Elfreda Manahan-Vaughan

“From Competence to Confidence – The Secret to Feeling Confident in Everything You Do”

by Nina from MindGourmet

We’re so happy to present our first online course at MindGourmet Academy: “From Competence to Confidence – The Secret to Feeling Confident in Everything You Do”!

We are honored to have this as our first course and here we will delve into a more in-depth discussion about its development, what you will get out of it and how it can most impact your world. We’ll get key insights from the course creator: Elfreda Manahan Vaughan! Discover how you can begin feeling confident in everything YOU do!

Further down the page there’s the interview for you to find, from which the content for the next paragraphs is distilled.

Learning from an Experienced Confidence Coach

Elfreda Manahan-Vaughan, a Confidence Coach from Ireland, has a passion for helping people understand themselves better while empowering them to become their most confident self. She believes we all, always have a choice when it comes to how we feel, who we are and who we ultimately want to be. Her focus lies intensely and successfully on making these choices available to her clients and students.

Elfreda has twenty years’ experience working in the areas of communications, personal development and performance training. In her online course created specifically for the MindGourmet Academy, she incorporates her skills as a Neuro-Linguistic Programming mind coach and meditation instructor, as well as her knowledge of cognitive behavior therapy and hypnosis.

Elfreda’s Work in her Role as a Confidence Coach

Elfreda works a lot with clients who are in transitional phases of their life; those who’ve had relationships end, a career break or even just starting out in their career. She helps her clients identify and understand those ideas and beliefs that are holding them back from feeling safe and confident in their daily situations by trusting their own abilities. She helps them change their perspective, where needed. This enables them to shift energetically, emotionally and mentally when they realize that whatever was blocking them or holding them back has changed from this new perspective.

Change is often desired AND dreaded

Elfreda often finds her clients want change but are afraid to move on in their lives, as it requires the need to move out of their comfort zone. The importance lies in understanding that the power to change is within ourselves, and that when we change internally, the external world will change too, and we’ll be okay with that. So if it’s, for example, about changing our career, the work really starts with us. As a result, once we have conquered our internal world, it becomes easier to make changes in our external world as well.

Going inward and developing that trust and that belief in ourselves allows us to embrace whatever changes might occur.

“From Competence to Confidence”

The course is about developing that understanding; what beliefs you have about yourself that create your identity, and how to understand the internal dialogue you might have with yourself that influences how you feel. It’s about being able to see where and why you feel confident and what competencies are influencing that. You will learn to use mindfulness meditation and certain techniques in Neuro-Linguistic Programming that allow you to become much more self-aware, to have greater management of your own experience and to build feelings and states inside yourself that allow you to feel confident regardless of the skills you have or the place that you’re in or what you’re dealing with.

The Importance of Mindfulness

Elfreda says the scientific findings, especially by Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson, about the positive effects of mindfulness are very compelling and convincing.

Mindfulness is a practice, a meditation, and by being consistent you can reap great benefits from it. When you practice mindfulness, it alters the structure of your brain, it alters the way the brain communicates with the body and thus alters the way the brain responds to threat and to fear. Once you commit to that practice, a ripple effect occurs and you start to become mindful without having to be actively mindful. You bring your awareness into the moment and realize what you’re thinking and what you’re feeling. You acknowledge that it’s from you rather from what’s outside of you. This awareness helps to quiet the internal dialogue.

The Safe State And Why It Is Relevant For Our Confidence

The Safe State is a term Elfreda created that stems from her own experience. She realized through her mindfulness practice and meditation that when she was most lacking in confidence or when she was most fearful it was because she didn’t feel safe. She started to do some research and learned that from a very young age our primary concern is survival, whether we are looked after. Our early childhood experiences influence how safe we feel today.

We need to find within ourselves what allows us to feel safe – it may be building trust in our abilities, our skills or relying on others. By doing so we discover what that’s like internally to have a great level of trust and safety. That’s the Safe State. It’s here we begin to feel confident and are more willing to put ourselves out into the world. So when there’s a challenge or a big task at hand we first create the Safe State to feel confident in dealing with what’s coming up and to be okay with not knowing exactly what comes next.