How To Strengthen Your Confidence In Yourself, And Then Demonstrate It For Others To See

On the most recent episode of Disrupt Yourself, I had the pleasure of talking with Tarsha Joyner of Mrs. Joy’s Absolutely Fabulous Treats, a bakery in Lynchburg. Tarsha took a label she created in her college graphic design class, a shortbread recipe, and a booth at the farmer’s market. Turning it into an award-winning brand, a brick-and-mortar store, and an upcoming television show.

There’s a lot to learn from Tarsha’s journey, and for this week’s newsletter, I wanted to zero in on this skill of establishing your sense of worth – and then stabilizing it, even during conflict that threatens to erode that confidence.?

For Tarsha, it started with her time in foster care, after her father left the family.

“I had a lot of adversity, a lot of trials early on, so by the time I've gotten to this point, honey, I could deal with just about anything,” Tarsha said on Disrupt Yourself. “I've gone through some of the worst things you could possibly imagine as a child.” She said that one of the first steps in grounding that personal worth is having the room to make mistakes, to face that adversity, and learn from it, whether you’re a kid or an adult.

“When you make choices, you either make a good choice or a bad choice, and most of the time when we're doing that, we know what we're doing. When you make those poor choices, you have to understand that there will be consequences to follow. And when you remove the consequence from your child, then they don't really learn a whole lot of anything.”

Beyond good parenting advice, it’s good advice for any stage of life – if we insulate ourselves from the consequences of what we’re doing, we never really take the time to understand ourselves and what drives our choices. We never ground our worth in knowing how to make the right decision.

And once we have that internal compass, we have to train the muscle that maintains true north even when others are trying to pull us in other directions. For Tarsha, that was made evident in the day-to-day running of a small business.

“It's your job to tell people what you're worth. Because if you let them tell you what you're worth, you'll never be worth anything,” Tarsha said. “And then you have to have a spine, because you cannot run a business without a backbone. Employees will try to get over on you. Vendors will try to get over on you.”?

Your true north has to be a visible mantra, that others know cannot be bent or broken just because they ask – or demand. And this will mean conflict, because there will always be someone who asks you to alter that internal compass just a bit, so a pillar of your worth has to be effective conflict resolution.

Tarsha agrees. “I used to be very uncomfortable in conflict. I just try to avoid it at all costs. If things happen, I would just pretend like nothing happened. You have to be able to deal with conflict and you have to be able to resolve it in a positive manner.”

Conflict can reinforce our worth, or it can erode it – it all depends on how you respond. I’ll end with an anecdote from Tarsha that highlights this:

“In our town, we're not known as the cheapest. It's really hard to live in this small town where people are used to paying lower prices,” Tarsha said. “But you have to be willing to stand your ground and say, this is what it's worth, and you can either purchase this or you can go somewhere else and purchase cheaper.”

“If it's worth it to them to come to my shop, they'll be there. And if it's not worth it, they won't.”

Where are external pressures asking you to compromise on your internal worth, and what do you want that resolved conflict to look like?

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