Where does your confidence lie?

Confidence is a belief that you can succeed at something. It’s an essential part of what we do. Yet, with the ‘society’ that we live in, confidence is tied up to how others perceive us. In effect our confidence lies in the approval of others.

But hang on a second, it’s a belief that you can succeed at something. Dig a bit deeper and find out how do you personally solidify this belief.

The temperament that we are born with can determine whether we will persevere at this belief or if we will be riddled with self-doubts because we want to feel confident at once. The latter would want to be great or be able to prove oneself with a snap of a finger. Tada! I for one belong to this group. The danger with the latter is that we will be too focused on external results such as other’s approval, or worse we benchmark our performance on others performance. Whereas, those who will choose to persevere to build on this belief will acknowledge that time and effort are their friends.

The belief that you can succeed at something needs unequivocal commitment from yourself to practice, step out of comfort zone and show what you got. Fail, learn and repeat. Take for example public speaking. You may dread standing up in front of the crowd for fear that you may not make any sense but, bit by bit through practicing before you step on the podium, you will realize that it’s not all that dreadful. According to the Confidence Code, “confidence is about facing obstacles and realizing you’re still alive even when you fail.”

So the ultimate question we can ask ourselves is – where does our confidence lie? Does it lie on others approval or does it lie in our perseverance to be good at what we want to be good at? The decision is yours.