Gaining Confidence

 Gaining Confidence

How are you supposed to be confident about something when you have nothing to feel confident about?

How are you supposed to be confident at your new job, or how are you supposed to be confident in social situations when no one has ever liked you? Or how are you supposed to be confident in your relationship when you’ve never been in a successful relationship before?

Confidence appears to be an area where the rich get richer and the poor stay losers. After all, if you’ve never experienced much social acceptance, and you lack confidence around new people, then that lack of confidence will make others think you’re clingy and weird, and they will not accept you. No confidence in intimacy will lead to bad breakups and awkwardness. How are you supposed to be confident in your work experience when previous experience is required to even be considered for a job in the first place?

If you’ve always lost in life, then how could you ever expect to be a winner? And if you never expect to be a winner, then you’re going to act like a loser. Thus, the cycle of suckage continues.

This is the confidence conundrum: where to be happy or loved or successful, first you need to be confident… but for that confidence, first you need to be happy or loved or successful. So, it seems like you’re stuck in loops: either a happy and confident loop. And if you’re in the loser loop, well it seems damn near impossible to get out. But maybe we’re going about this all wrong. Maybe the confidence conundrum isn’t a conundrum at all.

If we pay close attention, we can learn a few things about confidence just by observing people.

1.    Just because somebody has something (tons of friends, a million dollars, a bitchin’ beach body) doesn’t necessarily mean that this person is confident in it. There are business tycoons who lack confidence in their wealth, models who lack confidence in their looks, and celebrities who lack confidence in their popularity. So, the first thing we can establish is that confidence is not necessarily linked to any external marker. Rather, our confidence is rooted in our perception of ourselves, regardless of any tangible external reality.

2.    Because our confidence is not necessarily linked to any external, tangible measurement, we can conclude that improving the external, tangible aspects of our lives won’t necessarily build confidence. Chances are that if you’ve lived more than a couple of decades, you’ve experienced this in some form or another. Getting a promotion at your job doesn’t necessarily make you more confident in your professional abilities. It can often make you feel less confident. Dating and/or sleeping with more people doesn’t necessarily make you feel more confident about how attractive you are. Moving in with your partner or getting married doesn’t necessarily make you feel any more confident in your relationship.

3.    Confidence is a feeling. An emotional state and a state of mind. It’s the perception that you lack nothing. That you are equipped with everything you need, both now and for the future. A person confident in their social life will feel as though they lack nothing in their social life. A person with no confidence in their social life believes that they lack the prerequisite coolness to be invited to anyone’s pizza party. It’s this perception of lacking something that drives their needy, clingy, and/or bitchy behaviour.

How to Be More Confident

The obvious and most common answer to the confidence conundrum is to simply believe that you lack nothing. That you already have, or at least deserve, whatever you feel you would need to make you confident.

But this sort of thinking—believing you’re already beautiful even though you’re a frumpy slob, or believing you’re a raving success even though your only profitable business venture was selling weed in high school—leads to the kind of insufferable narcissism that causes people to argue that obesity should be celebrated as beauty. People soon realise this doesn’t work, and so they take a different approach: incremental, external improvement. They tell the top 50 things confident people do, and then they try to do those things.

They start to exercise, dress better, make more eye contact, and practice firmer handshakes. This is admittedly a step above simply believing that you’re already confident and that you don’t belong in the loser loop. After all, at least you’re doing something about your lack of confidence. And actually, it will work.

So no, external improvement is not a sustainable solution to the confidence conundrum. And feeling as though you lack nothing and deluding yourself into believing you already possess everything you could ever dream of is far worse. The only way to be truly confident is to simply become comfortable with what you lack.

The big charade with confidence is that it has nothing to do with being comfortable in what we achieve and everything to do with being comfortable in what we don’t achieve.

People who are confident in business are confident because they’re comfortable with failure. They realise that failure is simply part of learning how their market works. It’s a reflection of their lack of knowledge, not a reflection of who they are as a person.

People who are confident in their social lives are confident because they’re comfortable with rejection. They’re not afraid of rejection because they’re comfortable with people not liking them as long as they’re expressing themselves honestly.

People who are confident in their relationships are confident because they’re comfortable with getting hurt. They’re not afraid to be vulnerable and tell someone how they feel and then establish strong boundaries around those feelings, even if it means being uncomfortable or leaving a bad relationship.

