Jack Canfield on Self-Confidence

[cjnolet]

He’s been posting a lot on this topic lately. Here’s the most recent:

“As you're focusing on your own self-improvement this month, let's talk about the importance of confidence.

If you are going to be successful in creating the life of your dreams, you have to have self-confidence and believe that you are capable of making it happen. Self-confidence is a deep-seated belief that you have whatever it takes. You have the abilities, inner resources, talents, and skills to create your desired results especially with the help of affirmations. ” - Jack Canfield

[Lani24]

Do you think you can be successful/achieve the life of your dreams etc without self confidence? Or at least without directly working on self confidence?

To me self confidence seems like the least important thing to work on, it’s just something that follows of a by product once you address/ overcome/ improve the real thing that needs to be worked on?

[cjnolet in reply to Lani24]

I 100% believe that self-confidence is of utmost importance. I say this because your ability to trust in yourself guides your perspective and your decisions. It determines whether or not you feel valuable enough to seek the help and self-improvement to begin with.

I make posts like this in the ADHD boards because I can tell, both from my own experience and from other posts I’ve seen here, that there’s a lot of lacking in self-confidence in our community. And why wouldn’t there be? We are different. But while I celebrate that difference and love my brain for what it has offered me in the way of creativity and reasoning, i do still recognize that there are many places in my life where being different has caused me to have a less than adequate amount of self confidence.

But I’m finding that throughout my journey of self-improvement, having more self-confidence is lost certainly driving my reality in different directions than it has in the past. For instance, self-confidence drives perspective and perspective drives intuition. When I’m walking around telling myself I suck, I’m not deserving, condemning myself for my brain and the ways I am, people will treat me differently. It’s not magic and it very much so makes sense- the energy I cast out into the world is mirrored back.

When I walk around with a smile on my face, confident in my social interactions, showing the world that I take care of myself both physically and mentally, that energy is also mirrored back. Some call this the law of attraction. I just feel like it’s common sense.

Anyways, this is what prompts me to make posts like this. I find that working in your wellness breeds self confidence, which to me is the point.

[cjnolet in reply to cjnolet]

If you couldn’t tell from my reply, I’m agreeing with you on the confidence being a byproduct. And yes, that is the purpose. If you are well, you will be confident and through such confidence you will be able to achieve the life of your dreams. You can define what that means and you can chase after it, or not, it’s complete up to you. I, for one, have been living mine and will continue to reinvent myself and strive to be a better person, lover, father, engineer, leader, and creator tomorrow than I am today.

[Lani24 in reply to cjnolet]

Sorry if This came across the wrong way. I didn’t mean for you to defend why you were posting about it.

I was just wondering whether I have much self confidence, and if it’s something I directly work/ have worked on. Or whether this would be a good place to start for someone who is at a low point etc.

There’s a difference in the way self value self esteem etc is defined.

I think I have good self acceptance, but my self confidence is based on things I’ve already achieved or done well in, but then if I fail or under perform etc my self confidence suffers. Maybe I’m missing the point and basing my self confidence on the wrong things...external vs internal etc

[cjnolet in reply to Lani24]

Not at all. I think you are doing the right thing by reminding yourself of things you have accomplished or are proud of in yourself. In fact that is totally one of the ways they recommend maintaining your self confidence even in those times when you feel you are not succeeding at something.

Another thing to always keep in mind is that you can’t really say you failed if you never tried (which means you should be proud that you are taking the steps to try in the first place). The most successful people had to fail their way to success. It takes tactics (like reminding yourself of your worth and accomplishments) to maintain your sense of determination during those moments when you realize you’ve made a mistake. Another perspective about mistakes is that you got to learn something new to better your abilities.

Shouldn’t it be up to you to determine what things you feel give you more confidence?

[Lani24 in reply to cjnolet]

Sure it’s up to me, or the individual to determine what gives them confidence.

I just think there’s a difference between having an inner deep sense of self confidence/ value that remains despite outside failures and set backs.

Compared to basing self confidence on external achievements, or positive reassurance from others etc- it just seems more fragile and fluctuating if that’s what confidence depends on.

[cjnolet in reply to Lani24]

I definitely agree with you in terms of self-esteem vs self-confidence. I'm currently working on building my confidence as my self-esteem is not lacking. I'm working on trusting myself and my abilities- outside of my areas of expertise.

I'm successful in my career & academically but in order for me to keep pushing harder, I need to trust myself to get further out of my comfort zone without springing back at the first sign of discomfort. Building my public speaking skills, for example, is one such thing I'm determined to work on. I'm not sure if I would say set-backs or failures have ever impacted my self-esteem, though. Perhaps this happens for some people? I apologize if this sounds insensitive.

Again, I feel like the narrative I choose to give myself when I fail, like "just a little set-back, you'll get it soon", rather than "you failed again? loser! you'll never do anything right", determine how I respond both physically and mentally. Notice I used the word "choose"? I didn't beat myself up when I decided to take a small break from the public speaking attempt. Rather, I just decided it was time to take a break until I'm ready to try it again. That doesn't mean I'm any more confident about stepping out of my comfort zone and speaking in public about things other than giving tech talks, however!

While I also completely agree with you that positive reassurance from others is not something to base self-confidence on, I'm not sure that's been mentioned anywhere in this thread thus far, has it?

External achievements, on the other hand, I believe very strongly create a feedback loop to build upon. The bar can be set as low as it needs to be- to a person who's paralyzed, achieving the wiggling of a toe could be reassuring enough for them.

[Lovinit]

I have confident moments, but I also can become overwhelmed easily and that causes my set backs

[cjnolet in reply to Lovinit]

I feel like I get overwhelmed easily too. How does this manifest for you?

For me, I feel like my confidence sometimes pushes me to new places where I’ll get opportunities to try new things and then I step back out of fear and end up going backwards a few steps (enter montage of Paula Abdul’s “Two Steps Forward and Three Steps Back”).

This happened recently with the Toastmasters club. Other than being too busy to have time for the meetings, the ones I did show up for I was too anxious to actually go up and speak.