Confidence, female style
For two years I’ve had in my arsenal of books “The Confidence Code.” It was given to me by a friend on impulse – because he was supposed to give it to someone else – and I took it with loving gratitude.
I then buried it in my personal library, there where I could see it but dismiss it. I have given up on self-help books at that time. I thought them boring, limited, would confuse my understanding of the world. There is no one size fits all. And if I would still have to separate the chafe from the grain – it is useless to me. I simply had no time for chaf-ing and grain-ing.
But then I was confronted with a crisis – a confidence crisis – not mine but of someone very close to me. So I had the urge to know more about it, know more about the science, and to see if the book could give me an idea of how I was able to build up my own, so I could share my story, so I could ease her pain. This fall into the abyss of self-doubt – it happens to all.
The Confidence Code was written by Katty Claire & Claire Shipman and it was touted to hold within its pages the “science and the art of self-assurance”.
So what is the magic formula? According to the book, “Confidence, at least the part that’s not in our genes, requires hard work, substantial risk, determined persistence, and sometimes bitter failure. Building it demands regular exposure to all of these things. You don’t get to experience how far you can go in life – at work and everywhere else – without pushing yourself, and, equally important, without being pushed along by others. Gaining confidence means getting outside your comfort zone, experiencing setbacks, and, with determination, picking yourself up again.”
It prescribes the following: meditation, be grateful (gratitude is one of the keys to happiness and an optimistic mind-set), think small (battle feelings of being overwhelmed by breaking it down), sleep-move-share, and practice power positions.
But what is mine? It’s a lot of the little things I do. I join classes – once a blogging class then a registered financial planning class – because I was very interested in blogging and financial planning and I wanted to be uneasy (not really, it just seemed a reliable byproduct) and to venture out of my comfort zone. In those seemingly random classes, one of the best pieces of advice I heard is this: “ready, fire, aim”. Just do it (as Nike said), then, if necessary, correct course.
I learned to embrace – even like – mistakes because I realized it is the only way to get the lessons – lessons which will then be emphatically embedded into my DNA. To quell my fears, I focused only on the experience. Unbeknownst to me, I was putting one foot in front of the other that my feet had no choice but to keep on moving.
The Confidence Code had another term for it but this one has a velocity component: “fail fast”.
I also learned not to care about the outcome. I tell myself that it does not matter. I will participate fully, I will observe, I will not be dogged by fear, I will try not to be enamored by it, or to be enamored by me or what I think is my incapacity.
Because really, some of it is ego. We think that people are thinking of us all the time, that they are obsessing about our failures or are secretly laughing – they are not. Okay, they might have, but they have since moved on to the more delicious thing – that is, of themselves, and of their own inadequacy, thinking about what other people think of them. Quite a vicious cycle, if you ask me. The rat race of the burdened mind.
One other thing I do is I write. When in deep doubt, I write. Here is something I recently wrote which reminded me of my vulnerability, and of my tenacity.
For what is life but a self-flagellation, a battle where the Will wins, and the Will is sometimes not stronger than it sounds, or should, or be.
It could be weak, deflated, punctured, sutured, until it realizes it can heal itself.
Everything is self-inflicted. The Will will not let through what it will not let in. That it could be selective in the pain that it will bring itself, that the choice has always been there.
Even if it is not evident.
But this is how it becomes stronger. This is how it can withstand the enormity of storms.
To laugh in the face of failure. To learn in the face of failure. To stand up again – stronger, maybe – in the midst of failure.
It will make for a better man. It will make for –
I am not yet there. I cannot find the word.
And in this seeming foggy, soggy, throbbing mess of emotions, in this chaos of warning lights that are not turning off, it is all in the connections. Sever the connections, do not give life to it, do not give it meaning – this means facing fear, its enormity, its eventuality, its function.
Because somehow there is a reason for all these. I could not find it – not right now – not yet.
So what is confidence? It is forging on, onwards, forward despite the din of the naysayers who mostly live in the head. It is the sense of being sure, authentic, prepared (sometimes overly-prepared), daring, crashing, burning – life is one big adventure after all – then to rise up, and learn.
Mistakes are the portals of discovery. – James Joyce