“Believe in yourself! Have faith
in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own
powers you cannot be successful or happy.” Norman Vincent Peale
Dictionary
defines confidence as the self-assurance or a belief in one’s abilities to
succeed. So confidence is what we believe about ourselves based on what we have
achieved so far. It is what we know for sure we can do purely because we have
done something quite similar or something more difficult before.
In other
words, the altitude of our confidence is largely determined by our history. In
a way, confidence is the mental effect of a repeated practice. For example, someone
who always receives compliments for the sweetness of the meals she cooks will
likely have some confidence to enter for a cooking competition at any level.
And someone who has been repeatedly battered for her poor cooking skills will most
likely not want to compete with mere local cooks. This is why the professional golf
champion, Hubert Green says: “Winning breeds confidence.”
Clearly,
confidence comes from a previous record of success. Therefore, the level of our
confidence is proportionate to the nature of our past and present results; more
wins automatically generate more confidence and less wins automatically erode
our current level of confidence.
If the
winning part of the foregoing doesn’t apply to you, then the next rest of this article should. So
read on to learn how to create your confidence anew.
Build It with Immediate
Action
If we
haven’t succeeded at all in an area that we now want to pursue, we can still
create confidence by mentally changing what we believe about ourselves—in that
particular direction—at this very moment.
That means, we
need to become the kind of person that thinks and acts in a different way.
Right here is where another form of confidence comes in. The confidence to
believe we can change, that we can do better than before.
As Hubert Green
concludes, “Confidence (also) breeds winning.” By that he means a positive and
strong state of the mind; a proactive mindset that we can learn, grow and start
over even if we have failed miserably before. And this must be accompanied with
immediate actions.
So if you
lack confidence in yourself as a brilliant student for example. You don’t gain
new confidence by merely daydreaming of becoming a scholar, but you gain new
confidence by doing something meaningful towards a purpose. You set yourself a target of studying, say, a
book, every month.
What we actually
do is what we believe we can do. And when we repeat the actions over and over,
our confidence in our ability to do it (better) grows.
So do
something now—even at a slow pace—to establish the fact that you can do it.
Once you achieve that, then repeat the process until your confidence grows
bigger than you can now imagine.
Adopt the
following good advice given to us by the author of ‘The One Minute
Millionaire,’ Mark Hansen to increase your confidence in any area that you want.
Hansen wrote, “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.”
In a
nutshell, be bias for action now if you want to create the confidence that you
must have.
