On Confidence
A fresh look on confidence from Alain De Botton and “The School of Life”: it examines the good and the bad reasons why we may lack it and explores how we can develop more of it in our everyday life. Confidence is a skill and a catalyst for bringing all the good things in us into the world.
Confidence is a skill, not luck or inherent gift.
We are afraid of appearing ridiculous. But everyone is a fool (book and inspiration: In Praise of Folly, by Erasmus; Dutch Proverbs by Pieter Bruegel the Elder) so the way to greater confidence starts with coming to peace with one's inevitable ridiculousness.
We feel like impostors because we cannot imagine how deeply flawed other people are - including the most successful ones. The solution to the impostor syndrome is a leap of faith and accepting that others' minds work in much the same way as ours do. (Book & Inspiration: Montaigne, Essays)
We often trust The System instead of recognising that it is imperfect. We are, in St. Augustine's words, not in the City of God, but in the City of Man, and by nature it is impossible for human institutions ever to meet our hopes.
We tend to believe the status quo is entrenched. Reality is, the world is being made and remade in every instant. Everything we do is up for further development.
We lose confidence not because the events are difficult but because we hadn't expected them to be so - largely because the narratives that surround us make success easier than it is. We'd better be meeting our own experiences against a realistic set of expectations that include pain, anxiety and disappointment.
Memento Mori. the tragedy of wasting our lives is more frightening than failure. In an ideal culture, our mortality should be systematically impressed on us from the earliest age.
Enemies: We cannot change the presence of the enemy, but we can change what the enemy means to us. We will constantly be the target of anger, but we don't have to believe ourselves to be its true cause. We should keep in mind a confident distinction between the hater and the critic.
Self-sabotage: one root cause is an unconscious desire to protect those who love us from a sense of envy or inadequacy that might be triggered by our gain - let's reassure our nervous companions of our loyalty. Another root cause is considering that the price of hope is too high to pay: but we can survive the loss of hope. Finally, one more root cause would be modesty - but we deserve success even if we we are imperfect.
Confidence in confidence: our negative view on confidence may root back to our own histories, but also has a huge cultural endorsement (e.g. Christianity). We need self-awareness: do we really admire timidity so much as fear trying confidence? Are we denying confidence in a self-protective deception? It isn't enough to be kind, interesting, intelligent and wise inside: we need to develop the skill that allows us to make our talents active in the world at large. Confidence is what translates theory into practice. We should allow ourselves to develop confidence in confidence.