How Do You Gain Confidence?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Gaining self-confidence is a frequent request for therapy, for personal change. And very often confidence is understood as a personal quality, having acquired which, you will be sure always and in everything. Is it so? Let's try to figure it out.

Probably, it is worth to separate such concepts as: confidence, determination and high self-esteem. They are close to each other, often there is no one without the other, but, nevertheless, they mean different things.

Confidence (from the word "faith") is precisely the belief that you are capable of certain actions, that if you make certain efforts to accomplish something (for example, nail a shelf in the bathroom), then you will succeed, you will achieve success in this task. If you know how to handle a hammer and nails (or a hammer and dowels), have repeatedly nailed shelves in the past, then most likely you are confident of success. And if you need to pass an exam in calculus, but you are not very strong in this subject, you most likely will not feel as confident as nailing a shelf if necessary. How does this compare with such a personality trait as “self-confidence”? You developed this quality in yourself - went to seminars, were engaged in self-development, developed self-confidence and … what? Now you should feel equally confident both where you are competent and where you are not very much?

Apparently, we are talking, after all, about a different personal quality, namely, decisiveness. You can decisively go to take the exam, even if you do not know the material very well, stay calm and confident in the exam precisely due to your determination and, perhaps, your demeanor will bring you an additional bonus. Of course, if you know at least something:)

Here there is, as it were, overlapping your uncertainty in your knowledge (and uncertainty is quite adequate if you know the material poorly) with other qualities - decisiveness and self-confidence. Here I use the word “self-confidence” in a positive context, as self-confidence - high self-esteem. If we are talking specifically about confidence as a state, then it is achieved, first of all, by the saturation of competence in the area in which you want to feel confident. Determination can "cover up" confidence, but it does not replace it. If you are very well prepared for the exam, you know the material perfectly, you assume a loyal attitude of the examiners to you - you, of course, may feel a certain fear, uncertainty precisely because of your indecision, however, at the basic level, you will feel confident in your competence, in the fact that the exam will turn out to be passed with a good grade.

Now about self-confidence, which is directly linked to self-esteem. And here, as it seems to me, the question should not be about the height or "bottom" of this self-esteem, but about its adequacy. Adequacy is precisely a healthy, mature assessment of oneself. Their abilities, skills, inclinations, skills of solving certain problems, personal qualities. Self-esteem is often really inadequate, underestimated due to the personal history of the person himself - the support and recognition that was not received from parents in childhood. This is a separate big topic. Love and recognition that are not received from parents form in a person a so-called narcissistic pathology, in his behavior and experiences the so-called. "Narcissistic swing", when a person is "thrown" into grandeur - his self-esteem soars to the skies, then into the devaluation of himself - a fall in self-esteem, the experience of his own insignificance. However, dozens and hundreds of books and, probably, thousands of articles have been written about narcissism, you can read about all this. Now let's return to the two concepts with which we started: "confidence" and "self-confidence."

In this article, I wanted to consider the logical fallacy that “self-confidence” replaces confidence in a particular activity. There is an idea that if you gain this very "self-confidence", then it will overlap confidence in all areas of life. This is not the case, each specific activity needs its own competence, confidence in this specific area increases along with the increase in this competence.

Usually we are not talking about adequate self-esteem, but about high, because no one turns to a psychologist with a request to lower self-esteem, because it is too high, or a request to make an assessment adequate. The request sounds exactly like this - help increase self-esteem. The overwhelming majority of those who apply to therapy suffer precisely from low self-esteem, the experience of their own badness, failure, feeling like a failure, etc.

What to do about it? Understand. Understand how it happened that you lost faith in yourself, in your abilities. What episodes from childhood contributed to this. Perhaps, as a child, my mother called you "clumsy", and you, being very small and uncritical in relation to the words of loved ones, believed this, and somewhere on an unconscious level you still think so. And even despite the fact that now you are quite successful, even, perhaps, occupy some position, this "I am a clumsy" sits somewhere in the depths of your unconscious. Perhaps in childhood there were some other unpleasant episodes or even psychological trauma.

All this must be dealt with. Both psychology and psychologists will help you! It is quite possible to gain self-confidence, to make self-esteem adequate (at least - to bring it closer to adequacy)! As well as the fact that confidence in specific topics and issues can be built by raising awareness and competence.