I had someone reach out to me following my last blog dealing with confidence, asking this question: ⬇️
“How are you supposed to be confident about something when you have nothing to feel confident about?”
I like this question and I’d like to expand on it a little more before I try answer it, how are you (yes you reading this as this might apply to even just one of you) supposed to be confident at your new job if you’ve never done this type of work before? Or how are you supposed to be confident in social situations when no one has ever liked you before? Or how are you supposed to be confident in your relationship when you’ve never been in a positive, healthy relationship before?
On the surface, confidence appears to be an area where the rich get richer and the poor stay the fucking losers they are. After all, if you’ve never experienced much social acceptance, and you lack confidence around new people, then that lack of confidence will make people think you’re clingy and weird and not accept you.
Same deal goes for relationships. No confidence in intimacy will lead to bad breakups and awkward phone calls and emergency Ben and Jerry’s runs at three in the morning.
And seriously, how are you supposed to be confident in your work experience when previous experience is required to even be considered for a job in the first place?
THE CONFIDENCE ENIGMA!
If you’ve always lost in life then how could you ever expect to be a winner? And if you never expect to be a winner, then you’re going to act like a loser. Thus the cycle of suckage continues.
This is the confidence conundrum, where in order to be happy or loved or successful first you need to be confident… but to be confident, first you need to be happy or loved or successful.
So it seems like you’re stuck in one of two loops: either you’re already in a happy and confident loop, like this.
Or you’re in a loser loop, like this.
And if you’re in the loser loop, well it seems damn near impossible to get out.
It’s like a dog chasing its own tail. Or Domino’s ordering its own pizza. You can spend a lot of time cuticle gazing trying to mentally sort everything out, but just like with your lack of confidence, you’re likely to end up right back where you started.
But maybe we’re going about this all wrong. Maybe the confidence enigma isn’t really an enigma at all.
If we pay close attention, we can learn a few things about confidence just by observing people. So before you run off and order that pizza, let’s break this down:
• Just because somebody has something (tons of friends, a million euros, a bitchin’ beach body at tramore or bunmahon) doesn’t necessarily mean that this person is confident in it. There are business tycoons who totally lack confidence in their own wealth, models who lack confidence in their looks, and celebrities who lack confidence in their own popularity. So I think the first thing we can establish is that confidence is not necessarily linked to any external marker. Rather, our confidence is rooted in our perception of ourselves regardless of any tangible external reality.
• Because our confidence is not necessarily linked to any external, tangible measurement, we can conclude that improving the external, tangible aspects of our lives won’t necessarily build confidence. Chances are that if you’ve lived more than a couple of decades, you’ve experienced this in some form or another. Getting a promotion at your job doesn’t necessarily make you more confident in your professional abilities. In fact, it can often make you feel less confident. Dating and/or sleeping with more people doesn’t necessarily make you feel more confident about how attractive you are. Moving in with your partner or getting married doesn’t necessarily make you feel any more confident in your relationship.
• Confidence is a feeling. An emotional state and a state of mind. It’s the perception that you lack nothing. That you are equipped with everything you need, both now and for the future. A person confident in their social life will feel as though they lack nothing in their social life. A person with no confidence in their social life believes that they lack the prerequisite coolness to be invited to anyone’s pizza party. It’s this perception of lacking something that drives their needy, clingy, and/or bitchy behavior.
With all that being said, remember to drink your coffee this weekend, be kind to others and don’t get arrested 🫡
Love from Lee
Tactical Psychology 