Confidence:
To be certain in your abilities.
Can trust yourself.
Able to rely on yourself.
This is EARNED.
Confidence is the residue of PREPARATION. It’s the result of deliberate training and practice. It is earned through sweat, work, and struggle. No one is born with confidence, and it cannot be bestowed by a coach, a leader, or a friend. They do not give you confidence, rather, they give you comfort, motivation, and boost your ego in the hopes that you keep going and keep trying… until you realize your potential.
Confidence is what we feel AFTER we have overcome a barrier or a challenge. It comes after the win. No one ever feels confidence the first time they look up at the mountain they have to climb. But once they come back down having successfully navigated the obstacles and challenges on the way to the top, they know they can do it. They have a win they can build on.
Confidence is intrinsic. It must be within you.
Being able to walk into a room with certainty that you belong there and can handle whatever is going to happen takes an incredible amount of work and preparation… and self-confidence. If your confidence is tied to the presence of a “safety net” partner, a patch, hat, a uniform, or any other trinkets (all things you can hide behind)… you are a liability in that situation. Why? Because you are not prepared. You have not trained. You have not studied the craft… and you know it. By all means trust your teammates to do their jobs and execute when the time comes, but do what you must in order to be able to trust yourself to do the same.
How does one build sensible and real self-confidence?
1.) Generate small wins over a period of time. This builds momentum and nurtures the will to keep working. Working hard over a period of time leads to success. Success leads to confidence.
2.) Deliberate training and practice with and around experts. True experts, not your buddies whose opinions you agree with. Training with and around experts gives you access to expert level feedback on your performance. This ensures that you are focused on iteratively patching the correct holes in your game to improve performance over time.
3.) Do not stop at a failure. You cannot acknowledge failures or see a failure as the limit of your ability. Failures lead to learning and facilitates the application of lessons learned. This is how you improve.
4.) Detach from the need to win. This can mitigate the effect of the ego and avoids emotional attachment to myopic training in the pursuit of wins that are not indicative of improvement (law of diminishing returns). This leads to wins at new, higher levels.
NOTE:
A lack of confidence is not imposter syndrome. There are a ton of posts out there on imposter syndrome and it is a real thing. But I feel it is important to differentiate imposter syndrome from a lack of confidence. Imposter syndrome is your tortured and poisoned thinking of your abilities AFTER you have done a thing. It is very difficult to overcome, but you still did the thing.
A lack of confidence is a mindset that STOPS you BEFORE you even get started. You quit before you even take one step toward the challenge.
Close Out
If you want to live the life, you have to live the life. Confidence is earned from incrementally overcoming challenges and learning. It comes AFTER you climb the mountain.
