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The Living Room Psychology and character How do I become more confident?

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Mark Opal

How do I become more confident?

Latest Post: April 20, 2011 at 6:41 PM

12 followers

As my posting about dedication netted many helpful remarks, I am hoping you all might be able to assist me with a similar issue. Issue might not be the right word as I am not much bothered by it and it hardly impedes my sleeping schedule. (For some reason the word issue conjures images of sleepless nights tossing and turning through pestering thoughts) But anyways, I wonder how, like dedication, I can become more confident.

Confidence is a silly matter. Sometimes it surges through my bones for weeks, and other times it cowers in the closet crying for its teddy bear. For me confidence has never been a conscious fact, rather it is a passing exuberance that I only recognize after the fact. Is there anyway to consciously grab hold of confidence and not let it go?

You can tell when a person is confident. When you meet someone like that he or she exudes a very specific color that you sense immediately. I have a friend who is a very particular shade of yellow. She is the yellow from those Curious George books, a 1930s yellow balloon floating alongside a gray New York City skyline. And she knows it, she employs that color to its best effect and in doing so makes everything around her shine a shade brighter. It is my conjecture that her yellow is the sole result of confidence. She knows how to make her best qualities bloom outwards and upwards.

It is one of my biggest goals to become a single color. When I meet people I want their eyes to become tinted in the shade of my confidence and personality. But my question is how? How do I get such a hold on my personality to paint the world in my likeness? Where do I start?

Is it a matter of identifying my color? And how do I do that? Do I dive into the murky pool of introspection and hope that once I clear away the clutter of leaves and dirt and years of buildup I'm left with crystal water? Where does confidence come from? Is it my friend's control of her color or is it something that never stays for long, something that is constantly retreating to the safety of solitude. Can we judge our confidence in our ability to small talk or when we actually follow through and become dedicated? Is it about conquering fears or defeating self-doubt ?

Is confidence a lifelong pursuit or does it just show up one day and never go away? And how do I manage to not let it go when it does show face?

This post is referenced by the following other contributors:

Morgan Milford	in "Doing what is expected of you"	(The Living Room)
Clark Thomas	in "The Gordian knot – A lesson in greatness"	(The Living Room)

Reply to:

Sarah M. Hall, Rather than describe myself as...

August 5, 2009 at 6:48 AM

1 follower

This is a question I've struggled with myself for a lifetime. Only in the past three or four years have I made really major headway in feeling more confident. I have found a few things that help: talking to myself--out loud. (Best done when alone, for obvious reasons, or at least out of earshot). "You can do this--of course you can. Why would there even be a question about it, you are infinitely capable of doing this," I have told myself, and strangely, have tended to listen. Reminds me of the song in The King and I": "Whenever I feel afraid, I hold my head erect and whistle a happy tune, and no one will suspect I'm afraid"--or, in other words, "Acting! Thank you!" ;-) And it never hurts to remind yourself just why you deserve to feel confident. You have an engineering degree, right, Marc? That means you are smarter than perhaps 98% of the people on the planet. That doesn't make you "better"; it makes you "better able to think/analyze/observe/cope" whatever. I think a lot of not feeling confident has to do with feeling, on some level, that we don't deserve to feel confident--that we have not done anything worthy of feeling confident about, or, if we did, it was short-lived and we shouldn't continue feeling worthy for more than five minutes. My parent were well-intentioned, but they should have spent a lot more time telling me I could do and be anything I wanted, and a lot less time saying, "don't toot your own horn." Toot it! Toot it loud and toot it proud! (yes, I'm snickering, too--humor is helpful, as well ;-)) And if you want to feel "yellow, " think yellow. You deserve to be any color you like. When you accept that, intrinsically, you will demonstrate it, extrinsically.

This post is referenced by the following other contributors:

Julie Sabatier

in "On pretending"

(The Living Room)

Reply to: or

Arthur Mont

August 6, 2009 at 4:13 AM

70 followers

Hi Mark, Sarah,
I was thinking for a while to write about Alexander the Great and the Gordian Knot and what can be learned from it. Reading you post Mark convinced me at last to write about it.

I will just mention a couple of small points:
Another issue which is crucial for confidence is to let things go: On the importance of letting go.
Letting go of mistakes you made, but also letting go of what other people think of you. Focusing on what color they would see when they see you is the wrong thing to focus on. Focus on yourself, not on how others will interact with you. You are not trying to figure out how to seem confident, but you want to really be confident.
(Sarah mentions how sometimes acting brave can lead to being brave, which is true in some cases, and in some cases it's not. It depends on the details, but I won't go into it.)

The question was very nicely put Mark; confidence is on its way.

Reply to: or

Sarah M. Hall, Rather than describe myself as...

August 7, 2009 at 4:48 AM

1 follower

I agree, Arthur, the acting bit only works some of the time, but it has gotten me through some difficult situations. You reminded me of something I read a long time ago. I'd like to say it was someone deep like Ayn Rand, but I believe it was actually, er, Ann Landers. A person had written who was suffering from a lack of confidence (or perhaps even something more serious, like fear of leaving the house) because she was too worried about what other people thought about her. Ann informed her that it was none of her business what other people thought about her. I remember thinking what a radical idea that was. "But it's me they're thinking about, why is it none of my business?" It's true, though--if you want to know what they're thinking, then you're wanting to invade that most personal of spaces, their private thoughts. I don't know about you, but I don't want other people invading my thoughts. So, in order not to be a hypocrite, I have to agree that other people's thoughts, whether they are about me or not, are none of my business. By the way, Mark, I apologize for misspelling your name; I plead "2 o'clock in the morning syndrome" (I'm an ex-spelling champ, I HATE to misspell things and obsessively/compulsively correct myself when I do.) If you like, you may refer to me as "Sara" . . . but only once. ;-)