Latest / Moving Minds Forward / LOW CONFIDENCE & SELF-ESTEEM Why your brain keeps telling you you’re not enough

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LOW CONFIDENCE & SELF-ESTEEM Why your brain keeps telling you you’re not enough · Moving Minds Forward

• 0:01
  Gary Johannes: Hi. My name is Gary Johannes. I'm a solution focused hypnotherapist, founder of Inspire to Change, and I train other hypnotherapists through CPHT. I left school at 14 with no qualifications, one of nine kids, joined the RAF at 16, then left and went into sales, run bars and nightclubs and restaurants. Not exactly the typical route into mental health.
• 0:26
  But in my late forties, I met a hypnotherapist, and everything I thought I knew about myself turned out to be a lot more flexible than I assumed. I retrained and started Inspire to Change. I took on an MSc in psychology and neuroscience of mental health at KCL in London, and then graduated at 60. This podcast is everything that comes from all of that. One condition per episode.
• 0:55
  What's going on? What's keeping it going? And what exactly helps?
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: Let's get into it. So confidence and self esteem. A lot
• 1:06
  Gary Johannes: of people spend their entire lives looking capable on the outside while quietly believing they're not enough underneath. I want to start with a question, and I want you to really sit with it for a moment before we go any further.
• 1:22
  Speaker 2: What would you do? What would you actually do if you truly believed you were capable of it?
• 1:30
  Gary Johannes: Not what you'd do if you had more money
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: or more time or the right circumstances.
• 1:37
  Gary Johannes: What would you do if the only thing that changed was what you believed about yourself? Because a lot of people, and I mean a lot,
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: that's the real barrier. Not ability, not opportunity, belief. Specifically,
• 1:57
  Gary Johannes: the belief that they're not quite
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: good enough, not quite smart enough, not quite the kind of person that things like that happen to. I know that feeling personally, deeply, and
• 2:12
  Gary Johannes: I want to talk about it honestly in this episode because I think it matters. We're gonna cover what confidence and self esteem actually are, why people struggle with them, what's happening in their brain,
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: what keeps the problem going, and what actually helps. And I'll leave you with something practical you can take away today. If you find this podcast useful, hit subscribe wherever you're listening. There's a lot more to come. Let's get into it.
• 2:48
  As I said in the intro, I left school at 14, no qualifications, one of nine kids, and for a long time, a very long time, I carried a story about myself,
• 3:00
  Gary Johannes: that I was thick, that I wasn't the kind
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: of person who achieved things. That success, real success, the kind that meant something, was for other people, people who were smarter, more educated, more deserving. I didn't think of it as low self esteem. I just thought it was correct. I thought I was seeing myself clearly.
• 3:26
  I wasn't. I was seeing myself through a lens that had been shaped by years of experience, by what I'd been told, by what I'd come to believe. And that lens was distorting everything. In my late forties, I met people who helped me see things differently. I also came across hypnotherapy.
• 3:50
  And for the first time, I started to question whether the story I'd been telling myself was actually true. It wasn't. So I retrained. I built a practice. I went back to study at 60 while still running Inspire to Change, leading a team, training other therapists.
• 4:11
  Gary Johannes: And I came out with a master's in psychology and neuroscience of mental health from King's College London, the same year that I found out that I had dyslexia and ADHD,
• 4:24
  Speaker 2: which explains a lot. I tell you that not to impress you. I tell
• 4:30
  Gary Johannes: you that because for decades, I had evidence right in front
• 4:33
  Speaker 2: of me that I was capable of more than I thought, and I couldn't see it because the belief was too strong. The lens was too fixed. That's what low self esteem does. It doesn't just make you feel bad about yourself. It makes you interpret everything through that feeling.
• 4:54
  It filters out the evidence that contradicts it, and it finds evidence that confirms it everywhere. That's what we're talking about today. So what's the difference between confidence
• 5:05
  Gary Johannes: and self esteem? Because they're related, but they're not the same thing. Confidence is task specific. It's your belief in your ability to do a particular thing. You can be confident in the workplace and completely lacking in confidence socially.
• 5:26
  Confident on the sports field
• 5:28
  Speaker 2: and a nervous wrath in a presentation. Confidence fluctuates. It grows when you succeed and takes a hit when things go wrong. And crucially, it can be built through experience, through doing things and discovering you can. Self esteem is broader and deeper.
• 5:50
  It's your overall sense of your own worth, Not just whether you can do things, but whether you matter.
