The internal workings of self-confidence

One of the greatest challenges that we all face when building our own self-confidence in relation to a particular issue or activity is the internal voice that gives us reasons why we can’t achieve at the thing we are thinking about doing.  I’m sure you have heard the voices inside your own head, you know the ones, “you’re too young or you’re too old”, “you don’t have enough money” or “you don’t have the knowledge or the experience”. 

Another issue that has a significant effect on us is the self-deprecating language we use with ourselves when we do not achieve to our own expectations, we tell ourselves we have “failed”.  This type of thinking acts as additional firepower for our internal voice to use against us in the future.  I’m sure you’ll recognise the thought “it didn’t work last time so it won’t work this time either”.

Coaches and mentors often use the saying “is your glass half empty or half full”, e.g. is the individual looking at life from a negative or positive viewpoint.  Many people are entrenched in the idea that they need to focus on what they got wrong when they did not achieve or exceed their own expectations during a particular activity. This type of thinking encourages the internal voice and makes it stronger and discourages you from attempting the activity again.

For example if your experiences “prove” to you rightly or wrongly that you do not have the skills to do well at a particular activity such as painting, then you may be motivated to avoid situations involving these skills because you are not confident in your ability to succeed and wish to avoid the feelings of being inadequate.

When we are failure focused we tend to loose sight of all the things we did well and solely focus on the things we did wrong.  We’re not giving ourselves a chance, our mind will take our destructive thoughts and give them back to us as a series of arguments that will end up with our self-confidence being kicked and knocked about until it’s a shadow of its former self. 

What we are completely forgetting is that our confidence is built in little steps and we MUST give ourselves a pat on the back and congratulate ourselves for the things we did well in order to have the confidence to start again. 

Lets say we perceive that we got 15% of an activity right and 85% wrong and we focus on what we got right.  We are giving ourselves the opportunity to remind ourselves that because we have got the thing we are attempting to do partly right we have already accomplished part of the task and there is less left to learn.  Additionally we have the opportunity to congratulate ourselves for the things we did well.  Immediately our thoughts become more positive.  We begin to build our “can do” attitude giving ourselves the strength to fight another day.  Focusing our attention on what we did well helps us diminish thoughts of failure, improve our self-confidence and build the motivation to have another go.

For example if our experiences “prove” to us that we did some things well when painting then we will feel good about our painting achievements, feel confident that we can learn and become a better painter and feel motivated toward the art of painting.