Cultivating Confidence (Part 1)

Confidence is one of the most important assets in life. It is one of the key attributes that distinguish successful people. Confidence helps you ace a test, make the buzzer-beating 3-pointer, ace an interview, talk to the hottie you've been eying, etc. Yes, if properly cultivated, confidence can really improve your life. To understand how we can grow our confidence, it is important to understand what exactly we are talking about.

Confidence isn't something that just comes for free. Sure you can suddenly act all cocky but that's not the type of confidence I'm talking about. I'm talking about real confidence that is justified by past successes that make up a proven track record. Real confidence is like health. Everything that you have done prior to today to maintain and improve your health defines your current health. Everything that you have done prior to today to maintain and improve your confidence defines your current confidence level. Whenever you ace a test, you gain that extra plus on your track record that you can use to boost your confidence on the next test. Confidence is knowing that you can succeed backed by successful similar past experiences. It is something that is gained and developed over the course of your entire life up to this moment.

On the other hand, unlike health, confidence is a personality trait that is applied toward challenging/fearsome life events. Confidence is our belief that we will succeed. Because of the different levels of challenge available in life, confidence is somewhat relative. For example, in professional men's tennis, the number 100 ranked professional in the world, Jiri Vanek, probably has high confidence in his tennis skills overall, but when playing against Roger Federer, the number 1 in the world, Jiri's tennis confidence level probably isn't as high.

We can also try to look at confidence at an absolute level. Absolute confidence (ie. confidence with the relativity taken out) is one's expectation of success given a challenging/fearsome life event of random difficulty in a predetermined category. Back to the example category of tennis: Our world #100 tennis player, Jiri, would have very high absolute confidence if you said he would play a opponent chosen at random from the world. Obviously, he would expect to win close to 100% of the time.

Absolute confidence is what I'm talking about. This is something that successful people, leaders, need to cultivate in order to excel in life. Now that we have properly defined what it means to have real confidence, we can talk about ways to improve it...

To Be Continued...