What Confidence Is & How To Get It

Last time I talked about how so many of us are not living our dreams because we're living our fears, and how the biggest fear that immobilises most of us is the fear of failure.

Today I wanted to touch on fear of failure from a different angle: confidence.

So often when we're not moving forward and taking the actions to make our dreams a reality, it's because we don't feel confident. When we have a fear of failure and we're afraid of making mistakes, we say we lack confidence.

But what is confidence? The root of the word confidence is confide. What does it mean to confide in someone? If you confide in someone, you tell them a secret, it means that you trust them. You trust them to be discreet and not tell anyone else the secret. So to confide is to trust.

So then, to have confidence in yourself means that you trust yourself. Confidence is literally self-trust. What is it that you're trusting yourself to do? You're trusting your decisions, and you're trusting your ability to deal with whatever challenges come up as a result of those decisions you've made to pursue your goals and improve your life.

And if you're trying to achieve anything significant in your life, you will face challenges, often. That's why so few people achieve their goals. Because they have to get out of their comfort zone, and in doing so they will encounter challenges. They don't have confidence in themselves. They don't trust themselves to be able to handle those challenges.

A lot of that comes back to fear of failure. We think if we pursue what we really want, if we act like the person we ultimately want to become, and then we make a mistake, we're going to be humiliated, that people will ridicule or criticise us. We think people won't accept us as the person we want to be. There's some imposter syndrome wrapped up in that too. “Who do you think you are?“

And so we never even try because we don't want to take the risk of making a mistake and then have to experience the criticism or humiliation because we don't trust ourselves to be able to handle it. We don't have confidence.

Confidence or self-trust is the opposite of caring about what other people think or trying to manage their opinions and expectations.

There might be something that you really want to do, but before you do it you consider the possible consequences, what other people might think, if it would be embarrassing or make you look bad. You try to manage their expectations of you, if this decision or action would line up with their expectations of who you are.

Whenever you try to minimise the risk of a social repercussion, you're not trusting yourself. Another way to frame it is any time you let fear make the decision for you, you're not trusting yourself.

The first step is to notice when you're doing things out of fear or trying to manage other people's expectations of you or avoid looking bad. Just ask yourself “where am I trying to manage other people's opinions or expectations?”

Once you've noticed where that's happening, then ask yourself “could I trust myself in that situation?”

The way to trust yourself, to trust your ability to handle challenges in the future, is to trust your past self. You've encountered challenges before. You've made mistakes in the past. And guess what? You survived. You didn't die. You've managed to keep yourself alive, which is the ultimate responsibility you could trust anyone with. So if you're alive, you can trust yourself with these non-life-threatening decisions and actions.

The decisions you make and the actions you take should be sourced in self-trust. But usually, we get into a fear cycle and look for all the things that can go wrong and we don't do the thing that is really true to our heart, and, as a result, we live a diminished life.

We think we're making a safer choice, but things will go wrong either way. Things will go wrong whether you do what you really want to do and you make a choice for your freedom, or you make a choice based on what everybody else will think and avoiding looking bad. That's life, things don't always go according to plan. But you can either have things go wrong while you're doing things that are smaller and diminished to please others, or things can go wrong while you're on your authentic path. You're much more powerful if you're operating from that place of what's true for you.