Playing Hide 'n Seek with Confidence
For being something that is so intangible, my lack of confidence has really got me in a choke hold.
I say the following sentence a lot: "If I believed in myself half as much as (insert person in my life who loves me), I could do anything". I say it because it's true. Not to brag, but I've been blessed enough to find people who genuinely like and encourage me. But I also say it to put a nicely folded blanket on top of why I really don't do anything which is because I'm too afraid to try.
And as someone that might be a little too self aware for their own good, this knowledge annoys me. The reasons for why I'm afraid to start anything could probably be cross examined in greater detail, but at at face value it's because an attempt, no matter how earnest and well intended, can lead to failure. And failure, like confidence, is a wall you can lean on when said attempt really knocked the air out of you and you need some place to rest. You fail and need time to lick your wounds. You lack confidence so you need time to find it. But sometimes, or maybe all the time, I spend too much time there.
But where the hell do you even find confidence? Is it purely external or is it somewhere in you already? I think it's a little bit of both. Externally we seek proof that our ideas are worth something. Take Kickstarter for example. When someone has a product that they want to create but don’t have the capital needed to produce and distribute it, they start a Kickstarter campaign where they can gauge public interest. If enough folks think it's worth the money, they contribute to it so that they can get it once the actual product has been made. For the inventor this proves that their idea has value. This gives them confidence that it will be successful and should continue.
Ah-ha! Confidence is grown with proof. You need to build up a repertoire of proof that you can do something and that is what makes you confident. Positive feedback generates proof, but the opposite is also true. If you never start, or worse, never finish, then the only thing you're collecting proof of is that you're a flake(ouch) who's only confident that they don't know how to follow through(yikes).
Despite how tough love-y this sounds, I'm really just talking to myself here. Sorry if you've caught a few strays in the process. I'm just connecting the dots in the only way I have ever known how and that's through writing. And for the longest time, I believed that the ability to be a confident writer was not something I could achieve. But as I've started to write more and, as a result, think more about what I want my life to look like going forward, I have determined that the only way to become my most confident self is to keep trying and failing and trying until I finally get it right.
Cue The Circle of Life
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