Building Self-Confidence
Posted: Tuesday, March 22, 2011
by Sulagna Dasgupta
Love in India
Think of any one of your colleagues with whom you’ve worked closely.
If I ask you which aspects of their way of working you admire and which aspects you think they could work on- you’ll be able to give me an answer, right?
Now put yourself in your colleague’s shoes. Certainly if you were to tell them why you like their way of working, it would go a long way in motivating them to strive to do better. On the other hand your honest feedback on their areas of improvement could also be of real help to their development-provided your feedback was objective and strictly impersonal.
If you’ve been able to understand confidence in this way-that is, as the product of action and feedback-you’ve already taken the first step towards achieving it. Thus there are two parts to achieving confidence-believing, and doing, that is creating the reason for believing. Let’s look at them separately.
Building competence: Be the person you want to be
What is confidence? It’s gaining your own trust.
Who would you rather trust-someone who is inconsistent, someone who may or may not keep their promises, or someone who delivers what they promise, every time, without fail? You know the answer.
The foundation of the fortress of your confidence is consistency-keeping your promises to yourself, not once but every single time you make a promise to yourself. Our plans and goals are our promises to ourselves. If you’ve set the goal of running for an hour every day, it’s a promise you’ve made to yourself. The very first day you decide to “take a break for today” because you’re “just not feeling like it”, you’ve broken your promise to yourself. Unfortunately for you, your inner self is much less forgiving to you than are outsiders. You’ll (hopefully!) not take a cut on your salary if you miss one deadline, but go back on just one promise to yourself and your inner self will punish you by taking away a good part of your hard-earned confidence. And we all know that it takes twice the effort to regain lost trust (if it’s at all possible) than to gain it the first time.
With each promise that you break your inner self is disappointed once again. This disappointment gives rise to lack of confidence. Sometimes it becomes a vicious cycle. You’ve failed to stick to your diet plan five times in the past because mentally you were not strong enough resist temptation consistently. The sixth time you embark on a new diet plan you fail within the first seven days, not because you were actually unable to resist temptation, but because by this time your inner self is sure that you are going to break promises. This failure breeds more disappointment and more failures in turn. The cycle continues until you’re left with the self-image of a depressed, tragic loser with zero belief in yourself.
The good news is that the reverse is also true. The more promises you keep the more satisfied you are with yourself, and the more you believe that you can. This belief acts as a fuel and propels you to take on greater challenges. Your approach to your goals becomes entirely different. Now they are just missions that need to be completed, not dreams which may or may not come true. So every step you take is bold, not tentative. The results are but obvious.
The key to building confidence is thus setting and reaching achievable micro-goals, every day, without fail. To start with, break up your goal in not small, not tiny, but microscopic daily chunks. If your final goal is to lose 5 kgs of weight, don’t start with running an hour per day, not even half an hour per day-you’ll have had enough by the 5th day at the most! Start with jogging indoors for five minutes per day. Yes, just five minutes. But don’t skip it. Under any circumstances on earth.
It’s said that it takes 21 days for any new habit to install itself in our brain. That’s because that’s how long we need to continue to do something, day in and day out, to gain full confidence of our own brain. Once we’ve done that, we’ve created the solid foundation to move on to the next step towards our goals-taking on more challenges on a daily basis.
Learning to trust, where it’s deserved
What produces lack of confidence? Failures. Most people have a too superficial understanding of success and failure-they gauge their level of success by the short term measurable results they produce in the external world. These results are the scores others have given us on our performances. Often they are not a true reflection of our abilities, commitment or efforts. The key to self-confidence lies in the score you have given yourself on your performance. Failing to get your dream job is not necessarily a failure. Failure to prepare yourself for the selection process to the best of your abilities is.
In order to keep your self-image from being influenced by the wrong factors, give yourself a score on your efforts on any given project of yours, before others have judged you on that. As you know, sometimes the short term results you produce are dependent on too many factors, not all of which are under your control. So you might be doing injustice to yourself if you always hold yourself responsible for unsatisfactory outcomes. Consciously stop the tailspin of your mind into a negative state as soon as you encounter a so-called ‘failure’, and tell yourself, “Now is the time to work. I can grieve as much as I want later.” Work here is analysis-objective and unbiased scrutiny of the reasons for failure. After proper analysis if you find you could have done something else that you didn’t think of, then this is an important lesson, not a failure. But sometimes you’ll find that there were factors at work which you couldn’t influence. In such cases you should really invest time and energy in coming to terms with the fact that you can’t hold yourself responsible for your ‘failure’. Otherwise your mind can initiate a destructive negative self-talk, destroying your self-confidence.
That’s my two cents on the topic. What do you think? Leave a comment to let me know.
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