Confidence

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Confidence is a tricky thing, isn’t it? Have too much of the wrong kind and it’ll blind you with arrogance. Have too little of the right kind and it’ll freeze you in uncertainty and fear.

If you really think about it confidence is how the world was built, designed, torn down, rebuilt, reimagined and reimagined again. How much confidence must it take to head off to unknown lands in hope of a better life? Is it more or less confidence than it takes to open a conversation with an attractive someone whom may one day start a life with you? More or less than the confidence to admit that dream first to yourself and then to the world?

Or the confidence to look in the mirror and like who you see looking back? Ahhh that’s the one I think. Is that the same confidence necessary to demand the person in the mirror grow and be better while promising you’re going to be right there with them? This is the confidence that could re-write your entire life’s story.

Confidence is a tricky thing. When you tag “self” to it it may be the most important thing you have or don’t have.

Anyway thanks for reading my thoughts.

Comments

Agree.

If you label it as "confidence", it can come from external sources, people telling you that you can do something. The most tricky one is "self-confidence", where you, and you alone, can give it to yourself.
 
I would say, yes, you alone can take it away. When we say others undermine our self-confidence, it probably never was self-confidence but just confidence in the first place.
 
D
@Silmende I don’t know though. I’m thinking of examples of abuse. A person can be abused to the point their mental view of self is distorted. In that situation the impetus for the distorted self confidence is external, but I don’t know that I can blame the victim for the internal ramifications. I’m just thinking out loud here. Really good questions!
 
But in a situation of abuse, usually something went wrong already in the building of self-confidence. Self-confidence normally is built on a very young age, through a nurturing environment in your childhood. I'm not saying it's impossible to build it later in life, but it's harder and takes a lot of work and therapy.

Self-confident people usually don't end up in abusive relationships (there's a list of character traits that for instance narcissists select their victims on - not consciously probably, but still - and it doesn't include people with healthy confidence, it is those who are pleasers (because they learned others matter more and first than themselves), those who are likely to forgive (because they haven't learned they deserve better and they take what they can get in terms of love/friendship), those who had narcistic parents (I doubt parents like that will create a healthy nurturing environment for their children), etc).

I'm not saying an abused person is responsible for his own fate (well, to a certain extent, maybe they should walk away, but it is not always an easy choice and they deserve support until they are ready - and afterwards to heal), but I think that they haven't built enough self worth and self confidence to walk away if they stay in the situation.

And I think for all of us, a lot of our confidence is because of external validation. Those who have enough of it to shrug off the occasional critique and just go elsewhere, are also more likely to get that validation from the people they keep interacting with.
 

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