Question from the forums on Steve Pavlina.com where I responded.
A lot of people think I am a confident guy… I think I am very good at faking confidence. Why? Because doubt is a constant part of my daily life; every decision I make is questioned by doubt. Because the latter is powerful, I have developed a mechanism to stay deaf to it, so that I can get going in my life and accomplish things. As a result some people perceive me as a very confident guy, and some others as arrogant. I don’t mean to be arrogant. I think it’s the way I fight doubt.
D.
What makes honest self reflection without falling into doubt and self-judgment such a tricky process to master is that we adopt different points of view. We have many sides to our personality and they take on different emotional states.
The thought, “I shouldn”t have said that €, can be made as an honest assessment when we are feeling confident. It is a simple observation that our actions didn”t get us the results we wanted.
We can also have the same comment from a side of our personality that feels it as a great failure. We really screwed something up. This is more often how it is felt. This is the side of our personality that is accepting the judgment as a punishment.
At the same we are making the judgment from another part of our personality that comes with a feeling of being right about our assessment. That side of our personality making the self judgment feels right and justified about punishing our self emotionally.
In this scenario of self assessment turning into self judgment results in a lack of confidence. This speaks to a fear at the core of it. Likely it is a fear of what others will think of us. Below that is a core belief of what we think about our self. How to have confidence is done by dissolving these artificial elements in the mind that create fear.
The technique I teach my clients is to take an inventory of all these (fears, false core beliefs, and sides of our personality) so that we can detach from all of them. We are actually dealing with a matrix of personalities and beliefs in our mind. It is self deceiving to think that there is only one thing to do that will address these multiple variables.
When you dissolve the false beliefs, false self images, and fears you don”t have to project an image of arrogance to compensate. You take on a quiet humble confidence that is unshaken by events or what other people think and say. True confidence doesn’t have to project.
Creating and having confidence can be done. In my experience it is a multi step process to Self Mastery. But with the number of years remaining in our life, there will be plenty of time for return on our investment of effort. The sooner we begin in our process the greater will be our reward.
Gary
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