Confidence is the degree to which you can trust yourself.
We tend to confuse confidence for skill: we see someone who’s a great speaker, a serial entrepreneur, a daring athlete, and think “I wish I could be like them”. Able to show up and just do it.
What we don’t see is the hundreds of times they tried and it didn’t work out.
That’s how they built their skills: by having the confidence to show up again.
Confidence is not knowing that you will win at whatever game you choose to play; it’s the certainty that you can take a punch (or a few).
That, when things won’t go the way you want them to, you will keep showing up and take another one on the chin. And again. Because that’s the best way to learn and get that level of skill where things work out great most of the time.
Confidence is not about results, it’s about effort: do you trust yourself to keep showing up? Or will you give up and stop doing it?
That’s why my hack to build confidence is to get used to doing things I don’t want to be doing.
For example, I love running in the rain.
Why? Because I used to hate it. All I wanted was to stay in and postpone the run, so I forced myself to run or train outside whenever it rains.
I used to hate cold water, so I took a cold shower every day.
I wasn’t a great runner, so I ran a marathon with 4 weeks of training.
I used to be uncomfortable talking to women, so I talked to 300 in a year.
I didn’t feel confident speaking in public, so I joined a speaking group.
I was scared to write online, so I started writing on Quora weekly.
I now feel confident at all the above, and more.
And that’s how I built my confidence.
By showing myself that I can trust me.
No matter the result, I’m going to show up.
– Matt
Thank you for the amazing support and for sharing stories in the comments – great to more nutters like me who lie to show. Let’s do this!
If this answer resonated with you, let’s be friends: give me a follow here on Quora – I’d love to keep in touch and share more of my principles.
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