Post by nutrick on Apr 18, 2009 11:48:08 GMT -5
Taken from SinJester at the Don Juan Discussion Forums
This is one of the first things i read coming into the community, and it still holds true today IMO. It's a great read, we'll definitely be discussing much of this in the webinar
Cheers,
Patrick
Self-Esteem And The Myth Of Confidence
Personally I think this is one of the best things I have ever wrote. When I wrote this I felt like I finally had a good understanding of confidence. I went through a LOT of stuff to come up with this, so don’t be surprised if you see something you have seen before. Generally I am pretty happy and confident, I lost touch with that for awhile, but it was only because I didn’t live up to what I write here. Enjoy. I hope it helps someone, I know it works for me. (Please at least do the short visualization exercise even if you are happy with yourself)
Confidence.
That word is thrown around here all the time. It is supposedly like some magical feeling that makes everything work, but it is ever-fleeting and oh so hard to grasp. ‘You just need to be confident’ I hear men yelling. ‘Girls are attracted to confidence’ is always on repeat. So then guys think that all they need in confidence and every girl they ever wanted will come their way. To further confuse matters people take it upon themselves to enlighten other by telling how to obtain this fantastic ‘confidence’. “Fake it until you make it”, “Tell yourself you are the man and one day you will be”, “Don’t use affirmations or fake it, just love yourself”. What? Which one do I do? These thought flow through the mind of the apprentice DJ. Eventually he finally believes he has found confidence, at last! But does it stay with him forever? Do all his dreams come true?
Confidence doesn’t exist. At least not how we usually see it. Guys tell you that you need to achieve something to gain confidence. That is one of the single most destructive beliefs found on self improvement. Sure it seems logical and fine in the begging, but if we look deeper we see how limiting it really is. For example, if we are just starting out on our journey and we take this belief, what happens if we have not achieved anything yet? We perceive ourselves as worthless. ‘If I haven’t achieved anything, why do I have the right to feel confident?”. It’s worse than that too. Many of us see confidence as a prerequisite to action. If we don’t feel confident at something we aren’t likely to go and do it because we feel that we will fail, and because of the belief that achieving something gives us confidence, if we fail we feel like failures. This limiting belief contributes to people who never take action, or the people who might take action but fall short and quickly give up. Have you ever felt this way about anything? If so, keep reading, we’ll sort that bit out
“There is no such thing as “confidence” as a general term. Confidence is context-specific. Let me explain:
Let’s say that you’re a highly-skilled heart surgeon. After years of schooling and training, and experience in the operating room, you’re as confident as it gets on the job. You’re tops in your field and you know it. Now, just as you leave the operating room, you go into the waiting room and see that a terrorist has left a nuclear suitcase bomb in the waiting room! There’s 2 minutes until it blows, meaning there’s no time to call the bomb squad. You open the bomb and see a bunch of wires and parts, and your confidence drops to ZERO as you realize that you’re clueless and powerless in this situation.
Suddenly a man in the waiting room sees what you’re doing and comes to help you. He calmly reaches into the device, turns a dial and pulls a wire, and the timer on the device stops. He doesn’t even look scared! In fact, he looks extremely confident. You ask him how he knew how to stop the bomb and he proudly says “I designed this weapon. I worked for 25 years at Los Alamos building nukes. Turning it off is child’s play.” Now your heart is still racing at this point and the stress hasn’t gone away yet, and all of a sudden you have a heart attack and stop breathing. The nuclear bomb technician has no medical training whatsoever, not even a first aid course. Suddenly HIS confidence drops to ZERO as he realizes that he’s clueless and powerless in this situation, and he calls for help.
The above story illustrates my point: There’s no such thing as a “confident” person, only a person confident in areas he’s very familiar with. If you have no skills and experience dealing with something, you won’t have any confidence in dealing with it either!”
Now that is only half the story. I haven’t explained self-esteem yet. Confidence and self esteem are very different. For the purposes of this, let’s think of self-esteem as the perception of our self worth, and confidence as the assurance that if we do something we will get a desired result.
