Welcome to the Only Child Diaries podcast. I'm your host, tracy Wallace. Have you ever felt like you didn't receive the how-to brochure on life, that you didn't get enough guidance about major life issues? So did I. You don't have to be an only child to feel this way. In my podcast, we'll explore some of the best ways to better navigate adulting, while doing so with humor and light. Welcome everyone to the Only Child Diaries podcast.

Today, I'm going to talk to you about confidence yes, confidence. This is something that I've thought a lot about and getting back to my roots for this podcast and giving you the how-to brochure on life, I'm going to talk to you about confidence and getting confidence when sometimes you don't feel confident. I think that this is something that is sometimes difficult for only children, but I think it's also difficult for people that aren't only children. I know several people, several adults, who, where I've known several adults, some of them have passed away people that had siblings and people that are only children. So there's no real common thread in who has a strong level of confidence about themselves. What I've noticed is, I think, strong, or always positive, relationship with my parents. I mean, again, they did the best that they could, and they were both only children and they might have had some, or they did have some confidence issues themselves Possibly. We're not going to get into that right now, but through my lifetime, especially in the last, I would say the last what 20 years or so I've come to appreciate when you're out in public and you see adults interacting, adult children with their parents interacting, or maybe you know someone who's an adult child and they're interacting with their parents and you see kind of what would be the perfect scenario of that relationship. You see a parent who's a positive person, a positive role model, who is supportive, who is nurturing, who offers just a positive, who offers just a positive relationship for their adult child, right, and you realize in observing this that probably most likely all the time that this person was growing up, the parent maybe not always, but maybe always, maybe sometimes the parent was the same way in that period. So what I'm saying is is that the parent was nurturing, supportive, positive, right Now, how many parents are actually like this? I don't know, or how many parents have been like this through the whole parenting experience, because I know for a fact that there are some parents who kind of have a renaissance, I guess or they just learn that or they grow as people and as their children age and become adults, they have a better relationship with them. Or maybe they've worked out some things and so they become more supportive and they become more nurturing and more understanding, and the adult children have a better relationship with their parents, and vice versa.

Now, speaking from personal experience, I didn't always have that. I had more of a fear-based relationship with my mother and that's not to say that I feared her or I feared my dad, because I didn't but I was taught to fear external sources. I was taught to fear the world, to fear life, to fear the things that could happen to me, to fear for my safety, and so I've come to recognize that and I've come to work hard to overcome that. And sometimes I recognize that I'm fearful and I realize that that came from a certain place, that it doesn't come from necessarily any place. That's logical. I try to push the fear aside and just take that out of the equation, because the fear was part of the way I was brought up. I realized that confidence was probably something more that I taught myself and that I learned myself than was something that I was provided and that I was taught from my parents. I wasn't necessarily bolstered up. I wasn't like, oh good job, maybe I did get a good job when I did something that my mother wanted me to do, but it wasn't always something that I valued.

How do you build confidence, or how do you recognize that you're confident or you're not confident? And how do you, as a young adult, as an adult, how do you build your own confidence? Right? How do you get to that place? Well, you know, there's the old saying or maybe it's not old, I'm not sure but there's the saying fake it till you make it. I think that in this world, a lot of the people that we encounter have confidence issues, and a lot of people, if you really ask them and they felt really comfortable to answer, you would agree that they have confidence issues of some varying degree, right? So how do we become more confident?

I think, for me, what I've learned is that I have to recognize, first of all, that I'm human and I'm going to make mistakes, and that's okay. It's okay to make mistakes, you don't have to be perfect and at the same time, I have to try to learn and grow and be aware and be kind to others. I have to really look at myself no-transcript right. You have to dig deep within yourself and you have to tell yourself that you're a good person just the way you are. If nobody else tells you this today, or this week, or this month, or even this year, I'm going to tell you this right now. However you are at this present time, you're enough. You are enough exactly how you are. You are a great person. All my listeners, all my listeners You're a great person. You're doing exactly what you should be doing and you're leading your life with value.

I want people to be confident about themselves and to see the value that they provide, and I think maybe that's really what confidence is is seeing the value that you provide, because we're all such unique beings in this world. We're all so different, but we also provide such unique characteristics to those around us, and that, in of itself, makes us special and should provide us with some level of confidence. I hope that that helps you in some way. I want to be positive the positive side of finding your confidence and feeling strong and feeling good about this life, because every day is not guaranteed and you have to try to live each day as fully as you can. So don't waste it feeling bad about yourself or bad about the choices that you make, because you're enough. That being said, I'll get off my soapbox for today. I want to share with everybody that next week drum roll, please is going to be my 100th episode is going to be my 100th episode. Yes, 100 episodes. I can't believe it and I'm going to try to do something special.

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about the future of the Only Child Diaries podcast and where I'm going with this only Child Diaries podcast and where I'm going with this, and for a while now, most of this past year, I've thought about doing more interviews, but it takes a lot of effort to do interviews. I'm going to be honest with you, and I've found myself pretty busy the last what three or four months and I've been kind of emotionally exhausted with the passing of my horse, dallas, and I'm feeling I don't know if I'm feeling better, but I just try to keep busy, and so I'm keeping busy, I'm keeping busy and I'm thinking about what we're going to do, but I do have another only child adult just like myself coming up that I'm going to share another interview. It's been a while since we've done an interview and I'm excited about it, so I'll leave it at that. We've been talking for a while and I think you'll I think you'll really, I hope you'll really look forward to hearing that. So I'd like to do more of that in the coming year.

The next 100 episodes it's hard to believe. Thank you so much for sticking with me and listening and sharing my journey, sharing your journey with me and sharing our journey together, right? So that's all I've got for today. Next week, we're going to tackle the 100th episode together. I hope you'll join me. If you like this episode, please follow the Only Child Diaries podcast on Apple Podcasts or other platforms. You might listen on and consider rating Only Child Diaries and writing a review. It helps others to find us. Please share it with a friend you think might like it as well. Visit my Instagram page Only Child Diaries or Facebook Only Child Diaries Podcast. Thanks for listening. I'm Tracy Wallace and these are the Only Child Diaries.