- Flickr Credit: Bellafaye
If you follow along with my daily tweets you would know that I like to post positive quotes; it’s my small way to encourage a circle of sharing and caring. The truth is, although I post those quotes to encourage and uplift whoever reads them, I originally sought them out to encourage myself. I figured if I worked through dark moments in life, and overcame the stress of having to be “always on”, then others did too.
The most recent quote I tweeted
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Really was my way to preach to myself about confidence building. (Apparently, my facebook peeps needed that bit of encouragement too *wink*) If you scroll through my personal reflection blogs, you can clearly see an underlying tone of constant effort to believe in myself and my abilities. It’s not that I can’t be overly confident to the point of being a little cocky (just keeping it real) it’s just always been a struggle for me to feel great about what I’m capable of when I look at what others around me are doing. I never really had the opportunity to be jealous of others success or progress because once I saw how awesome they were, I admired them and counted myself out of the game. For instance, in high school and probably college, if I saw that a beautiful girl liked the guy I was secretly crushing on I knew I didn’t have a fighting chance and kept it moving. There was just no way could I compete, she was gorgeous and I was well…me. The comparison monster has been one of my greatest adversaries, one that I make a conscious effort to be aware of and combat in order to truly define success own on my own terms. Now, I do my best to admire the awesome in others, learn from the traits I admire most in them, and make my own way, giving the best of what I have to offer.
The wonderful thing about building confidence is that it can be learned.
I’m learning to be proud of my accomplishments great and small, as they were something I couldn’t do before, but despite my fears, and shortcomings I waded through the mucky waters and made it through to the other side. I’m learning to say no to things I don’t enjoy doing, as well as things I really don’t care to learn more about as it would take me away from the things I wish to hone specialization in. After all, as much as I want to help as many people as I can, I can’t be everything to everybody. As I wrote last week, I’m learning that it serves everyone’s best interest if from time to time I call in reinforcement to get things done, and done well. Delegating gives me confidence to stay in my own lane enabling me to produce my best work and concentrate on areas I can most improve. Finally, I’m learning to accept encouragement from others even when I don’t always feel I deserve their belief in my potential. I would never deny the power of a positive and encouraging network. But, at the same time, I’m aware that my confidence should never be built on the approval of others no matter how uplifting they are. That would be a foundation of sand; never the stuff real confidence is made of. Real confidence enables you to say yes to challenges because fear of failure won’t cause you to have paralysis.
So, to summarize my thoughts, I grow in confidence one building block at a time.
How do you build confidence?