Now you can see from the story that any man will feel confident in certain circumstances but there will always be a lot of things he won’t feel ‘confident’ about. That is not a bad thing. We can’t have people performing heart surgery or defusing bombs if they have had no experience with it can we? However if we take the belief held by most of society that ‘we must achieve something before we will be rewarded with confidence’, can you see the problem?
Consider this, if someone is a heart surgeon does that let him feel confident about his life? What if he was also terrible with women? What if he was short, skinny or fat and ugly? Does that give him any less right to feel confident?
The thing is no one can ever be confident at everything they do. Every time you try something new, you won’t feel confident about it. Is that bad? NO! It’s normal. Does it say anything about you as a person? NO! The kind of confidence you are looking for in life doesn’t come from chasing after achievements, it comes from what I will call self-esteem. If your confidence relies on your achievements, you will always be lacking because you will always be chasing more. If your confidence depends on your body then that is not only shallow but it will one day be gone. The same applies to your car, money, house and looks. It especially applies to the way people react and treat you. All of this is EXTERNAL VALIDATION.
All ‘confidence’ comes from external validation. How good you are at something, your test results, how you compare with other people. All this is unstable, it is never certain; it could disappear at any time. Even if you get your confidence from a skill, what if you have a bad day and make a mistake? What if a few people come to you who are better than you? What if people criticise this skill and put you down? Where is your precious confidence now?
What you need to aim for is self esteem. True, lasting ‘confidence’. This comes from inside. It is internal validation not external validation. It comes from when your self-image is not determined by what people say to you. It is where you realize that your self-worth is not determined by what you do. This may be hard to understand and take in. All our lives we are conditioned by society to do the opposite. At primary school we are graded and then we are broken off into different groups. The ‘smart kids’, the ‘middle group’ and the ‘slow learners’. Right from the start we are comparing ourselves to others. Our worth depends on how we compare to others, if we are up the top we are good, if we are down the bottom we are bad. But we are ALL human. It doesn’t matter what you do there will always be someone better than you, and there will always be someone worse than you. It’s a silly thing to base your self-esteem on.
If someone is worse at a particular thing than someone else does it make him a bad person? No. Although, sometimes it can feel that way can’t it. Think of the times when you seen guys getting awesome super-hot girls, and you weren’t. It doesn’t feel great does it? Still, he is no better than you are. There will be SOMETHING in life you do better than him.
Ok so now I’ve made what I think is a clear distinction between confidence and self-esteem. You are probably thinking, how the hell do I get self-esteem? Relax I’m getting there. Just keep in mind confidence isn’t bad. It is good to be confident at a few things in life, but your self-esteem, self-worth and self-image should never be dependent on those things. Research has shown that people who have a narrow self-image, (i.e. I am a lawyer/businessman/sportsman) are much more likely to fall into depression and suicide because their whole self-image is based on one thing. When this isn’t going as well there is nothing to fall back on, it feels to the person like HE isn’t good enough. If that person has varied hobbies, even if he isn’t going good at one he has others to buffer that. He doesn’t collapse. Although we will be going deeper than a varied self-image.
Think about a top athlete. Does he go out the KNOWING he will win? Maybe he does think like that. When he is having a shot is he thinking “go in go in go in” or “I know this will go in”? Most likely not. What usually happens is he just focuses on the actual act of having the shot, the past and the future don’t matter, just the single activity. You need to take your eyes off the scoreboard to play the game.
I believe that there is a set of steps to self-esteem. It looks like this:
Self-acceptance -> self-respect -> self-love -> self-esteem
You can’t respect yourself if you don’t accept how you are. You can’t have self-esteem if you dislike yourself. True confidence can be thought of as what comes after, or it can be thought of as being something completely different altogether. Think about a time you felt confident at something. Feel the actual feeling. Is that confidence? Is the feeling confidence? Or is it just the feeling of being pumped in the context of you doing something where you think you might get the desired outcome? Is it confidence, or excitement? Is it confidence, or happiness, or pleasure, or contentment? You see, I don’t think confidence is a feeling, it’s just the context for the feeling.
