Sep 19
- “Being confident means that I can do it all myself”
On the contrary, people who lack confidence are less likely to ask for help as they’re more scared of looking weak or people saying no. With confidence comes the awareness that you do sometimes need help – whether it’s practical or emotional – and the ability to feel okay asking for that help. - “If I work hard enough success will follow”
Success isn’t just about putting the hours in or working to exhaustion, it’s about leveraging your strengths and talents to make it easier while maintaining a good level of energy and health. Sure, sometimes you need to put extra work in and sometimes there’s a lot of pressure, but success comes from being plugged into the things that matter and using what you’re best at, and true confidence also means being able to prioritise your own health and wellbeing. Ignore those things and your hard work will be for nothing. - “I should fake it ‘til I make it”
Focus on faking confidence or success and you’ll become a big faker. While it can be useful to step into other points of view and to try on different perspectives, trying to ‘act confident’ or ‘act successful’ is about bluffing other people and even trying to fool yourself. It’s like trying moving into the mansion when you only have keys for the cow shed. - “Nothing can stop me if I have complete self-confidence”
Life will always have something up its sleeve that can rock you to your foundations. There’s always a twist coming that can throw you off course, something unpredictable that will cast doubt on things. That’s life. True confidence is your best chance for being able to navigate through those times while keeping true to who you are and what’s most important to you, but it doesn’t stop life from trying to throw you overboard. - “I won’t be scared of things when I’m confident”
Confidence means that you better equipped to take risks and do the things that scare you, but that’s not a one-time thing. A rich, successful life demands that you continually engage with what matters and sometimes that’ll be the big, scary thing. You can still be shaking in the face of a challenge and be truly confident. True confidence doesn’t mean you can’t not be confident, it just means that you trust yourself to deal with whatever happens. - “Confidence is really about positive thinking”
People assume that a smattering of positive thinking is all they need. Wrong. Positive thinking is like dressing a cow up as a duck and asking it to quack. It’s not going to fool anyone. The key is to have the foundation of self-confidence first, then positivity comes more naturally.There’s the story about the housewife standing in her kitchen, looking out the window to her garden which has become a bit too overgrown with weeds for her liking. Looking at all the weeds spoiling her view, she tries a bit of positive thinking. ”There are no weeds.”, she whispers, ”There are no weeds”.That little piece of positive thinking doesn’t change the fact that there are weeds in the garden. If that housewife felt better about herself she’d have the self-worth needed to do the weeding.
- “I have to make sacrifices to be successful”
People think they have to give up what’s important to them in order to be successful, that it has to be a personal struggle or that they have to suffer in some way. Absolute rubbish.Real confidence means that you know what’s most important to you and allows you to prioritise your life around those things. Sure, while prioritising what matters most might sometimes mean sacrificing the time and energy you spend on the things that don’t, that’s not a sacrifice – it’s freedom. - “Self confident people have big ego’s and are ‘in your face’”
The misconception is that people who have bundles of self-confidence are in your face, ego stroking, full of themselves idiots. I know I’ve met people who fall into that category, but it’s not because they have bundles of self-confidence. Quite the opposite. True confidence has a quietness and grace to it – it’s not about getting in peoples faces and being the loudest, it’s knowing who you are, what you’ve got and finding your own voice in the world. - “Confident people always get their own way”
The lie here is that confident people always make sure they’re heard and will use their confidence to exert influence so they get their own way, whether professionally or personally. That’s just not true, although I’ll accept that confident people might have more of the skills needed to influence or negotiate. People who are over-compensating will make sure they’re heard and manipulative people will orchestrate things in an effort to get their own way – none of those people will have true self-confidence. - “Confident, successful people set goals and achieve them”
The myth is that success is achieved by setting goals and working towards them, and that confident people have a way of doing that that means they’ll succeed. I disagree. The stats show there’s a 70% to 80% failure rate in goal setting, and goals bring all kinds of problems to the fore. Setting a goal instantly creates a gap between where you are now and where you want to be, which can easily make you feel like a failure before you’ve even started.Setting a goal means that you’re looking towards something that isn’t part of your life right now, and that makes it difficult to connect with and put energy into. And of course the goals you set are too often based on what you think you should want, rather than what truly matters to you.Real success is achieved by playing a game that matters to you right now. It happens by engaging with something that’s important to you, and that just happens to be how people become truly self-confident.
