Below is a transcript of this video interview on finding confidence with Jessica Goh done by Sharon White.
Sharon: Hi I’m Sharon White from Global Healing Exchange. I’m here with Jessica Goh from Life In Confidence. She’s a life coach, but not your ordinary life coach, she specializes in self-confidence and reconnecting you with your Higher Self.
She’s helped both men and women who have suffered from depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, low self-esteem, midlife crisis and it goes on.
Her work has resulted in clients reconnecting to a loving relationship with their parents. Discovering their own self-worth, finding happiness, letting go of past pains and reigniting into a life of love.
She’s helped others switch careers and increase their money flow. When we find our confidence we are much more able to live life to the fullest.
She also writes confidence blogs for EHarmony which is a dating site here in Australia. Welcome Jess.
Jessica: Thank you Sharon for having me.
Sharon: You’re welcome. I’ve been looking forward to interviewing you as we’ve been talking about doing this for a while and finally it’s happened.
You’ve got a really interesting story and before we get into the confidence side of things I’d love you to talk to the viewers and tell them how you got here.
What made you not confident in your early life and what happened where you’ve actually had to find and gain confidence in your life, so that you can help others to do that in their life.
Jessica: Thank you Sharon. I guess it all started about three years ago. I lost everything in my life. I lost all money, my wealth that I had worked so hard to build up, with two investment properties that were both positive cash flow, and I sold it to set up a business.
That came from egotistical point of view where there wasn’t really any passion or purpose in the business, it was all about just making money.
I attracted and dated men who were either emotionally unavailable, married, de facto relationships, or just saw me as fun and didn’t want to be in a relationship with me.
I noticed about three years ago I felt like I was reliving my dad’s life.
Growing up as a kid my parents worked full-time in their business selling tools in the markets and they taught me that life was all about work, no play, and that it’s hard to earn money, and that life is a struggle. That’s what I learned from them at an early age.
Dad was the very first man in my life who broke my heart and shattered it. At the age of 8 I first noticed that I suffered from anxiety.
My dad would be aggressive and abusive towards me because I was not understanding the timetables when he was trying to teach me the timetables.
That’s when I felt a barrier around my heart and this nervousness and fear showed up because I don’t feel safe around my dad. I had to know what I needed to know for me to feel safe. I had to be smart.
I had to work hard. I had to do all these things just to please my dad. At the age of 18 it really hit me, the domestic violence between my mum and dad escalated. I defended my mum and so the aggression and the abuse was directed towards me.
I was doing my homework late at night in the kitchen while they were fighting and I just had enough of what I was seeing, when I stood up for my mum, dad hit me.
Even though it didn’t hurt, that act of aggression and abuse was so traumatizing. I felt betrayed by both of my parents because after I was hit by my dad, my mum will look at me and laugh at me, and humiliate me and criticise me saying, why did you say that?
Why did you speak up to your dad, you shouldn’t be doing that? She was saying that I was stupid for doing that. I was crying in the corner while my dad was sleeping away on his lounge chair and my mom criticizing me.
I was so close to having a mental meltdown, where I could have easily have gone crazy and I didn’t allow myself to do that. My inner strength stops me from feeling my feelings, feeling the trauma and the accumulation of those traumatic experiences that I had to go through in my life.
Going back to three years ago, that’s when it really hit me again. I noticed that every single guy that I’ve dated or been in a relationship with, I felt this immediate anxiety and nervousness. I couldn’t stop crying.
I couldn’t stop screaming, “Why me? Why all men screwed up?” and it came back to my experiences with my dad.
What I learned from all those experiences is that it had affected my confidence. It shattered who I was as a person.
When I hit rock bottom, when I lost everything in my life, my wealth and my relationship with my family and I felt like I was stuck in a rut, I had to rediscover who I was again.
By doing that I had to learn to love and accept myself as who I am. I had to allow myself to be vulnerable, because that was the biggest thing that I struggled with, because it wasn’t safe to be vulnerable with men.
It wasn’t safe to be vulnerable with my dad. It wasn’t safe in the household with my mum criticizing me for sticking up for myself or for her.
So I had to relearn how I could be vulnerable and that it’s okay to feel my feelings and to love myself and be connected with my spirit again. That’s how I was able to regain my self-confidence.
Sharon: Thank you so much for sharing your story. I think a lot of people watching this video would have gone through similar experiences. I actually work with a lot of people who have had abuse so I know that people like that are attracted to my website.
Many people that have had abuse suffer the anxiety, depression and the lack of confidence.
But it isn’t only if you’ve had abuse in the past, from your parents or your loved ones. It could be if you were at school and you were put down by other children which can damage your confidence.
So whatever has happened in the past, if you have low confidence and whether it’s from abuse or whether it’s from another area, it’s a similar sort of strategy to building confidence back up.
I would love you to tell us how you managed to build your confidence up enough, so that you felt confident enough to help other people to do the same.
Tips To Gaining Your Confidence and Self Esteem
1. Talk To Someone Who Can Help You.
Jessica: There’s no way that I could have done it on my own. I would say definitely see someone about it to help you. I had to get a mentor. I saw a love and relationships coach. She was the first coach/therapist that I’ve ever seen in my whole life.
I had never seen a counsellor, or a psychologist, or psychiatrist. I didn’t think at that time that I needed something clinical. I thought it would be for someone who’s crazy, but in fact I suffered a lot of craziness myself.
So I was drawn to seeing this love and relationship coach because of her energy. The changes that she was able to help me with are amazing.
