Episode Details

“Stay afraid but do it anyway. What’s important is the action. You don’t have to want to be confident. Just do it and eventually the confidence will follow.”

– Carrie Fisher

People have asked me where I get my confidence from. For years I couldn’t answer that without sounding arrogant. I would say things like: I just am or I don’t know why aren’t you confident in yourself.

Those things weren’t to sound cocky, I truly didn’t know.

Now, through reflection and maturity, I realize that confidence requires one big thing.

Telling yourself you’ll do something and following through with it.

The less you follow through, the less trust you have in yourself. The less trust you have in yourself, the lower your confidence.

Here are two examples to demonstrate my point:

* Someone consistently lying to you.

* Working out

If you have a relationship of any kind with a person you build trust from the initial meeting. When that person lies to you once, you lose trust in that person. At least a little. But when they do it consistently, you have no trust in them. You don’t believe anything they say. You have no confidence in them.

With working out, you gain confidence with the more results you see. But if you don’t see results quickly, you lose that confidence that you can do it. However, gaining results in the gym requires consistent effort over time. It doesn’t just happen in one day or one week.

Also, with working out you build confidence. If you tell yourself, “I’m going to the gym” especially when you don’t want to, you build confidence. AND you always feel better afterward. However, when you don’t follow through, you tend to feel ashamed or upset with yourself.

Confidence is built up over time. It’s built up with little victories that sometimes only you can see.