19. Confidence After Infidelity

Infidelity doesn’t just break trust. It also shatters confidence. Whether you’re the betrayed or the unfaithful partner, your sense of self can be left in pieces. You start to question your judgement, your worth, and your ability to trust yourself again.

In this episode, you’ll learn practical strategies, mindset shifts, and a powerful four-step model to restore your self-belief, one small win at a time.

Key Takeaways:

• Learn the difference between confidence and self-confidence and why it matters after infidelity.

• Discover how betrayal impacts your belief in yourself and how to reclaim it.

• Use the Four Cs model to build confidence from commitment through to capability.

• Understand how daily self-care and tracking small wins can rebuild inner strength.

• Avoid the trap of arrogance and instead cultivate authentic, grounded self-confidence.

💬 Reflection questions:

Have you noticed a shift in your confidence since the betrayal? What small step have you taken to rebuild it?

Connect with Luke:

• Website: www.lifecoachluke.com

• Instagram: @mylifecoachluke

• Email: luke@lifecoachluke.com

Join the After the Affair community at www.facebook.com/groups/aftertheaffaircommunity

Episode Transcript:

The After The Affair podcast with me Luke Shillings is here to help you process, decide and move forward on purpose following infidelity. Together we'll explore what's required to rebuild trust not only in yourself but also with others. Whether you stay or leave I can help and no matter what your story there will be something here for you.

Let's go. Hello and welcome to the After The Affair podcast with myself Luke Shillings. Today I would like to talk about confidence and what impact infidelity has on your confidence and also the different types of confidence and how they can show up in your life.

So let's start with just understanding confidence itself. On the surface confidence seems simple and obvious but it is a complex concept. It is essential for both personal and professional growth.

Confidence is the belief in one's abilities, qualities and judgement. It allows us to approach situations and challenges with assurance and trust in ourselves. Confidence can appear in different aspects of life such as in personal relationships, work and hobbies.

High confidence levels can lead to increased resilience, better decision making and improved relationships. Whereas low confidence can result in self-doubt, indecisiveness and a complete lack of motivation. Confidence is built through experiences of success and can be improved through self-reflection and growth.

But it can also be easily shaken by experiences of failure or disappointment and it can be completely shattered by experiences like infidelity. Infidelity can have a profound impact on a person's confidence especially if they're the one who committed the infidelity. The feelings of guilt, shame and self-doubt often follow can leave a lasting impact on one sense of self-worth and belief in their abilities.

It also plays a huge part in the betrayed spouse's journey as the confidence they had in themselves as a judge of character has been put firmly into question. Now there are two types of confidence. Confidence and self-confidence.

They are closely related but distinct concepts in themselves. As I have already mentioned, confidence refers to the belief in your own abilities, qualities and judgement. It can be present in many different areas of life and can fluctuate based on a variety of circumstances.

Confidence tends to be related more specifically to tasks and actual activities that we can carry out, learning a specific skill or behaviour to be able to better do something in the world. So for example we might want to get better at climbing or running or cycling, you know some kind of physical activity or maybe playing the piano or becoming better at chess. These are things which when you have achieved confidence in those things you feel comfortable and you believe that you can complete or participate in these activities without fear of self-doubt.

Self-confidence on the other hand refers specifically to your individual belief about your own abilities, qualities and judgement. It is a personal attribute and can influence overall confidence in various situations. It's about feeling secure in yourself and about how much you trust yourself.

When you have self-confidence you can cope with any emotion no matter how uncomfortable. Essentially self-confidence is a subset of confidence and improving self-confidence can lead to an overall increase in confidence in various areas of life. The self-confidence I see in each of my clients is when they follow through on what they've set out to do.

They make a plan, they execute that plan and they see the results. This sounds simple on the surface but it is much harder than most people recognise. You likely have heard me talking about taking responsibility for yourself in previous episodes and self-confidence is the epitome of seeing that through.

In our early sessions, particularly where the infidelity is still quite raw, there is a tonne of self-doubt and actual lack of self-confidence. Up until this point they had their own backs but now it's all been brought into question. Remember the worst thing that can happen is an emotion.

It's easy to forget this and with good reason. Most of us have spent our whole lives avoiding our emotions, especially us guys, so we just don't have the practise. Like anything though, the more you do something the better you get at it.

You may just have been unwillingly getting better at avoiding those emotions without realising it. This can be changed though and it all starts with how you think about yourself. Both confidence and self-confidence are just feelings so when we consider that our feelings come from our thinking then it becomes clear that we can adjust our confidence by thinking differently.

Ask yourself, what's the difference between a person with self-confidence versus a person without self-confidence? The self-confident person believes that they are worthy, they're strong, resilient, they're competent. Nothing else needs to happen for them to have self-confidence, they just need to believe it. But isn't self-confident just being arrogant? Well some people are afraid of what self-confidence might mean about them.

Perhaps they think they will come across as cocky or arrogant. In its simplest form, arrogance is when someone fakes self-confidence. They believe that they need to put others down to get ahead.

Arrogance is based heavily on comparison but don't forget comparison is the thief of joy. Arrogant people are not happy people and they are not fulfilled. Self-confidence doesn't require other people at all as it's only about you.

An arrogant person criticises at any opportunity in an attempt to make themselves look better but this is just a weak overcompensation for their lack of confidence. So how can we rebuild confidence after infidelity? Well self-confidence is something that you can earn from yourself, for yourself, by yourself. Rebuilding confidence after infidelity is a gradual and challenging process but it is possible.

