Self Confidence

Nobody is born with limitless self-confidence. If someone seems to have incredible self-confidence, it's because he or she has worked on building it for years. Self-confidence is something that you learn to build up because the challenging world of business, and life in general, can deflate it.

Self-confidence is the belief in oneself and abilities, it describes an internal state made up of what we think and feel about ourselves. This state is changeable according to the situation we are currently in and our responses to events going on around us. It is not unusual to feel quite confident in some circumstances and less confident in others. It is also influenced by past events and how we remember them; recalling a former success has a very different outcome in terms of our confidence levels than thinking about an occasion when we failed.

Confidence and self-esteem are terms which are often used interchangeably, but although there is over-lap perhaps there are also subtle differences. Self-confidence can refer to how we feel about ourselves and our abilities whereas self-esteem refers directly to whether or not we appreciate and value ourselves. We may have been discouraged from being boastful but a healthy amount of self-liking and self-approval is necessary if we are to have the confidence to meet life's challenges and participate as fully as we wish to in whatever makes life enjoyable and rewarding for us. In a sense, we could say that having healthy self-esteem leads to being self-confident.

If we are fortunate and had relatively favourable conditions and experiences whilst we are growing up, we are likely to develop a healthy self-esteem and become confident people. However, if conditions and experiences are mainly negative we are more likely to experience difficulties developing our confidence. Some of the negative messages we have received will have been internalized and become part of what we think and feel about ourselves.

A person lacking in self-confidence who receives a low mark for an assignment may think, "What else could I expect? I'm stupid, this proves it, and I might as well leave." A person with healthy self-esteem who receives a low mark may think, "I wonder where I went wrong? I'll find out so that I can do better next time." Although this person may feel disappointed, s/he does not feel diminished as a person, by the low mark.

If we have little self-confidence then the 'low mark' scenario may trigger memories of similar events in the past and then lead to a cycle of negative thinking in the form of self-critical put-downs. This is how we intensify and perpetuate a lack confidence. When we feel low like this our expectations about the future tend to be negative and this discourages us from really trying. Then we experience another disappointing result and feel negative about ourselves again.

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