Confidence as One of Your Greatest Currencies
Metaphors are often used to demonstrate lessons in life. I remember how one of my past friends saw life as a cup of coffee−whereby sweetness and bitterness mixed up. Nowadays, I often regard my life as storage rooms whereby you store all of your assets or stuffs or, the way I like to call it, currencies.
The currencies I’m talking about here comprise all the attributes you have in life − i.e. love, energy, money, time, knowledge, happiness, etc. You exchange all of these things with other human beings as you go through your day to day life. When you spend your time with your lover, for example, you exchange your time, love, and energy for his/her time, love, and energy.
By using such metaphor, however, I do not wish to regard all of those currencies as limited. In some spiritual school of thoughts, such as Buddhism and Dao de Ching, all of those currencies can be regarded, in fact, as unlimited.
The purpose of me writing this, is to elucidate what I regard as one of the greatest currencies that have ever been there, confidence (for the purpose of this writing, Confidence is as defined by the 14th edition Oxford Dictionary, “a positive feeling arising from an appreciation of one’s own abilities”). It is great because in some cases it actually determine whether or not you get something you really, really, really want. It is a fair argument that confidence is responsible for the successes of Edison in inventing the light bulb and Lincoln in raising to the top place in politics.
a. The purpose of confidence
Suppose your soul is an automobile, I would think confidence as the fuel which gives it power to move forward. Practically, without it we can’t move forward in actualizing ourselves.
b. But where does it come from?
As the author Jack Canfield puts it, there are two sources where you can draw your confidence. You can draw confidence from without as well as within yourself.
The first one, confidence from without one’s self, is the most common we see in our life. Everyday we see how a lecturer would be so confident in giving his lecture. You put him in a night club he would probably be half as confident. In that case, the lecturer draw the confidence from the environment in which he is.
The second one is my favorite, inner confidence. This is the kind which comes from character and a courageous heart. This is the place where you can be confident despite the places you’re in, the number of drinks with which you’re familiar, the number of people you know at a certain environment, etc. Think of someone like Bruce Wayne. Put him in any environment in this world, I don’t think he would lose his composure as he is well aware of his place in the world−as well as his faculties.
c. The one million dollar question, can we sort of “hack” it the way we want?
By hacking it, I suppose you mean to have the confidence almost all the times, to which my answer is… Yes and no.
I said yes because, despite the factors outside ourselves, we can always choose to know our places in the world. We do this by acknowledging that, as Robert Allen puts it, everything you want is practically outside your comfort zone. It’s okay to fear, it’s okay to be frustrated and it’s okay as well to be put down on you knees. It’s life. No one has ever said that it was going to be easy, right?
On the other end, I said no because there isn’t one-time thing to do that can make you be confident at all times (and no… Attending confidence seminar and reading confidence book won’t do. Anything that tells you the contrary is bulls**t, sorry). You have to be consistently courageous. Doing the right things shall be your life policy you uphold every second of your life. It’s only when you do the right things consistently despite the environments and feelings, you’ll start to feel self-assured or confident.
Now, what I propose you to do is… To actually forget 90% of this writing. Really, forget it (nice advice, huh? J). The important part of this writing is the last paragraph (the paragraph before this). That’s the real thing that shall be nailed down to our heads and hearts.
Have a good day,
Ganda H.
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