The first steps is to acknowledge the impact of the affair and begin the healing process. This involves addressing the reasons why the infidelity happened, forgiving yourself and taking steps to rebuild trust. You can hear me talk about trust and forgiveness in previous episodes so please refer back to those if you'd like to learn more.

In the here and now you can focus on simple activities such as logging your wins each day. You can do this by writing down two or three small wins. It doesn't matter how small or seemingly insignificant or trivial these may seem.

Over the course of the coming days and weeks your brain will actively begin to seek out these wins as you go throughout your day. What you pay attention to is completely within your control but it does take a little practise. Starting small and building from there is as good a step forward as any.

When you lack self-confidence it's so easy to pay attention to all of the things going on around you that make it seem like you were justified in your self-doubt. You might see other people having fun and laughing. This amplifies the fact that you are sat alone and creates a larger disconnect.

This simple exercise of writing down your small wins will educate your brain and awareness to seek out the other side of your story. When we look at how to build confidence in a specific task or activity I like to use the four C's. This is not my work but I like to use this model when helping my clients understand the building blocks of confidence.

I learned it from the great business coach Dan Sullivan. The first step is commitment. The first C, commitment.

This is committing to the goal. Whatever your specific objective or outcome is you're trying to achieve you're committing to it and you're determined to do that. The next C is courage.

It's being courageous to experience hard things. Think back to the I can handle all emotions. I can handle any negative emotion.

Once you get good at handling those emotions, you're better at it because you've practised it, then you can have the courage to experience those hard things time and time again. When you are courageous that leads on to capability, the third C. Capability are the skills that we gain from being courageous. It's about doing those hard things repeatedly which then builds our capability.

And then once we have that capability in this specific task or activity then that can give us confidence because we now have trust in our ability to do that thing. When my daughter was learning to ride her bike she was committed to being able to do so. She then used courage to keep trying even though she fell many times, even hurting herself in the process on occasion.

Through this commitment and courage she gained the skills required to first be able to ride that bike and with that came the confidence. She can now confidently say that she can ride her bike because she has evidence to prove it. I don't doubt that everybody listening will be able to recall multiple instances in their life where they followed this path, this model.

I want to offer that the confidence in step four is available from the off. When you build that self-confidence muscle through the repetition of recognising your wins, acknowledging that you can deal with any emotion and doing it all on purpose, then you can have that confidence in advance. I am confident that I can do anything that I haven't done before.

I know that I just have to commit, be courageous and become capable. I've shown myself many times in life that I can do it and I know that I have my own back even if it's scary. So moving on, next we want to consider the self-care element and this also plays a huge part in personal growth.

Self-care and personal growth are essential for rebuilding confidence after infidelity. It's a bit like, I like to use the analogy of a car, you know your car might have a good performing engine but without a good quality fuel to drive it, without the right maintenance and care and attention then it's just not going to perform at its best. Well of course we're exactly the same, we need to make sure that we are getting good enough rest, we are sleeping well, we need to make sure that we are drinking plenty of water, putting the right kind of food in our body.

Now I'm no dietician by any stretch of the imagination but it's really paying attention to that part. You know and also to be active, use different types of exercise and therapy and self-reflection, engaging in hobbies and interests that really boost that self-esteem and increase that sense of personal satisfaction and this gives you a foundation of which you can then really start to build that self-confidence. Trying to do the confidence first without having those basics, you'll always burn out, it always becomes overwhelming and too much so really pay attention to that.

Then when it comes to moving forward in relationships and this doesn't matter whether you are staying within your current relationship, the relationship where the infidelity occurred or maybe looking at future relationships. We recognise that infidelity can have a profound impact on them both but it really is possible to move forward and to rebuild trust and this involves open and honest communication, being accountable and taking the steps to address the reasons why that infidelity happened. Having the confidence to be able to have these difficult conversations, having the confidence to be able to stand up shoulders back and take responsibility for yourself regardless of which side of the infidelity you fall on, that gives you the power, it gives you some control.

It's something that you can actively do and it's one of the things which you can actually affect. We can't affect or we can't control the other people, we can't change how they show up in the relationship, we can't control them but we can control how we show up and if we intentionally start to look after ourselves, pay attention to ourselves and our bodies, focus on building that self-confidence muscle and using it in your day-to-day then all kinds of things in the future can happen, many of which you would probably not even believe. I hope that this discussion has shed some light on the complex and often overlooked impact of infidelity on personal confidence.

If you or someone you know has been affected by infidelity, remember that help is available and healing really is possible. So I really want to thank you for joining me but before you go, I always try and answer the questions that are asked of me either through the podcast or through some of the online forums that I'm part of. I try and answer them in a way that is going to be useful to as many people as possible and isn't necessarily always a very specific personalised response.

However that is a facility that I do actually offer, it's something that you can do and it doesn't mean committing to working with me for a longer period of time. There's a link in the show notes which will allow you to connect with me directly and you can ask me a very specific question about your situation exactly where you are right now and I will respond via video with a personalised response to your situation, giving you both an answer and feedback on the question plus offering maybe some guidance to action steps that you can take from that point forward. All you need to do is click the link and follow the instructions and hopefully we'll talk soon.

Okay it's been great speaking with you again, I look forward to talking to you all next week. In the meantime have a great week and take care.