One of my favorite YouTuber Vinh Giang said the ability to being confidence or not is all in the mind. There are things we can control and there are things we can't control, but the big question remain is confidence even real?
In simple terms, confidence refers to the freedom from doubt and disbelief in yourself. It is the belief or trust in your abilities and capabilities to perform a certain task. But what happens when it's my first time performing a new task, would I still be confident? Or say I got a role I had never occupied in my life, would I be confident?
What I have come to realize in most cases is that the more evidence we have about performing a particular task, the more confident we become about doing it again. For instance, a chef who has cooked over and over again would be confident about cooking a delicious meal the next time. But for someone like me who does not cook regularly, there would be a little doubt about whether the food would be delicious or not, lol.
It might intrest you to know that our brains do not 100% know the difference between what is real and what's not. Infact in one of my recent posts I mentioned how our brains tries to protect us from doing something new because it thinks it might be dangerous or harmful to us.
So the idea of "the more you practice, the more confident you become" is very true, but I have seen alot of first timers perform confidently well in their new roles. I know of a lady that is afraid of public speaking and the thought of it makes her shiver, but the first time she held the microphone to pitch her idea in front of a large crowd of people, she did amazingly well. So where did all that confidence come from?
Here's where it gets interesting. Research in psychology suggests that confidence isn't actually a memory of past success, but it is a prediction of future capability. That means performing a task multiple times doesn't ultimately guarantees confidence, because I have seen people get scared and nervous every single time they want to perform a particular event.
I think this is true to some extent because I literally run very often, but I still get nervous whenever am about to compete in a track event. This made me to realize that the feeling we call "confidence" is often just the absence of hesitation, and that absence is a choice, not a condition.
Now this brings me to my ultimate point, "Confidence is the Courage to move despite the uncertainties." Most of us think confidence comes first, and so we say things like "once I feel confident, then I'll act." But the actual truth is that every time we exercise courage, we deposit evidence into our confidence account, and not the other way around.
For me, the first courageous step is the hardest part but it is basically all we need to become confident in whatever we do. It doesn't really need to be perfect at first, but the more courageous you become, the more confident you can be.