She helped me with, eating disorders and going from where I was with men to now being in love with an amazing man, and having an amazing coaching business.
That’s definitely my number one tip. If you’re suffering you need to see someone about it, because we’re not even aware that we’ve created this situation and that we are in a self-tormented relationship.
I was definitely in denial about three years ago with my relationship, so I needed someone to show me how I could raise my self-awareness. I needed to relearn how to experience real confidence again. To sustain that feeling I have a self-love ritual.
2. Self-Love Ritual.
One of the self-love rituals is meditation. Clearing out the mind.
Sharon: Yes it’s so important isn’t it? The thing is when you meditate you don’t have to just sit in a room. There’s so many different ways of doing it. So which way do you like to meditate?
I like to listen to music, or I like a guided meditation, because just sitting there doing nothing for an hour, my mind goes crazy. So there’s lots of different ways, what’s your favourite way to meditate?
Jessica: That’s a really great question when I first started meditation I really struggled. I did a meditation class and I hated it. I noticed how hard it was to sit still. Someone suggested to me that I should try headspace, which is an app, so I gave that a go.
That was a guided meditation and I found that helped quite a bit to the point where I was able to try it and move on to more advanced versions like Kundalini Yoga, chanting meditation and now I can meditate on my own.
What I like about meditation now is, like you said, it doesn’t have to be sitting in silence, cross-legged and trying to over override your thoughts.
It’s about how we can create space and experience inner peace, by letting it go, by disengaging from our thoughts and just being aware of them.
How I meditate now is, I listen to meditative music on YouTube and I’ll either lie down, or sit cross-legged. It depends how I’m feeling with my body and I tune into the music, place my focus on the meditation music.
Sharon: How about affirmations? When somebody is very low in energy and self believe and self-love, do you find affirmations help at all?
3. Affirmations.
Jessica: Yes definitely because a lot of us are not aware that our current beliefs are quite destructive. I hear a lot of people saying things like; it’s hard to earn money, life is a struggle. For others they may say; there’s not many great guys/girls out there for me.
Or that it’s hard to find love. That’s a really common one in our society these days, or it’s hard to be confident when you’re depressed. All these sort of beliefs are so destructive.
It really lowers our confidence. We do need affirmation to recreate those beliefs by having supportive beliefs instead.
Every month I write a positive statement affirmation on my whiteboard and that is the focus of my month. I ask myself, how can I experience life differently every single month? This month is about connecting with my spirit. My affirmation is; I am pure love, I’m spirit.
That is a beautiful affirmation because I’ve struggled for most of my life to connect with myself because of the abuse, and the criticism, and the struggles and hardships that I had to go through throughout my childhood and adult life.
Sharon: It’s an ongoing thing isn’t it? We can get to a point where we feel very confident, and then another level of shutdown comes up and we feel like we are going backwards, but we never go backwards. It’s just another layer of uncovering every time.
When you’re talking about meditation and talking to people and doing self-love affirmations, it’s something that we have to practice isn’t it? It’s something that we have to do all the time.
You can’t suddenly say, ‘hey I’m confident”, and then you’re confident in all your life, in all areas. It’s something that you’re always working on.
Jessica: Yes, definitely spot-on. Like you said, it’s an ongoing journey. There’s so many past experiences that we haven’t even pinpointed yet that is holding us back in life. It’s all about rebalancing those past memories so we can be free and be happy again.
Sharon: If I came to you and I said look I’ve got no confidence, how would you help me?
Jessica: The way I would help people is, if they’re really suffering on a deeper level, such as not having self-confidence, I provide one-to-one confidence coaching programs.
It takes three months for people to change one habit and so that’s why I’ve created a confidence program called life and confidence. Within the three months, what I do is, in the first session, I pinpoint what it is that a person needs.
We find out what is it that they’re struggling with, and how I can help them get there in a realistic way.
What I focus on is childhood conditioning, because that’s where a lot of the trauma lies. So we find out five things that we don’t like about mom, dad, siblings or an authority figure, that has fostered our childhood.
We learn how we can first see it from your point of view, which is the victim state. The next thing we do is learn how we can see it from their point of view.
How can we have a better understanding? We learn why is it that they did those things, by understanding their background.
From there I would help them extract the lessons that they can learn from each and every experience that has traumatized them. So they can learn what it is they can improve on or be aware about themselves.
What is it that they’re doing to themselves to allow them to set this victim circumstances up for themselves, because a lot of us don’t have that awareness.
The fourth step is how can they release their fear and replace it with love and appreciation. That’s where the real transformation lies.
It is shifting that energy, those emotions and thoughts about the past into something that is beautiful and supportive, so they can experience that on a day to day basis.
Sharon: Beautiful work. Thank you so much for talking to us today. If anyone wants to find you, they can find you in life in confidence.com. You also write for Global Healing Exchange. You also have your programs and your one-on-one coaching as well.
So if people come onto your website they can find you there. I know that you’re going to be writing for us again in the future, so you’ll have more blogs and more confidence tips on Global Healing Exchange.
Thank you so much for coming in and giving us these tips. It’s really important to help people to really look at themselves, very holistically and realize that when we’re looking at changing our confidence levels it’s a practice that we do.
There’s all of these different things that you can do and you can pick out the thing that really suits you and find the therapist that suits you.
So if anyone wants to work with you Jess they know where to come and find you now. So thank you so much for talking to us today.
Jessica: Thank you so much Sharon. See you next time, take care.
