There is a funny thing about confidence: sometimes the people who look like they have the most actually have the least.
For me, it’s not confidence that has fueled my success, but optimism, romanticism, idealism. What most people see as confidence is just those things disguised as forward motion, action, and determination.
You see, I’m a hopeless optimist, a romancer of dreams, and an idealist extraordinaire. It’s not that I do big things because I am certain that I am someone who can. I do big things because I desperately want to imagine that I am someone who has. I can visualize the finish line, taste the victory, savor the success, feel the crown atop my head, but I truly have no idea whether or not I’m going to fail miserably at the start. If I waited until I believed I could do anything for certain, the only thing I would do for certain is nothing at all.
It goes against every central tenet of every confidence coach you’ve ever heard, I know. They all say, “Believe that you can, and then you can do it!” I think that’s bunk. Sure, there is a role for visualization — see: my romantic visions of, well, everything in life — but I’d rather have you just do the thing whether you believe it or not. It is through the doing it, that you start believing you can. Sometimes it just takes one foot in front of the other, over and over, lather, rinse, repeat, to strip away your self-doubts and remind you that you are royalty. And it is through the doing it that you will find your confidence.
Because, yeah, in the doing it, you’re gonna fail. And you’re also going to succeed. And, in each, there is a lesson. Now, adjust that crown, stand up tall, and go kick some ass.
