Hey, hey, beautiful human. Can I steal five minutes of your time? I have something super important to share with you, but I promise I'll be really quick. You're listening to my weekly bonus episode of Embrace Your Real with me, Julie Labbetter. I'm about to give you a quick tip for building your confidence, honoring your body, and unconditionally loving your authentic self. Stay tuned. If you're ready to embrace a real, let's get it.

Let's go.

Hello and welcome back to another bonus episode on the Embrace Real podcast.

I'm genuinely so happy that you're here with me today. All right. I need to tell you something that I don't know that I've ever fully admitted on here before. And it's something that I still struggle with, but I struggle way less than I too before. I used to wait for everything. Literally, I'd wait to post the photo until I felt confident enough. I'd wait to wear certain outfits until I toned up a bit more or got smaller. I'd wait to start the big project until I had it all figured out. I'd wait to speak up until I felt brave enough to handle whatever response came back. And you know what? I was always waiting because that feeling of ready and never actually came. Or maybe you can relate to this. Maybe you've been waiting to join a gym until you get in shape first

or waiting to wear the dress until you feel better about your body or waiting to start the

business, apply for the job, have the conversation, post the unfiltered photo, show up without a

makeup, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, for some magical moment when confidence

just shows up and makes it easier. But here's what I learned.

And honestly, it's changed everything for me. Confidence doesn't come first. Action does. And today, I want to share with you something that actually changed my life when I stopped waiting to

feel ready and just started to do the thing scared. I'm just going to dive right in. This is the whole,

like, waiting to fill ready thing.

Here's the lie that we've been sold. Once I feel confident, then I'll do X, Y, and Z. We think

confidence is the thing that we need to have before we take action. Like it's a prerequisite.

Like we need to collect enough of it first, then we need to store it up. And then once we've

had enough, we finally are able to do

the hard thing. But that's completely backwards. Confidence isn't something that you find. It's

something that you build. And you build it by doing the thing that you're scared to do, not by

waiting until the fear goes away. Think about it like this. Have you ever waited to feel ready

and then just magically woke up one day, totally confident and

prepared? Probably not because that's not how it works. What actually happens is when we wait,

we feel more scared so we don't do the thing. And then because we didn't do the thing,

we then feel less confident, which makes us even less likely to do it. And the cycle just

...