Confidence

I grew up middle-class, white, well-loved, supported, empowered, relatively popular, and disciplined appropriately. So why on earth am I lacking confidence in almost every part of my life? Even though I am a woman, I do not recall ever being told I could not do something. I am coming to realize what a rarity that is for women. The expectations were that I would perform well in school and receive a higher education. I met those expectations, did well in college, (barely) passed graduate school and have held successful jobs since.

So how does one acquire confidence? Can one acquire confidence? I believe that all qualities or skills can be acquired to some degree. I know I have gained patience in the past several years through working with children. So now I am on a mission to increase my confidence. I will no longer be some meek little mouse. I will not hide myself. I will no longer say “I’ll never be able to believe in myself”.

During this journey of mine, I continue to listen to an extensive amount of self-help and personal journey audiobooks. Some authors that I am crushing on at the moment include Rachel Hollis, Brené Brown, and Leslie Morgan. One of the main things that I am learning is that words matter. Above, where I say “During this journey of mine…” my first draft that I wrote was “During this little journey…” This is not a little journey. This journey is huge. It is monumental and life-changing. Why would I write it with such diminution? I think because I am trying to downplay it’s impact on my life so that if it fails that its no big deal. But it cannot fail. It has already succeeded. It is a big deal. So I am purposefully choosing different words.

I tended to apologize constantly. If someone no-showed an appointment with me, I apologized that I did not confirm the appointment with them. If someone treated me poorly, I apologized for walking away from them and their interactions. I have always felt that I needed to please people and keep peace at all cost. Now I have learned that my actions often have very little to do with how pleased people are and that not everything that happens is my fault. So I am desperately trying to speak my mind more often, including being more honest with myself. But in that honesty, I am trying to exclude calling myself names or belittling myself such as “I’m such an idiot”. Sort of like how I would not call my child “bad”; why am I calling myself “bad”? I am working on changing the words I use with myself.

I have been hearing again and again in my learning about gratitude practice. I try to do it every day and am also including my child in it, much to his chagrin. I am beginning to wonder what might happen if I add to my general gratitude a practice related completely to my body/personality/accomplishments. This sounds like an amazing experiment to explore. What are some of the strategies you have used to increase your confidence?