I just re-read a post from Jamie Harrop called ‘Rekindling Our Child Like Self Belief‘ that struck so many chords it could have been the London Philharmonic.

I travelled around Europe as a teenager without knowing where I was going or where I was going to sleep each day. I went on holiday to Boston, Mass. by myself on a couple of occasions, confident that I’d meet people and have a whale of a time without my friends around me. I took part in a couple of dozen stage plays at school that earned me the ‘Best Characterisation’ award in the schools equivalent to the Oscars.

There’s a bunch of stuff I still want to do. I want to live and work in New York City for a while, I want to do more great work in world-class ad agencies, I want to be the best damn confidence coach in the world, I want to be a published fiction author and I want a relationship with great girl who makes me laugh, cry and learn all the time.

I bet you have a list of your own.

I’ll also bet that too often those things stay on that list and rarely get off the page. I’ll bet there are things on your list that you know, somewhere inside, that you won’t do, be or have.

Why? Because it’s too difficult and the chance of failure is high. If you knew you could get it the chances are you’d already be doing it; the fact that there’s the chance that you could go for what you really want and not get it is enough to stop you and most other people in their tracks. But the most tragic thing in life isn’t knowing what you want and failing to get it, it’s knowing what you want and not bothering to try to get it.

Jamie’s article reminded me of what it’s like to have that child-like self belief. The kind of self-belief that means you don’t even question whether something’s possible or achievable, you just have the confidence to go right ahead and try it. The kind of self-belief that sees you pushing your own boundaries without even being aware that a boundary was there to begin with.

Where that self-belief goes I don’t know. Maybe as time goes on and you see how hard life can be and discover that things don’t always turn out as you want, you teach yourself to aim lower and think smaller. Maybe you learn to look at what you stand to lose before you look at what you stand to gain.

What I do know is that the diminishing of that child like self-belief happens slowly over time, and is one of the great tragedies of life, stripping away self-confidence and self-esteem as it goes. But it shows us what true self-confidence is all about and what’s at the centre of my methodology – being able to choose your behaviour with implicit trust in that behaviour.

Notice how I didn’t say ‘choose your behaviour with implicit trust in the outcome’? The difference is one of predictability. Nobody can predict exactly what will happen with something you’re working on, but you can predict that you can deal with whatever happens - and that’s true confidence.

Sometimes things work out, sometimes they don’t. But if you approach everything you do with a willingness to engage and a feeling in your bones that you can deal with whatever happens, then that’s pretty damn close to that child like self-belief Jamie talks about, and that’s flippin’ well good enough for me.