.

A good friend of mine once said to me, “Words are just flower petals. Let them bounce off of you and let them hit the ground and do their thing.” So that’s what I do. I breathe again and then I smile. Then I think of something really amazing, like my beautiful, amazing daughter and how much I love her, how much she means to me, how much love I have for her and she has for me. I immediately light up inside and I just feel wonderful again and my confidence is back.

So if it’s just a moment, that’s an exercise that I do. If it’s a feeling that I have, I just take a day off because I realize there’s 365 days in a year and not every single one of them is going to be the exact same. So I just allow my mood to become like seasons. I allow my moods to come like rainstorm, the kind that’s a little shower, maybe sometimes a thunder shower, other times an altogether shit-ass, gray day. And that’s it. Nothing ever lasts. Even when you’re feeling your best, you’re feeling the most confident that you are, you know that that run is not going to last. It’s going to end, and there’s going to be a funky day thrown in.

I look at my confidence like a great athlete looks at sports. There are some games that just don’t work, and Kurt Warner, the old quarterback for the St. Louis Cardinals, said it best. In an interview, a reporter said, “Kurt, how do you deal with throwing four interceptions, how do you shake it?” He looked at her with a smile and he said, “I just have short-term memory, and next week is a whole other day and a whole different game.”

It’s over. It’s done. That’s it. So channel that energy and realize, if it’s a moment you can change it, if it’s a mood or a funk for the day just kind of go with it.