Building Confidence
At the start of last January I wrote the word ‘confidence’ at the top of my goals for the year and let it come to mind over and over as the year played out. I thought I would find a deeper sense of the word but you know what I found?
Confidence is easy to fake! We’re good at putting on a mask that can look an awful lot like confidence (especially on stage) but really we’re hiding a whole slew of insecurities just waiting to rear their ugly mugs. A unsteady totem pole of successes carefully balancing upon a base of failures waiting to send it a topple.
Isn’t it amazing how we can be so confident in some areas but so full of insecurities in others? So how do we address this and transition to better confidence across the board?
#1 – Confidence comes from trust & execution
“Have confidence that if you have done a little thing well, you can do a bigger thing well too.” – David Storey
How often do you honor your commitments with yourself? Steven Tyler Ph.D wrote in Psychology Today “‘self-sufficiency’ is the quality of feeling secure and content with oneself, a deep-rooted sense of inner completeness and stability.”
Confidence is rooted in one’s inner experience with the world and arguably that confidence comes from honoring your commitments with yourself.
Place to start? Create a small goal and honor your commitment to yourself. Maybe it’s to go for a walk (mine is to do 10k steps for the next 10 days) or get up on time each day this week or write a song by the end of the week. Whatever yours is – DO IT! Make it something you can complete and do it. Once that’s complete then think of your next goal. Confidence starts with building trust with yourself.
#2 – Confidence varies. Learn to see the signs.
This is a big one. It’s easy to think of confidence as a blanket experience but that’s very rarely the case. Confidence varies in different areas of life and that just means the areas where you are less confident, you can start to set small achievable goals to get your confidence in those areas up. Be gentle with yourself. You don’t have to have it all figured out, enjoy the process! We’re all learning here.
When you feel your self ‘pretending’, slow down and find the small victories to focus on. Be real with yourself and take it one tiny step at a time. The more you believe in yourself (in the unwavering, deeply seeded way) the more you will experience confidence in ALL areas.
“Don’t wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles and less than perfect conditions. So what. Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident and more and more successful.” – Mark Victor Hansen
#3 – Confidence needs roots in unshakable truths.
I don’t know what you believe in but I truly believe that we have to know there are things much greater than ourselves at play around us. If you believe that you can have the very best, then you start to look for the very best in your life. You start to feel worthy of the very best and realize what you do at EVERY level matters. You have a talent and that is not an accident. It is a gift. That means you have purpose so much greater than yourself. When you start to approach your craft that way, you forget to be caught up in success or failure and you only start to see the people who need exactly what it is you do.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” – Marianne Williamson
“Indeed, the LORD will be your confidence, and he will keep your foot from being caught.” Proverbs 3:26 (ISV)
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