“Why do I always feel the need to explain myself?” (Tips for confidence in business)
Hello friends! Hi, I’m Shikah, I’m a former counsellor and I create done-for-you lead magnets and workbooks for coaches.
In this blog post, I’ll share reasons why you feel the need to explain yourself to people. Perhaps you are starting a new side hustle, have a coaching business, starting a self-employment journey such as network marketing or real estate, for example. And you are getting judgy comments from people around you.
If you are starting a coaching business for example, you may hear comments such as “Coaching is a scam” or “Everyone and their grandmother is a coach these days.” If you are getting started in a self-employment journey, you may also hear comments like “Your market is too saturated” or “You are just in it for the money.”
I was a victim of this myself. When I was working as a counsellor in a school in the past, I had to endure people making many snide comments about my job. I heard comments like “Counselling doesnt work.” “Counselling is too ‘soft’ for teenagers. They need to be disciplined the ‘hard way’”. Or “Honouring your emotions through counselling is a waste of time.”
There were times when I felt indignant hearing such comments. At that time, I felt like I had to explain my job to people. Which is ironic, since counselling is such a beneficial job to society. I felt like I had to explain that counselling, or any form of therapy, is for long-term good, and is not a short-term solution. In reality, of course, I did not have to explain my work or my job options to people.
I’m sharing my story because you may be in the same boat where people are judgy about your career or business decisions. When you choose to pursue a business path which is not conventional, or has a bad rep like network marketing or sales, you will be exposed to uninvited comments. And then you feel as though you need to defend yourself or your decisions so that you don’t seem either silly, too idealistic or ‘inferior’ in any way.
Let’s break down the reasons why you feel the need to explain yourself.
Firstly, when someone makes an unwelcome comment about a personal or harmless decision you made, your ego was affected.
You felt that your intelligence, your life choices and your beliefs were attacked. Naturally, you get defensive and start spewing a long paragraph of reasons why you chose to make that specific decision.
There is one way to look at this situation. Your ‘attacker’ does not care about your explanation. And I say that with love and compassion. When someone rudely attacks your choices, and you know this person is insecure or does not have your best interests at heart, they are not interested in your reasoning.
They have a strong opposite opinion about your decision and they want to appear ‘superior’. They want to be seen as ‘right’. They want to be seen as intelligent and have the upper hand over you in some way. So they express their opposite opinion in a brash, disprespectful, forceful way. I would say that this is a character trait of someone who is highly insecure in themselves and someone who is very concerned with their image and appearances. Someone who is very egoistic.
In this situation, your inner critic will be activated and may be telling you, “Don’t be a weak person. You need to stand up and defend yourself and set this person straight.” However, considering that your ‘attacker’ does not care about your explanation, there is no point engaging in any sort of debate with that person. There is also one point for us to remember : we cannot change someone else’s opinion if they don’t want to. So spare yourself the battle and do not engage with that person.
Another reason why you feel the need to explain yourself is you may be subconsciously comparing yourself with others and feeling a little ‘inferior’ as a result.
If you have decided to set up a coaching business and it is still in the start up phase or your business is having a slump, which happens, you may feel the need to explain yourself when people ask you business-related questions. Questions such as “How is your business going?”, “How many clients have you had?”, “Are you already making a full time income?”, “Are you still making a 5-figure income?” “Are you making enough money for yourself?”
These questions are very tough to answer as a new coach or business owner. If you have a strong inner critic, you will, number 1) have this urge to answer those questions and number 2) justify your answer.
You may answer like this : “I am on the way to making money. As you know, there is so much for me to learn when running a business, the economy is down and people are not buying courses like they used to, it’s normal for coaches to take a long time before they get clients, I think business success takes time and when you get the formula right, clients will flow, I leave it to God and the Universe to plan it out for me and I am simply going with the flow.” You get the idea.
If you catch yourself doing a word vomit or typing a long defensive reply message to your friends, that’s because your inner critic tells you that you need to defend and explain yourself so that you will not look like a ‘loser’ and you will not look ‘inferior’.
Again, there is no need to reply uncomfortable questions. You can simply say, “My business is doing alright. I’ll share more details with you when I have interesting updates. There’s nothing much to share right now.” You can then gracefully turn the spotlight to your friends and ask them questions about their work or business.
At this point, you may be wondering “What can I do if I have clients who have low self-confidence or low self-worth and have to keep explaining themselves to people?”
That’s why I want you to download my free mini workbook called ‘Self-loving ways to boost confidence’ for your clients. You can use this as a lead magnet on your website to get more email subscribers. Simply key in your email and name below and it will land in your inbox.
Now with that out of the way, let’s move on to the next reason on why you feel the need to explain yourself.
Another reason why you feel the need to explain your decisions is that you are silently second-guessing yourself.
You may be second-guessing your own decisions at that point. In this case, as you are explaining to someone why you are becoming a coach, you are also trying to convince yourself why you chose this path, simultaneously.
If you catch yourself overexplaining and being defensive, you may be silently doubtful of your decision at the back of your mind. So over explaining yourself is one way for you to also convince yourself that you have made the right choice.
Now you know the reasons to why you feel the need to explain yourself to people. At the same time, you may not know how to coach your clients if they show the same signs of a harsh inner critic or low self-confidence.
If that’s you, check out my done-for-you 7 Day Self-Confidence program which you can launch and sell to your coaching clients.
You can have your own confidence course running and ready to launch by today. You can set up the course once and sell it on evergreen on your website.
It’s so much easier to have someone who has a counselling background - which is me - to create coaching materials for you. You can save so much time and energy and you can use the free time to focus on getting more clients and growing your business.
Thank you and I’ll see you in my next episode. Bye!
