Self-Confidence, Part One: A Primer on Building it and Sustaining It

Contributor: “Dr. J”
Dr. J offers his irreverent, slightly irrelevant, but possibly useful opinions on health and fitness. A Florida surgeon and fitness freak with a black belt in karate, he runs 50 miles a week and flies a Cherokee Arrow 200.

(CC) Michael Napoleon/Flickr

Self-confidence can be one of our strongest assets as we journey through our life. In many ways, the ability to build and sustain our self-confidence is the key to our highest spiritual, mental and physical health.

Simply put, the best way to build self-confidence is to start doing things you’re not sure you can do. Yet so often we hesitate. Is it that we are afraid of failure? Perhaps we are afraid of frustration. Regardless, the result is that we will still lack self-confidence.

This is the vicious cycle that we must break. To do this, we must make a commitment and carry it through. If we do this, then the next commitment will be easier, and this will break our circle of failure.

Beware the trap of committing to a process that is all preparation for a commitment. The only commitment that will educate us is actual experiences. All the preparation in the world will only teach us how to prepare. We must take the first step. Thinking about taking that step is not the same as the experience of action.

Building self-confidence is not just to start doing things. Doing things that we are sure we can do will not build our self-confidence. It must be things that we are not sure that we can do. We must stop thinking about it and just do it, and it will become easier and easier. Once we get started we must stick with it. To maintain our self-confidence, we keep giving ourselves new challenges. Make sure they are really new ones, not the same old ones in a new form.

Inertia is a force that works against us when we feel like doing something but we do nothing, but if we start doing something, then inertia works with us and keeps us going. Once we do this, we will see how powerful inertia can be to move us forward. We probably already know how powerful inertia is to keep us from not moving forward.

The key is commitment and consistency. Once we’re committed, it’s hard to back down. Do it and we grow stronger and surer of our abilities to do it. Our brains will work for us with this, because with behaviors, we will build new neural pathways that, like a smooth highway, are much easier to follow than clearing that road in the first place.

Looking for validation from others will not give us self-confidence. Validation is not self-confidence: it will not make us stronger. That strength must come from ourselves and our actions.

Now we know how to do it. It is our life and our choice!

Please read my next column, which will be: Self Confidence Part Two: “Once you understand the way broadly, you can see it in all things.”

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Self-Confidence, Part One: A Primer on Building it and Sustaining It is a post from: CalorieLab - Health News & Information Blog

Source: http://calorielab.com/news/2012/10/22/self-confidence/

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