• 5:59
  Gary Johannes: Whether you deserve good things. Whether you're fundamentally okay as a person. Self esteem tends to be more stable than confidence, which means it's harder to shift, but also means that when it does shift, the effect is profound. They interact with each other constantly. Low self esteem makes it harder to build confidence because you interpret failure as confirmation of what you already believe about yourself rather than just information about what to do differently.
• 6:38
  Speaker 2: And repeated confidence failure in important areas of life can erode self esteem over time. The combination of both, low confidence and low self esteem, is one of the most limiting things a person can carry. Not because it stops you functioning, most people function, but because it shapes every decision, every opportunity taken or avoided, every relationship, every version of yourself you allow the world to see.
• 7:13
  Gary Johannes: So what causes it? Childhood is where most of it starts. Not always through dramatic events, sometimes through the accumulation of small things, criticism from people whose opinion mattered, being told you were too much or not enough, failing publicly and having that failure define you rather than inform you, being compared unfavorably to others, being bullied, being overlooked. The brain is particularly vulnerable in childhood and adolescence. The beliefs we form about ourselves during those years become deeply embedded.
• 7:55
  They become the operating system through which we process everything that happens to us later. And unless something challenges them, unless something disrupts the story, they tend to persist. Media and social comparison feed into it. We've always compared ourselves to others. It's human nature.
• 8:19
  But now we're doing it constantly against curated, filtered, highlighted, real versions of other people's lives. And for anyone with an already fragile sense of self worth, that comparison is corrosive. Personal setbacks and relationship experiences reinforce it. An unhealthy relationship that confirms your worth fears about yourself. A career failure that lands on top of existing self doubt.
• 8:50
  A period of mental health difficulty, anxiety, depression that makes it even harder to access any sense of capability or worth. And then there's the perfectionism trap. The belief that your worth is conditional on your performance, that you're only as good as your last result, that anything less than excellent is failure. Perfectionism looks like high standards from the outside, but from the inside, it's exhausting and relentless because no achievement ever actually settles the question of your worth. So what's actually happening in the brain?
• 9:34
  Self esteem and confidence are fundamentally about the stories we tell ourselves and the neural pathways those stories run on. Every time you think, I'm not good enough, every time that belief is activated, the pathway associated with it gets slightly stronger, more automatic, more default. The brain does something very specific with self referred information, information about ourselves. It pays particular attention to it, which means the things we believe about ourselves carry more weight neurologically than almost anything else. They're not just thoughts.
• 10:16
  They're filters. They shape what we notice, what we remember, and how we interpret ambiguous situations. This is why people with low self esteem consistently underestimate how they come across to others, Why they attribute success to luck and failures to personal inadequacy. Why they find it actually hard to accept compliments. Because compliments don't fit the filter.
• 10:47
  They get processed as exceptions or as the other person being polite or evidence that you've somehow fooled them. The negativity bias we've talked about throughout this series is particularly powerful here. The brain is already wired to remember negative experiences more vividly than positive ones. When that's combined with self critical internal narrative, you end up with a brain that is actually building a case for your own inadequacy and struggling to register the evidence that contradicts it. Serotonin matters here too.
• 11:27
  Low self esteem tends to correlate with low serotonin levels, which affects mood, motivation, and the capacity to feel positive about yourself and your future. It creates a neurochemical environment in which confidence is hard to access even when the evidence for it is there. So what keeps it going? Avoidance is the central one. And it works the same way as it does in anxiety and panic.
• 11:59
  When you avoid the thing that might reveal your inadequacy, the challenge, the opportunity, this situation where you might fail, you get short term relief. But you also deprive yourself of the experience that would have given you evidence of your capability. The belief stays unchallenged. The confidence doesn't get built. The thing that feels like self protection is actually self limiting.
• 12:31
  Comparison maintains it. Constantly measuring yourself against other people, particularly the most successful, most polished, most impressive version of other people. It's a game you will always lose because you're comparing your inside to their outside, your full complicated reality to their curated highlights.
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: Self critical thinking feeds it. The internal voice that dismisses achievement, magnifies failure, and interprets neutral events as evidence of inadequacy. That voice feels like honesty. It isn't. It's a pattern.
• 13:18
  And like all patterns, it can change.
• 13:22
  Gary Johannes: Withdrawal makes it worse. When low self esteem leads to pulling back from opportunities, relationships, challenges. The brain gets less of
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: what it needs to build confidence, less positive experience, less evidence of capability, less serotonin. The belief that you're not good enough gets stronger simply because it's going unchallenged. And there's something specific that happens with self esteem, a kind of identity lock. After years of believing something about yourself, that belief becomes part of how you understand who you are. Challenging it doesn't feel difficult.
