Confidence vs Self Esteem
Confidence is a trait that most desire, and we’re going to provide a blueprint for this. First, let’s get on the same page by clearly defining confidence.
It’s sometimes mistaken for arrogance, and sometimes for high self-esteem. But there’s one thing that confidence cannot be mistaken for and that is the belief in yourself.
Self Esteem is feeling great and even proud of yourself. But confidence is more of an attitude than a feeling. Confidence can make you feel proud of yourself, but don’t be mistaken, confidence isn’t feeling proud of yourself. It’s an attitude that resembles, “I know I can do it, and I will do it.” To put this in perspective, think about a skill that you’re proficient in. Now imagine you’re called to use that skill for a practical purpose such as public speaking. If you’ve practiced and practiced and you’ve become adept at conveying your ideas in front of a crowd, you would be confident about presenting your speech. Remember that most are confident about something. When people say “I’m confident”, it refers to confidence about themselves, which actually means they have self-belief.
Confidence vs Arrogance
This phrase, “I’M CONFIDENT” is often used by people who are unpleasant to be around. We perceive that they’re arrogant more than confident because of their overall attitude and our intuitive belief that confident people don’t usually go and throw that phrase around. So confidence can sometimes be mistaken for arrogance because both attitudes display behavior of self-belief. The major difference between confidence and arrogance is self-belief regardless of how they feel. Confident people maintain their self-belief even when they’ve fallen, bruised themselves up, and feel like shit. Arrogant people have self-belief until they get punched in the mouth. Prior experience of hard work, tough experiences, and overcoming them make confident people confident about themselves. Arrogant people are obliviously proud of themselves because they haven’t yet experienced hard work and long periods of hardship. In essence, confidence is associated with experience and arrogance with a lack of experience.
Where Does Confidence Come From?
Belief in Yourself
Now that you’re aware that confidence comes from self-belief, we’re going to dive into the importance of self-belief.
First, you need to believe in yourself before you do anything because if you don’t then you’re setting yourself up to fail. There’s a reason why all self-help books emphasize the importance of believing in yourself. When you really believe in yourself, your brain works to reinforce this belief because that’s the brain’s job. The brain more specifically, your subconscious, directs your interest and focus on specific books, directions, advertisements, people you choose to listen to, and everything else that helps you get closer to your belief.
For example, if you believe that you can do anything and more specifically, you believe that you can create a successful business, guess what your google search query and recent book collection will look like. Compare that to someone who doesn’t really believe that they can create a successful business. Your search queries will include specific questions about entrepreneurship, more of your time will be devoted to market research and finding niche markets, and you’ll certainly invest in more courses/books related to entrepreneurship. Eventually, your belief will influence what you’ll do during your free time such as choosing Shark Tank over Stranger Things on Netflix.
You can definitely be confident about something without self-belief, but it’s in your best interest to develop self-belief if you ever want to be confident about yourself. Although self-belief is thought to be intrinsic, we adamantly believe that it can be learned and we’ll jump into this in another article.
Confident Actions Stem From Self-Confidence
Self Confidence is the precursor to confidence which is the precursor to confident actions.
Self-belief propels self-confidence which is your belief that you can do something. And self-confidence is developed by grinding day in and out that’ll propel you towards your goal(s).
Once you see yourself get better, you’ll naturally feel more self-confident which means that ‘can do’ attitude will increase, which will motivate you to continue grinding. And this motivation will cause a positive perpetual cycle.
All you need to do is keep practicing and improving and self-confidence will surely develop. Once you feel fully competent in this skill, you’ll be confident about applying it in a real-life situation and bam, that’s when you’ll use your skill, excel, and display confidence.
How to Develop Confidence
Action. Adapt. Repeat. Perfect.
Action
This is the most important because you’ll never develop a lick of confidence if you don’t start. Understand that once you start, all excuses that you may have that are causing hesitation fades away. And when you see progress, you’ll become motivated to take action which will make practicing easier. But you don’t reap the reward of confidence until you turn off your mind and start. This is why Nike’s slogan is so relatable, you just need to do it. You can develop confidence in the bedroom for example by using escorts, or shemale london escorts, if that’s your thing…
Adapt
Humans don’t have to consciously focus on adaptation for adaptation to occur because the human brain is naturally made to find mistakes after repetition and to correct them. So finding mistakes, correcting oneself, and improving can happen unconsciously, but if you want to build confidence efficiently, you must consciously attend focus to your performance and analyze your actions to find avenues of improvement. This is an active vs passive dilemma. Are you going to wait for your brain to finally realize, “oh, this is how to do it.” or will you force your brain to find the solution faster through analysis? How much effort you expend on adaptation is directly related to the rate of your adaptation.
Repeat
Practice makes perfect. There will undoubtedly be days when you won’t want to continue because you won’t see results or you’ll see your results stagnate. Are you going to give up? Or will you continue on like the champions who didn’t give up because they didn’t see immediate results? Because more often than not, the inflection point, or commonly known as a breakthrough, is right after the moment you don’t feel like improving but improve anyways. It’s like destiny designed life to be this way, results don’t require just action and adaptation. It requires patience and perseverance too, and life will test your patience and perseverance.
Perfect
Once you go through this process of ups and downs, you’ll finally reach competence, the know-ing that you can do something flawlessly. And, it is this knowledge that will you can do something well that will develop the shift the attitude of I can to I definitely can.
Why You Should Develop Confidence
There are only net positives from developing confidence. Sure, you use time but understand that time is for investing in things that matter to you.
Surely, if you’re looking to develop confidence, you’re going to develop confidence in things that matter to you.
But note one thing. Developing confidence in everything besides yourself requires physical practice. Developing confidence in yourself requires mental practice such as shifting how you perceive yourself, developing strong self-talk, mastering your emotions, and much more which we’ll dive into thoroughly in a future article.