- “I’m just not a naturally confident person”
Rubbish. You demonstrate confidence every single day, and I guarantee there are things you’re absolutely confident in. Are confident behind the wheel? Are you confident dealing with the detail of your job? Are you confident when chatting with a friend or your partner? Are you confident cooking a meal or brushing your teeth?Natural confidence is being able to choose your behaviour with implicit trust in that behaviour, and everyone has it. Some people are naturally more extroverted or introverted and that’s fine, that doesn’t mean you’re more or less confident. You have natural confidence in you, it’s simply down to working out what it feels like for you and applying the same principles to the areas you’d like to feel more confident in. - “Success is all about how the world sees you”
People often look for external signs of success, whether that’s material possessions, your reputation, your status or the feedback you get. The misconception is that the more of those things you have, the more successful you are. Not so.While those things might indicate how well you’re doing (or what kind of impact you’re having), it doesn’t necessarily connect with genuine, happy success. How many people chase the next promotion in the hope that they’ll feel successful, only to find that they feel just the same? I know I have.Real success is about how you relate to what you’re doing and what it means to you.
- “My levels of confidence and self-esteem were fixed at childhood”
The lie here is that your level of self-confidence is fixed at childhood, that however much confidence you have in your teens is how confident you are for the rest of your life. The truth is that your confidence and self-esteem might rise and fall throughout your life depending on what you’re experiencing, but that you can always do something to improve how you feel about yourself and your level of confidence. Don’t just roll over and accept a lack of confidence and self-esteem, you’re better than that. - “If I loose weight/have a breast enhancement/get a nose job I’ll feel much better about myself”
You know what? Doing something to improve your physical appearance will make you feel better about yourself. Bet you didn’t think I was going to say that, right? But it’s true. Whether it’s a new haircut, a new outfit or something more permanent like a surgical procedure, you’re likely to feel good about your new image.For a while, at least. The trouble is that it’s a very short-term strategy to achieve self-confidence. Once the novelty’s worn off it’s back to being you in your old life, with all the problems, doubts and fears that brings. So while your appearance can and does matter, nurturing healthy self-esteem is about more than getting a boob job or new nose. It’s about acknowledging who you are at your core and giving yourself the freedom to be yourself. - “Using affirmations is a good way to build confidence and self-esteem”
I hate affirmations. Really, I do. The thought that the self-help industry has pedalled for too long is that reciting something over and over again makes it real. That’s like trying to become a millionaire by looking at a dollar bill a million times.Affirmations don’t make much of a dent. It’s trying to pull the wool over your own eyes and make something real that isn’t. Research indicates that people with a lack of self-esteem don’t believe affirmations simply because they don’t value their own opinion, and the problem is that when they fail to work they leave can leave you with less self-esteem than when you started.
- Other articles you might like:
- QA: How Do I Stay Positive?
- Confidence & Success – Which Comes First?
- What do Insecure People Fear the Most?
September 19th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
Great thoughts. Sometimes people need help with this from a therapist or a life coach.
September 21st, 2008 at 2:00 am
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September 25th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
A good way to break it down to a simpler understanding. Many people probably think that having confidence will take them far but it requires more than just that
September 26th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
@ Josten: I think that true confidence is what really matters. People try to go after what they think they want, but sometimes lack the foundation or core to really go after what they truly want – that’s what I call true confidence. What do you think it takes in addition?
October 5th, 2008 at 12:59 am
Bottom line is Affirmations do work but just reciting them is pointless – you have to FEEL the positive emotions that the affirmations should inspire in you. Feeling is the magic ingredient.
October 6th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
@Az: Ah, if you’re talking about feeling and connecting with something you’re working on then I’m with you. The ‘feeling’ part can often be the catalyst for all kinds of things, and is an important step.
That said, I think the feeling and connection can be made without using affirmations, which are too often used on auto-pilot, without feeling or connection.