A week ago I was right in the middle of the first retreat I ever held completely on my own with a client of mine. His name is Florian Zagler and he is the CEO of Zagler Müslibär, maker of the world’s crunchiest and healthiest, and tastiest Müsli that I know of. As we planned his year and dove deep into the biggest challenges, dreams, and wishes, and since I coach him in German, we happened upon the wish for “Selbst-Bewusstsein.”

Selbstbewusstsein translates into something in between of self-confidence and self-awareness in its everyday use. Colloquially most people that use the word when they say this person is “selbstbewusst”, tend to mean that this person is self-confident in how they appear.

When we talked about this, something sparked in me, that made me realize that true Selbst-Bewusstsein is something else entirely. “Bewusstsein” means consciousness and “Selbst” means the self. So the most accurate translation of the word is that the self has been made conscious. I drew up the below map to explain to Florian what that actually means in my understanding:

If you want to build more Selbstbewusstsein or more self-confidence, we can be very precise in breaking down what that means:

It means that we practice making aware of the parts that make up the self. And there are 4 aspects that make up my self:

• Feelings
• Thoughts
• The body
• Images (or our imagination)  

Now the more we practice making these 4 parts aware of ourselves, becoming intimate with them, and getting to know them, by its very definition, the more Selbstbewusstsein we will have. This gives us a very clear route in how to build it and makes the idea of self-confidence less of an ominous thing that some people have and others don’t. It brings our power back to actually practicing it and as the fruit of our labor we will have it.

Let’s break it down

Of course, people have written books and books and developed in-depth practices on each of these 4 aspects over the millennia. The best I can do here is to give some short pointers in the direction of each of them that I hope is useful. I’ve covered a lot of this in my previous article on the practices that influenced my life the most.

Note: My understanding is also that each of these 4 components are interlinked with each other in ways that we’re just beginning to understand. Our feelings are rooted in our bodies. Our thoughts are connected to our feelings. Our imagination goes with certain sensate experiences and so forth.

• Feelings: I’ve written before that I think one of the best practices to build confidence with our feelings is to improve the vocabulary we have for it. And the most precise feeling-vocabulary that I’ve seen developed comes from the Non-violent Communication community (I’ve covered NVC in-depth more here). When we begin to know how to distinguish between disappointment, sadness, loneliness, and a sense of abandonment, we can learn to meet ourselves in those areas much more easily. This has the effect that we’re less afraid of naming and feeling our feelings, which by definition brings up our self-confidence again.
• Thoughts: Thoughts are best explored in my experience through vipassana meditation. Or therapy / coaching where you have someone paying attention to your thoughts by way of the words you use. The overall idea in building intimacy and self-confidence with your thoughts is to again begin to actually listen to them, even if it’s hard to hear at first. From there, thoughts can complete more easily and most importantly can begin to be connected to your wider experience. Thoughts tend to be like the tip of the iceberg underneath which body sensations and feelings lurk. If you see your thoughts as an entry point to your wider human experience, I find it much less frustrating than to just keep circling through the thought loops. (I cover my take on meditation more in-depth here and here).
• Body: I’ll probably sound like a broken record to you since you’ve heard me say this in so many of my previous articles. But the body and its sensate experiences is probably by far the most underrepresented part in our day to day experience and therefore also the biggest opportunity to become awake, well, and self-aware. Learning to become intimate with our bodies is the biggest opportunity we have for building Selbstbewusstsein. My favorite practices for it are Somatic Experiencing and the Grinberg Method, as well as ecstatic dance, cold exposure and as of late, boxing. (I explore all these methods in-depth here). The more you are aware of your body, the easier it is to stay with whatever conversation or experience is right in front of you. There is nothing more powerful than learning how to do that and build massive amounts of Selbstbewusstsein along the way.
• Imagination: I cover this as distinctly different from thinking. This is the kind of day-dreaming under the shower when you imagine yourself walking up to this or that person, saying this or that which you tend to never dare in real life. Or where you dream of the house by the lake or punching that guy for what he did to you. Personally, I have a lot of these imaginative moments when I’m pumped up and listen to hip hop or techno. My mind then just springs forth with these images, where I’m the big hero of course in all of them. I believe that this quality of dreaming and imagining isn’t covered too widely as a practice as far as I know. And yet, I think it is at the root of all of our creative expression. We have to somehow dream it up in an image first before we can manifest anything we want. Elon Musk needs to dream of electric cars and landing on Mars as an image way before he can do anything about it of course. Luckily we’re all extremely gifted in this. And the problem is not how to do it, but how to stop ourselves from interrupting it. Most of us have been taught to either keep our day-dreams to ourselves or to not do it at all because it’s not “productive”. I argue the opposite, make time in your life for this kind of dreaming:
  • go on walks or ride your bike with music pumping,
  • shower a little longer to bask in the glory of your imagination
  • let yourself sit still or be in silly conversation with a friend where you dream up the wildest images you can come up with
  • let your mind drift off, away from the thinking, into the imagining on a quiet Saturday morning as you’re sitting on the couch

Bringing it all together

The more we become aware of these aspects of our “self”, the more we’ll build intimacy with it, have less fear, and thereby build the Selbstbewusstsein we need to live the life we want.

Over time, we of course learn to naturally interlace all these areas of ourselves with each other more and more. And through that return to our natural form of life as play in the world. This, I believe, is the most fun way to live, with plenty of Selbstbewusstsein, lots of fun, and connection with others to explore.