Building Confidence Through Failure

The truth is that the route to the positive runs through the negative. Those among us who are the most comfortable with negative experiences are those who reap the most benefits.

It’s counterintuitive, but it’s also true. We often worry that if we become comfortable in our failures, if we accept failure as an inevitable part of living, that we will become failures.

But it doesn’t work that way.

Comfort in our failures allows us to act without fear, to engage without judgment, to love without conditions. It’s the dog that lets the tail go, realising that it’s already a part of himself. 

Ways to Build Confidence

• Throughout our development, confidence is cultivated.
• Increasing confidence is an inside job that takes concerted effort, practice, and persistence.
• A willingness, taking risks, and trusting in yourself, among other things, contribute to confidence-building.
• We aren’t born with confidence; we cultivate it over time. Some factors contribute to it and directly take away from it. Socio-cultural and familial constructs communicate subliminally and overtly about who we are and how we’re expected to be. How we navigate our relationships and how successful we perceive ourselves to be in all realms of life also impact our self-concept. The degree to which we acquire self-efficacy, self-love, and self-compassion is a further factors that contribute to our overall confidence.

Our Values

Decisions that are guided by fundamental values are often more effectively processed. There’s increased consideration as to the possible conflicting values that are causing decision-making to be challenging, and there tends to be less residual negative emotions that get evoked, such as regret, guilt, and shame. Proactively and mindfully making sound decisions greatly impacts our confidence.

Throughout our development, confidence is to be built upon, fortified, and integrated. There are significant ways to focus and directly work on it.

Different  Ways

We all have inner protectors. It’s the part that desperately wants to protect you from discomfort and perceived “danger.” Notice, observe, and show compassion to your inner protector.

1.    Avoid putting yourself in a position of victimhood.

2.    Celebrate all moments you lean into your values. Enhance yourself; you deserve recognition. Your confidence, inspiration, and motivation will undoubtedly benefit from it.

3.    Take the time to learn and practice mindfulness. You can invite mind-body techniques and exercises into your daily practice. Expanding your mindfulness and present-moment awareness has been proven to increase personal health, mental health, and general well-being.

4.    Look within, rather than outside of yourself. Increasing confidence is an inside job. Don’t rely on others for confidence-building; take personal strides toward creating a life you're proud of and satisfied with.

5.    Be accepting of all thoughts, feelings, and body sensations, no matter what. You can’t control thoughts, feelings, and body sensations. They’re a direct portal to your values and highlight how wonderfully multidimensional you are. Take pride in the many facets of you.

6.    Embrace your humanness. Everyone has imperfections. You are more likely to accept these imperfect parts if you get familiar with, understand, and appreciate all that makes you imperfect. Your perfectionism lends to your conscientiousness, and your hypervigilance lends to your thoughtfulness. Practising self-compassion will assist you in recognising your very best.

7.    Mistakes are lessons, not failures. Every circumstance helps you to learn more about yourself and what you want more or less of. It gets you closer to living the life you want.

8.    Make and take the time for you. Accept that all things worthy require your time, energy, persistence, and continual practice. Treat yourself as if you’re the most important and special person you know.

9.    Trust in yourself. Trusting yourself includes making decisions independently and unilaterally. The more you do, the more you prove to yourself that you’re capable and can do what you set your mind to.

10.             Build strength in your inner and outer worlds. Having balance and peace in you and surrounding you will make you feel better about your life each day.

11.             Be willing. In a state of willingness, you’ll be more flexible and expansive and will avoid the pitfalls of denial, avoidance, protectiveness, and disconnection. You’ll approach your life more fully and openly.

12.             Continually challenge yourself and take risks. It helps to grow your resilience, coping skills, and self-efficacy. The more you put yourself out there, the more you’ll prove with new corrective experiences.

13.             Don’t take things personally. People's behaviour is typically a reflection of where they're at, rather than based on something you said or did.

14.             Cultivate a healthy inner circle. The way you’re treated and treat others is an indication of where you’re at in your personal development and self-growth.

Increase your confidence so that life is more meaningful and fulfilling. The choice is up to you—stay where you’re at or thrust forward with greater personal power.