Being Confident

July 21st, 2007 by mas | Filed under Courses & Events.

I’m not sure why I started thinking about this earlier today but I started pondering what confidence actually is and how you would explain it. My thoughts were that being confident is to have the feeling that you can deal with situations - then I thought it was also having the belief that even if it turned out you couldn’t deal with a situation you would still be able to handle not being able to deal with it (now I’ve probably lost you!!).

I think confidence is one of those things that everyone just takes for granted - not necessarily having it but understanding it - its a word that people use easily without giving much thought to what it actually means. When we go through evaluation sheets from our courses I always say that if there are lots of comments saying “I feel more confident” this shouldn’t be assumed to be a good thing. This is because people will say this because they think you want to hear it - its a lazy comment. Often when you ask a group to reflect back on training activities they will say “we’re a better team” and/or “we feel more confident” - both nice positive things at face value but really quite meaningless - what you want to know is how are you a better team? what makes you more confident?

I think its interesting too to think about where people draw their confidence from. For some its a strong self belief in their own abilities whereas others draw down from other peoples strengths or perhaps some sort of spiritual guidance. Lots of people I’ve played sports with in the past have taken confidence from certain rituals - some of these make sense like imagery (self hypnosis) or set practice routines prior to performing - whereas others certainly didn’t give me confidence in them - things like sticking a penny in your shoe?!!!

Finally I wonder about the balance between building up confidence and the effort and time that takes for some people compared to how quickly it can be lost perhaps through a failure or a mistimed comment. Why some people seem to take forever to gain confidence while others have too much too soon and how those that do have lots of confidence are both able to inspire confidence in others and also knock it right out of them or are even an obstacle to some people attempting anything at all!

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Ann Bernard 1 year ago 1 point
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I have many thoughts on confidence. Way too many to even start to talk about them in a comment box...and I am planning on writing a workbook on how to develop supreme confidence. Supreme confidence is the type of confidence that is deeply rooted in who you are and not affected by circumstances or other outside sources. I will leave you with my quote "You don't need it all to have confidence, but you need confidence to have it all" Ann

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digitalyw 1 year ago 1 point
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Hi Ann - interesting quote - I wonder if its easier to be confident if you do have it all though? I can see how its possible to come from having nothing to getting somewhere and developing confidence from that journey. Supreme confidence is an interesting concept - I wonder if that goes against the notion of losing confidence?

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