Wow! Talk about a leading question, however, the reason I wanted to cover this today was because it has cropped up a couple of times with various people I’ve spoken to recently which led me to think there are a few ‘schools of thought’ out there and perhaps it was worth mentioning these to gauge your thoughts and to get you thinking about whether your confidence is where you want it to be and if not what you might be able to do about it from now on.
It is commonly believed that confidence isn’t something that can be learned, like learning how to drive a car, but that it’s more of a state of mind. If we work on the basis that it’s based on our state of mind, then we know confidence comes more from how we feel about ourselves. Our own self-belief and how we feel about ourselves and our abilities. We need to really believe that we do have the skills and experience to do what we feel we need to do each day.
We may look at others and feel they possess this amazing confidence and wish we had their confidence. But we too can have what they have. The difference is, they believe in themselves, and they have just gone out and done what they needed to. To do this they trusted themselves.
We know that confidence is being assertive, and being more forthright, efficient even, particularly around decision-making.
If you think about it, we can all learn this, we can all decide to be more confident from now on. We can tell ourselves we do believe we CAN do this, we are able to take ourselves outside of our comfort zone, and that nothing bad will happen.
What we do know is that NOT being confident means we let difficult things stop us, we avoid challenges like the plague for fear something bad will happen.
They say, ‘he who hesitates is lost’ and if we don’t ‘grasp the nettle’ and act then we will never be that confident person we admire.
If confidence can be learned, then what are we waiting for?
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