• 14:07
  It can feel threatening, like you'd be losing something. Even though what you'd be losing is a story that's been limiting you for years. So let's talk about what actually helps. The solution focused approach starts as always, not with the problem, but with the preferred future. What does it look like when confidence isn't holding you back?
• 14:32
  What are you doing? What risk are you taking? What conversations are you having? What version of yourself are you showing up as? Getting clear on that gives the brain direction.
• 14:47
  Not a vague sense of feeling better. A specific detailed picture of what better actually looks like. The brain moves towards what we focus on.
• 15:00
  Gary Johannes: Give it a clear destination, and it starts to find the root. From there, we work on building evidence.
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: Because here's the truth about confidence. You
• 15:13
  Gary Johannes: don't think your way through it, you act your way through it. Confidence is built through experience, through doing things, especially things that feel slightly outside your comfort zone and discovering that you can. You're giving your brain new data, new evidence that contradicts the old story.
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: Small steps, incremental challenges,
• 15:40
  Gary Johannes: not throwing yourself in at the deep end. That can backfire and reinforce the fear. But consistently, deliberately, putting yourself in situations where you can build evidence of your own capability. Self esteem is rebuilt differently, more slowly, more fundamentally. It requires changing the relationship with yourself, treating yourself with the same basic decency you'd offer someone else.
• 16:14
  Challenging the internal narrative, not by arguing with it aggressively, but noticing when it's running and questioning whether it's accurate. Building a more honest, more compassionate picture of who you are. One that includes failures and struggles without letting them define the whole story.
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: The three pillars mattered here enormously. Positive interaction, genuine connection with people who see you clearly and reflect something real back, directly builds self esteem over time. Positive action,
• 16:55
  Gary Johannes: doing things, engaging, showing up, builds the neurochemical foundation that makes self belief more accessible and positive thinking. Deliberately, intentionally acknowledging what you've done and what you're capable of, what's going right, starts to build new newer pathways, new stories.
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: Sleep is fundamental. When
• 17:24
  Gary Johannes: we're sleep deprived, the brain is more threat sensitive, more self critical, more prone to the kind of thinking that erodes confidence. Better sleep creates a better neurochemical environment for self belief. Here's what the research tells us. The brain is not fixed.
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: The stories it learned to tell, it can learn to untell. Through deep relaxation, through carefully directing thinking, through working with the subconscious rather than against it, those old beliefs begin to loosen. Not overnight, not dramatically, but really, lastingly. People who have been carrying these beliefs for years and years, who have organized their life around the assumption that they weren't quite good enough, find those beliefs can shift session by session, step by step, because the brain that built one story can build a different one. That's not optimism.
• 18:31
  That's neuroscience. Before I close, one thing you can
• 18:37
  Gary Johannes: do right now. Write down three things you've done that you didn't think you could. Not three things you're proud of in a general sense. Three specific things where you doubted yourself beforehand
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: and did it anyway, or where something felt impossible turned out to be possible, or even where you showed up even when everything in you said don't. They don't have to be big. They don't have to be impressive. They just have to be real.
• 19:09
  Gary Johannes: Because the brain under low self esteem has a very selective memory. It files away failures in full color and dismisses achievements as luck or flukes or exceptions. This exercise is a direct counter to that process. You're building a vial of evidence that your brain doesn't want you to have. Three things.
• 19:32
  Write them down. Read them back. Let them learn. That's the start of a different story. If you're listening to this because confidence or self esteem is something you've struggled with,
• 19:45
  Speaker 2: I want to say something directly. The story you've been telling yourself about who you are isn't the truth. It's a story built from experiences, shaped by other people's words and
• 20:00
  Gary Johannes: actions, reinforced over years of repetition until it feels like fact.
• 20:06
  Speaker 2: But it isn't fact. It's a narrative, and narratives can change.
• 20:11
  Gary Johannes: I left school at 14 with nothing, told myself for decades that I was too thick to amount too much. And at 60, I came out with a master's degree from one of the best universities in the world while running a practice, leading a team, and training the next generation of therapists. The same year I found out my brain had been working against me in ways I hadn't even known about. If the story I told myself had been true, none of that would have happened. The story wasn't true.
• 20:45
  And whatever story you've been telling yourself,
• 20:49
  Speaker 2: I'd invite you to start questioning it too. Because the brain that learned to doubt you can learn to back you instead. It starts with understanding what's going on. You've just done that, and that, quietly, without any fanfare, is a step forward. If this episode has been useful, and I honestly hope it has, hit subscribe wherever you're listening.
• 21:17
  Every episode, one condition, the same lens. What's going on? What's keeping it going, and what actually helps. There's a lot more to come, and I don't want you to miss it. See you on the next one.