This is one of the first things i read coming into the community, and it still holds true today IMO. It's a great read, we'll definitely be discussing much of this in the webinar
Cheers,
Patrick
Self-Esteem And The Myth Of Confidence
Personally I think this is one of the best things I have ever wrote. When I wrote this I felt like I finally had a good understanding of confidence. I went through a LOT of stuff to come up with this, so don’t be surprised if you see something you have seen before. Generally I am pretty happy and confident, I lost touch with that for awhile, but it was only because I didn’t live up to what I write here. Enjoy. I hope it helps someone, I know it works for me. (Please at least do the short visualization exercise even if you are happy with yourself)
Confidence.
That word is thrown around here all the time. It is supposedly like some magical feeling that makes everything work, but it is ever-fleeting and oh so hard to grasp. ‘You just need to be confident’ I hear men yelling. ‘Girls are attracted to confidence’ is always on repeat. So then guys think that all they need in confidence and every girl they ever wanted will come their way. To further confuse matters people take it upon themselves to enlighten other by telling how to obtain this fantastic ‘confidence’. “Fake it until you make it”, “Tell yourself you are the man and one day you will be”, “Don’t use affirmations or fake it, just love yourself”. What? Which one do I do? These thought flow through the mind of the apprentice DJ. Eventually he finally believes he has found confidence, at last! But does it stay with him forever? Do all his dreams come true?
Confidence doesn’t exist. At least not how we usually see it. Guys tell you that you need to achieve something to gain confidence. That is one of the single most destructive beliefs found on self improvement. Sure it seems logical and fine in the begging, but if we look deeper we see how limiting it really is. For example, if we are just starting out on our journey and we take this belief, what happens if we have not achieved anything yet? We perceive ourselves as worthless. ‘If I haven’t achieved anything, why do I have the right to feel confident?”. It’s worse than that too. Many of us see confidence as a prerequisite to action. If we don’t feel confident at something we aren’t likely to go and do it because we feel that we will fail, and because of the belief that achieving something gives us confidence, if we fail we feel like failures. This limiting belief contributes to people who never take action, or the people who might take action but fall short and quickly give up. Have you ever felt this way about anything? If so, keep reading, we’ll sort that bit out
“There is no such thing as “confidence” as a general term. Confidence is context-specific. Let me explain:
Let’s say that you’re a highly-skilled heart surgeon. After years of schooling and training, and experience in the operating room, you’re as confident as it gets on the job. You’re tops in your field and you know it. Now, just as you leave the operating room, you go into the waiting room and see that a terrorist has left a nuclear suitcase bomb in the waiting room! There’s 2 minutes until it blows, meaning there’s no time to call the bomb squad. You open the bomb and see a bunch of wires and parts, and your confidence drops to ZERO as you realize that you’re clueless and powerless in this situation.
Suddenly a man in the waiting room sees what you’re doing and comes to help you. He calmly reaches into the device, turns a dial and pulls a wire, and the timer on the device stops. He doesn’t even look scared! In fact, he looks extremely confident. You ask him how he knew how to stop the bomb and he proudly says “I designed this weapon. I worked for 25 years at Los Alamos building nukes. Turning it off is child’s play.” Now your heart is still racing at this point and the stress hasn’t gone away yet, and all of a sudden you have a heart attack and stop breathing. The nuclear bomb technician has no medical training whatsoever, not even a first aid course. Suddenly HIS confidence drops to ZERO as he realizes that he’s clueless and powerless in this situation, and he calls for help.
The above story illustrates my point: There’s no such thing as a “confident” person, only a person confident in areas he’s very familiar with. If you have no skills and experience dealing with something, you won’t have any confidence in dealing with it either!”
Now that is only half the story. I haven’t explained self-esteem yet. Confidence and self esteem are very different. For the purposes of this, let’s think of self-esteem as the perception of our self worth, and confidence as the assurance that if we do something we will get a desired result.
