Excuse me, your leaking confidence...

Welcome to Nurtured with Naketa, my two-weekly blog, video, email to my subscribers.

I’m sharing what popped off, usually in our socials through the week. So, what’s been hot on socials this week?

My post about leaking confidence, assimilating, using metaphor like a cup of coffee is like our confidence. And, as I share that, I'm doing exactly what I'm asking people not to do. I'm a work in progress, we're all a work in progress.

There are a number of words that we use in statements, in conversations, in requests, that almost act as qualifiers to minimise the authority. Now, I'm all about being humble, but sometimes these words get in the way of our message being heard.

So, the first one that I'd like to invite you to think about not using is the word just.

“I just wanted to ask…”

“Just think…”

This is another one that we put in to minimise, to kind of make small our requests.

But the one statement that popped off on social media this week was when I asked and pleaded and pleaded for people to stop adding this statement at the end of their sentence:

“Does that make sense?”

For one thing, every time you say, “does that make sense?” you're tipping a bit of your confidence.

There are a couple of ways we can see it.

One, you're trying to minimise that if you don't make sense, you know it, so you're calling yourself out so that nobody else calls out that you don't make sense.

The other is that it can be quite patronising.

“Does that make sense?”

“Do you understand?”

“Do you understand what I'm saying?”

Either way, it doesn't really add to the value of the sentence.

I know we do it out of habit. Definitely, I heard people's perspectives, given that it was my most popular post in the last two weeks.

But I want to invite you to think about the words that we're adding to minimise our authority, or to make ourselves small.

Things like:

“Just…”

“Kind of…”

Over-apologising.

“I'm not sure…”

Or undermining our own thinking:

“This might be wrong.”

“I'm not sure if it's right.”

“This could be a silly question.”

So, this is my invitation to you.

Listen to yourself.

Take the bird's-eye view of your conversations, and notice the words that are coming out where you are intentionally trying to, or habitually trying to, minimise your statements.

That's my core heart to you today, for the next couple of weeks.

Mā te wā!