Never Lose Your Confidence Again!

The only way to lose our confidence is if we don’t know what it is. By knowing what it is, we might not have confidence but it’s not because we’ve lost it. We know where it is and how to get it.

Confidence is the feeling and the belief of “I can do it”. And we can easily measure our confidence in doing something by simply gauging how much we believe we can do it.

We can see our confidence in action by simply standing up and walking across the room. If we got up and walked across the room without any hesitation, then we’re absolutely confident. And everything we do without a second thought falls into that category. Brushing our teeth, using our phone, tying our shoes, making coffee, and everything we know we can do without a shadow of a doubt is something we’re confident in doing.

But maybe we’ve just sprained our ankle so we don’t know how much weight we can put on it. Because of this, we’re not as confident in our ability to walk across the room. It’s the same if we were suddenly asked to cook something we’ve never cooked before or told to brush our teeth with our opposite hand. We don’t know how capable we are in being able to do it and that’s reflected in our feelings of confidence.

Our lack of confidence stems for our doubt in our ability to do it. So to build our confidence we only have to “do and learn”. If we’re not confident walking on our sprained ankle, we can try to take a few steps. And with each step, we’re able to learn how much weight we can put on our ankle, increasing or decreasing our confidence based on what our ankle is able to do.

And it’s the same with cooking something we’ve never cooked before or brushing our teeth with our other hand. Through the act of doing, we learn what to do and what not to do and what we can do and what we can’t do.

Finally, if our ankle is severely broken. Then we have zero confidence in walking across the room because we’re not capable of doing it. And that’s okay. There’s no shame in not being able of doing something. For most of us, if we were asked right now to dunk a basket ball, solve a quantum physics problem or fly a plane, we’d probably have zero confidence in doing them. And that’s normal.

Confidence is our feeling and belief of “I can do it” but one of the reasons why we believe confidence is hard to grasp is because we confuse it with the rising of our insecurities.

So, for example, if we’re able to walk across the room when it’s empty but we’re not able to do it when it’s full of people. That’s not a confidence issue but an insecurity issue. And it’s the same if we’re able to perfectly give a speech during practice but freeze up when we’re in front of a crowd, or confidently cook for ourselves but we’re not able to cook for other people.

The issue isn’t that our confidence has left us, it hasn’t. It’s still there. We still “can do it”. But now we’re “afraid to do it” because we’re afraid to be judged. It’s like thinking the light bulb in our room is broken because it’s always dark when we enter it. So we keep changing the light bulb. But it’s dark because we’re closing our eyes before entering the room.

In knowing what confidence is, we can avoid this confusion and never again feel like we’ve lost our confidence since we know what it is and where to look.

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