Episode 059 – Your confidence secret weapon

Hello! I’m your host, Lorraine Stone, and on today’s episode I’m talking about your confidence secret weapon – what it is, how it works, how to discover it, and how to use it to your best advantage.

There are a few things in the world that can boost confidence in a heart beat. Through trial and error of many many things on my journey to crack confidence with a chronic illness, I have discovered that the ultimate is the power of scent.

Ignite positive associations with a scent, and you have therapy in a bottle.

Scent can enhance your mood and change your behaviour. Think about how you change when you smell something nasty, or when you smell one of your favourite foods. Not forgetting how people are split on whether the smell of petrol is nice, or not.

Scent plays a huge role in how you feel and can trigger emotions such as feeling happy, relaxed, sexy, and confident. This is because your sense of smell, the olfactory system, is directly connected to the limbic system, the primitive part of the brain, that interprets memories and emotions.

Scent has the power to make you feel great. Think about perfume. When you smell good, you not only feel good, but you feel far more confident and assured. This has been known for centuries, both the rich and the poor have used fragrances and scented oils to help them feel good. Of course on the flip side, feeling stale after a long day at work or feeling sweaty after a workout or being squashed in crowds, can make us feel bad about ourselves, ditch our confidence, and make us feel very self-conscious.

I tried so many things when trying to reclaim my sense of power and alignment to change what I believed is possible for happiness and fulfilment on MY terms, and one of the super-simple powerful tools was scent, and I use it every. single. day. to help give me the confidence to leave the house, deal with stressful situations, and just to get through the day really.

Having my power scent helped me get through blood tests, pre-op assessments, as well as the morning of my surgery and the few days I spent in hospital after, back in January.

Interestingly, the sense of smell is said by many scientists to be the strongest of our five senses and is regularly used by the Police when investigating crime scenes.

However, there isn’t a one-size-fits all confidence-boosting scent. Why? According to science, from a physiological perspective it’s about how you connect to a scent on an emotional level. This happens on two levels.

The first is how your brain interprets the scent. When you smell a scent, your brain quickly determines if it’s pleasant or unpleasant and those associations typically stay true for you for your entire life. Although, pregnancy and treatments such as chemo can skew this for a while.

The second is how you emotionally connect to a scent and that this goes back to when we are first exposed to it, even to our early childhood. Scientists believe that we’re born with a clean slate when it comes to scent preferences and your preference is developed by your first exposure to it and/or the experience happening when you first smell it.

Many adults can still vividly remember their mother’s perfume, the smell of cooking from the kitchen. They can also vividly recall the smell of people or things that frightened them.

It’s this aspect that creates the scent and confidence connection. If a certain perfume makes you feel amazing whenever you wear it because it was the one you had on when you rocked a work presentation or grabbed the attention of a date, then your brain will forever connect it to being aaaall that.

This is true of your power scent. When you smell a scent that you connect to positively, it can instantly make you feel confident and in a great positive mood. You literally light up, stand a little taller and have a smile on your face when it happens.

So, how can you know which scent will make you feel like you can conquer the world? Or, just help you go out the front door?

I’m really excited to share with you that I have created a quiz for you to answer a few questions to reveal your perfect match power scent, intrinsically echoed through your many varied choices in life. There’s a link in the shownotes, and you can also find it at lifeinalign.com/link-me. Or, if you go to anywhere on my website, you should see a pop-up that will take you there.

Once you have discovered your power scent family, find an aroma within it that makes you feel good. If we take the scent family fougere, which is mine, I love, love, love the smell of lemon. My sister’s would be the smell of a cup of tea, as her power scent family is chypre.(sheepra).

Once you have that, find a product/item that you absolutely love. It doesn’t have to be in the form of a perfume, it could be a candle, or hand cream. Shower gel. Anything that you’re able to carry with you for whenever you need to take a moment for yourself.

It needs to be something that triggers your sense of smell, and can be tucked away somewhere you can sneak off and hide for a few minutes. Mine is l’Occitane verbena hand lotion. The lemon smells incredible and this went to hospital with me, I just love it.

Once you’ve found your item. Hold it, spray it, or use it. F it’s a perfume please be careful of the next bit. Close your eyes. As you savour the smell or feel, take 10 deep breaths. And it’s that simple. Repeat as many times a day as you need whenever your confidence needs a boost.

If you’d like some support with working through what’s getting in the way of you reclaiming your life from chronic illness, you can email me on [email protected]. You can also find me on Instagram, at lifeinalign, just DM me, and I’ll get back to you. I’ve put a link to my email and my Instagram in the shownotes, and of course you’ll also find the link to the quiz there.

Thanks for listening, and remember, you are worth it, and you get to choose. Have a lovely day