Now you can see from the story that any man will feel confident in certain circumstances but there will always be a lot of things he won’t feel ‘confident’ about. That is not a bad thing. We can’t have people performing heart surgery or defusing bombs if they have had no experience with it can we? However if we take the belief held by most of society that ‘we must achieve something before we will be rewarded with confidence’, can you see the problem?
Consider this, if someone is a heart surgeon does that let him feel confident about his life? What if he was also terrible with women? What if he was short, skinny or fat and ugly? Does that give him any less right to feel confident?
The thing is no one can ever be confident at everything they do. Every time you try something new, you won’t feel confident about it. Is that bad? NO! It’s normal. Does it say anything about you as a person? NO! The kind of confidence you are looking for in life doesn’t come from chasing after achievements, it comes from what I will call self-esteem. If your confidence relies on your achievements, you will always be lacking because you will always be chasing more. If your confidence depends on your body then that is not only shallow but it will one day be gone. The same applies to your car, money, house and looks. It especially applies to the way people react and treat you. All of this is EXTERNAL VALIDATION.
All ‘confidence’ comes from external validation. How good you are at something, your test results, how you compare with other people. All this is unstable, it is never certain; it could disappear at any time. Even if you get your confidence from a skill, what if you have a bad day and make a mistake? What if a few people come to you who are better than you? What if people criticise this skill and put you down? Where is your precious confidence now?
What you need to aim for is self esteem. True, lasting ‘confidence’. This comes from inside. It is internal validation not external validation. It comes from when your self-image is not determined by what people say to you. It is where you realize that your self-worth is not determined by what you do. This may be hard to understand and take in. All our lives we are conditioned by society to do the opposite. At primary school we are graded and then we are broken off into different groups. The ‘smart kids’, the ‘middle group’ and the ‘slow learners’. Right from the start we are comparing ourselves to others. Our worth depends on how we compare to others, if we are up the top we are good, if we are down the bottom we are bad. But we are ALL human. It doesn’t matter what you do there will always be someone better than you, and there will always be someone worse than you. It’s a silly thing to base your self-esteem on.
If someone is worse at a particular thing than someone else does it make him a bad person? No. Although, sometimes it can feel that way can’t it. Think of the times when you seen guys getting awesome super-hot girls, and you weren’t. It doesn’t feel great does it? Still, he is no better than you are. There will be SOMETHING in life you do better than him.
Ok so now I’ve made what I think is a clear distinction between confidence and self-esteem. You are probably thinking, how the hell do I get self-esteem? Relax I’m getting there. Just keep in mind confidence isn’t bad. It is good to be confident at a few things in life, but your self-esteem, self-worth and self-image should never be dependent on those things. Research has shown that people who have a narrow self-image, (i.e. I am a lawyer/businessman/sportsman) are much more likely to fall into depression and suicide because their whole self-image is based on one thing. When this isn’t going as well there is nothing to fall back on, it feels to the person like HE isn’t good enough. If that person has varied hobbies, even if he isn’t going good at one he has others to buffer that. He doesn’t collapse. Although we will be going deeper than a varied self-image.
Think about a top athlete. Does he go out the KNOWING he will win? Maybe he does think like that. When he is having a shot is he thinking “go in go in go in” or “I know this will go in”? Most likely not. What usually happens is he just focuses on the actual act of having the shot, the past and the future don’t matter, just the single activity. You need to take your eyes off the scoreboard to play the game.
I believe that there is a set of steps to self-esteem. It looks like this:
Self-acceptance -> self-respect -> self-love -> self-esteem
You can’t respect yourself if you don’t accept how you are. You can’t have self-esteem if you dislike yourself. True confidence can be thought of as what comes after, or it can be thought of as being something completely different altogether. Think about a time you felt confident at something. Feel the actual feeling. Is that confidence? Is the feeling confidence? Or is it just the feeling of being pumped in the context of you doing something where you think you might get the desired outcome? Is it confidence, or excitement? Is it confidence, or happiness, or pleasure, or contentment? You see, I don’t think confidence is a feeling, it’s just the context for the feeling.
