The word confidence comes from Latin, as does spumy and nymph.  But let’s not go there.

Confidence is derived from “con fides”, meaning “with faith”.  I give you the language lesson because I only recently found this out, and it chimes perfectly with my understanding of confidence.

With faith.  With.  Faith.

Faith is a belief in something for which there’s no evidence, or a belief in something real that has no real basis – faith in God, faith in hope, faith in mankind for example.  Confidence then, is being with a belief of something for which there’s no evidence.

Now, I’m pretty sure you exist.  It wouldn’t be difficult to amass a wealth of evidence to prove your existence, even if part of that evidence involves bouncing a doughnut off your noggin.  No noggin and that doughnut would sail right through.  (That’s my litmus test for proving things exist, by the way, it even works for litmus paper).

So we can be pretty sure you exist.  But your confidence?  That’s harder to spot.  You can’t bounce a doughnut off it.

My approach to building confidence arms you with a weight of evidence in your own capability and gives you tools to convert that into self-confidence, but even so, there are moments when you have to make a leap of faith – a split second when you either make a choice to step forwards into the unknown, or you don’t.

Even with no evidence to tell you what’s going to happen, you make a decision to take yourself beyond what you know and embrace what you don’t.  You take one step, but it feels like a thousand.  Your only ally in those moments is faith.  Faith in yourself.

No matter how good you are or how confident you are, and no matter what you’ve achieved or proved to yourself -  faith in yourself is the only way to get through those moments that demand a leap of faith.  And taking leaps of faith is the only way to experience the extraordinary.

No faith, no leap. No confidence, no extraordinary.

So the question for you is, do you believe?