Confidence–the miracle additive

There is an aikido adage,”Perform with confidence” which basically reminds us to go for it without holding back, as it is much safer.  If you watch rugby, you will see players fling themselves headfirst (quite literally) into situations which common sense would never let you do, and they (mostly) seem to suffer little harm!  You may say “That is all very well for other people, brave people to do these things!” but it is much tougher to feel we are capable of this kind of thing.  However, if you think about your life, there are all sorts of things that you feel confident about, in fact you don’t even pause to question whether they will work.  You confidently drive your car towards a junction at many miles an hour and press the brake, confident it will stop you.  So what is the difference?  The more often you do something the more predictable the result and the more confident you feel. 

The thing is, as Claire Shipman observes, “Confidence can be thought of like a muscle. Just because it’s weak now doesn’t mean it can’t be strong later. All you need to do is exercise it.”  Taking action, builds confidence; holding back feeds fear.  So don’t be a spectator in your own life, take action, and become the person you wish you could be…

You can build a ladder of baby steps, if you make a habit of doing things,especially new things, or perhaps things you don’t feel are quite ‘you’.  We are taught to fear failure and so we keep ourselves safe from it by doing nothing so we can do nothing wrong, but actually it is well documented that success is built on failure and the learnings that it brings, and with success comes confidence.  Conversely, if we try and fail we usually find that the consequences were far milder than we feared; people don’t care if we can’t dance well, or don’t notice if we say something ‘silly’.  So go ahead!  Step out of your ‘Comfort Zone’, don’t me a safe ‘Couch Potato’, give a go… What’s the worst that could happen?

This entry was posted on Monday, April 13th, 2015 at 07:00 and is filed under Hints, Tips & Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.