Real Confidence is Inner Confidence
15 November 2006True Confidence is not based on anything external; it is not fuelled by something outside of you. It’s its own power source that allows you to take risks and experience life to the fullest. It’s a cause, not an effect. But the conventional way of thinking is to ask what would give you confidence. Even when I was studying Confidence with ICA, we were asked “what would make you feel confident?â€
The problem with confidence based on anything is that it’s always dependent, to one degree or another, on elements outside your control. You need external feedback to validate your confidence. You need people’s positive reaction to you to let you know you’re a good person. You need to see your pay check to determine your worth. You need a girlfriend to make you feel loved.
Taken one step further, it means that you can’t rely on your confidence to help you through dark times (and believing that there won’t be down times is just naïve) because you rely on the outward signs to help you feel confident. When they go, or are on shaky ground, your “confidence†goes with them. You built your house on quicksand, as it were.
True, lasting, inner confidence – which forms the base that allows you to experiment, thrive, and radiate charisma in everything you do – is never dependent on forces outside your control. It comes from within you.
There are two very obvious examples that highlight just how confidence has to be developed internally and how it simply cannot be any other way. There are people who have all the outward signs of success who don’t feel confident. If you think of all the things you need to be confident, you’ll be able to think of someone who has them but doesn’t have confidence.
Sometimes, the people you expect to be the most confident aren’t. In fact, usually the opposite is true. There are rich men who still live in a scarce world with a fearful, poverty stricken mentality. They are extremely frugal and don’t enjoy their money at all. There are beautiful women out there who don’t believe they are beautiful and spend all their time comparing themselves to other women who they deem more attractive. Or, if they know they’re good looking, they’re constantly fearful of losing their looks or if people only hang around them for their beauty and not for the person they are inside.
Then there are people who seem confident regardless. They don’t have anything going for them but they radiate positivity anyway. If confidence is built up from the outside in, by rights these people shouldn’t be confident at all. Yet you’ll find more people who appear naturally confident and happy.
Confidence is in you, not your skills. I might be using skills here differently than the typical sport definition but I wanted to separate the skills from the individual, and abilities just seemed too innate and linked with the core of an individual.
If you’re placing confidence in your skills, which is what most of us were taught to do, then you have Conditional Confidence. Conditional Confidence is based on external validation/signs that you’re doing well and succeeding. The major problem with conditional confidence is that if you receive negative feedback your confidence will suffer. Ironically, it’s when things aren’t going so well for you that you need Confidence the most.
Conditional Confidence can spiral downwards very quickly, as there might be nothing to stop the spiral. You receive negative feedback and lose some confidence. With lower confidence, you’re less able to devote yourself fully to the next interaction. Because you don’t commit, you receive negative feedback. Now your downward spiral really begins to pick up speed. As this continues, you’re less likely to even attempt the thing you had such confidence in only a short while ago.
Also, since Conditional Confidence is developed from the Outside In, it makes it very difficult, if not impossible; to reconnect with the confidence you had previously. You can only feel confidence when you’re in the zone and getting that external validation, so you’ve no way of reconnecting to confidence without the external validation.
Another problem with conditional confidence, is that it’s non transferable. While someone might be very comfortable and confident talking in front of his staff put him in front of some strangers and he’ll crumble. A rock star might have all the charisma in the world when on stage, but when he’s off stage, he might the most insecure and shy person you could ever meet.
Conditional Confidence can almost manifest itself with the ups and downs of life, with your confidence riding high one week only to hit rock bottom the next week. How many times have you seen people on a high after some success, only to be completely depressed the next time a failure crops up? Does this count as confidence? Hardly.
Of course you can take pride in your victories. In fact, I definitely believe you should let in everything that builds your confidence. It’s best to be semi permeable – letting in all the good, but keeping out all the bad. So by all means, let the victories you experience in your life boost your self confidence, just don’t let the “failures†damage you.
Trying to build your confidence from the outside in is like trying to heat your house from the outside with a candle when you’ve got a furnace inside! Don’t beat around the edges, get straight to the point and work on confidence, not just the areas around it.
Confidence in yourself is the ability to know and feel confidence inside of you. It’s connecting with the feelings, states and emotions of feeling truly confident, regardless of what’s going on around you. This type of confidence is developed by looking at confidence itself; examining what it means to you and what facets of confidence you feel you’d like to develop.
By working on your confidence in this manner, it will permeate everything you do. You won’t have confidence in only one area and not in another. You’ll have confidence in you, which you can bring with you into whatever endeavour you chose. That is true inner confidence.
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