Do you know how it feels when you don’t love yourself? Do you know how it feels to be in the middle of a group and not being able to be yourself .ecause you think that they may not like that? Do you fear banishment? Do you feel undeserving in the midst of so many successful people with that beasty smirk on their faces? – Tell me one thing, why do you do that? I’ll tell you why you do that. You do that because you hate yourself. You do that because you’re not confident.
Confidence is generally described as a state of being certain either that a hypothesis or prediction is correct or that a chosen course of action is the best or most effective, stated by Wikipedia. This entails that you believe in yourself. You accept what you are; you believe in yourself and move on.
Still, what is confidence, really? My mom used to tell me to be confident before going for exams. Today my girlfriend tells me to be confident before an interview, and I can go on and on. But what is it, really? Why does everyone keep telling me that? And specifically, why does most of the time it come from the people that are close to me? It’s because they know what you are. You’re good. You’re likeable, and they want you to know it. That is what confidence is.
Most of the time, we have a tendency to think that people are judging us. It’s basically because we are doing the same thing (Yes, stop lying to yourself now). But that’s what makes it a cruel world. Everybody is judging everybody. Everybody wants to be better. Everybody wants to be more powerful. We all have that greed. Then why would you feel like a minor? Why do you have to be the one that has to feel undeserving? It’s okay, if your hair is not good today, if you were laid off from work yesterday, and it’s okay, if today’s exam was not that up to the mark. These things do not define you. You define yourself. You own it. Believing all these is confidence.
“Nah man, I’m not rich. I hate my job. I don’t own a car. I don’t even have a leather jacket, man! I hate myself. I hate this life” – is this what you’re thinking? What makes you think that you need any of them to be confident? Tell me because I don’t know, because what I know is that you don’t need these to have confidence. I know that confidence is the thing that can get you all of these. Yes, confidence plants the root.
Do you remember that time in exam hall when you sort of cheated by asking the guy sitting beside you the answer. It was different from the one you had derived. You checked your solution again and again. It seemed that you were right. So, you went with your one. In the end, getting out of that exam hall, you checked your book and found out that you were actually right. Yes, you got that answer right because you were confident. You believed in yourself. What if you had gone with your friend’s answer? Even though you had the talent to derive the answer yourself, you would have gone wrong and lost the marks. That’s what confidence does. It empowers you. You need it to succeed.
I wonder about that man, who was being told that people didn’t really like his odor, and even then he claimed that he could design the best game in the world. Yes, that man later turned out to be the Steve Jobs.
It’s not very uncommon that at times confidence has harmed us. Overconfidence can do that. It’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect. It leads you to believe that you’re right, no matter what others are saying, and what others are doing. You don’t even believe the facts, if they don’t seem to agree with you. That’s not actually what ‘being confident’ means. This is outright being biased, and you don’t want that.
Even then, a research, done by University of Edinburgh and University of California-San Diego, regarding overconfidence, found that even if you’re destined to lose something, and you know it, by constantly believing in yourself, you can prove that you are right. Yes, even being overconfident sometimes helps. But saying ‘sometimes’ is actually exaggerating it. It’s really rare, and often is deemed madness. You should definitely not give into that.
All in all, if you draw a straight-line to measure confidence, then the middle point that says zero with positive values in the right and negative values in the left is where you should be. It’s the optimum place that can get you anywhere you want. Obtaining that is not that tough. You just have to be yourself.
