Self-Doubter's Guide to Building Genuine Self-Confidence: Part 3
General and Specific Self-Confidence
This is Part 3 of Self-Confidence essay series. If you haven’t already, read Part 1 and Part 2 by clicking on them.
We finally get to address what most people reading this series have been interested in.
You are not interested in confidence as described in the previous 2 essays. At this moment, you don’t have a specific thing you want to be interested in. There isn’t any ability of yours that you want to be confident in. You "just" want to be a confident person. You want what we could call "general" or "overall" self-confidence.
Fair point. And I find it reasonable that it is this type of confidence that most people are interested in.
First, we need to analyze a bit further what people usually mean by this general self-confidence.
In most cases, it comes from one of two ideas.
You want to be more confident in your social interactions. Whether it’s in a conversation with colleagues, at dinner with new friends, or when approaching someone you like, you just want to be more confident. But let’s be honest, the latter situation is what most people are interested in, and it’s the one that requires the most confidence, so allow me to use it as an example moving forward.
The second case is that you want to have that general confidence so that you are confident in trying new things and taking chances as you move through life. You might now have a specific thing that you want to be confident in right now, but you want to be a confident person so that when you find something, you believe in your ability to get good at it.
I will be addressing both of these cases in order to convey the main point of this essay: there is no such thing as general or overall self-confidence.
So before I start breaking it down through these two cases, let me expand on this point a little bit.
There is no general self-confidence. At least not as we usually imagine it, which is as this aura that someone is either born with or isn’t. That would be narcissism, not self-confidence.
Real general self-confidence has to be built on something. And it is built on the foundation of specific confidence.
But what does your confidence in a specific ability or quality of yours have to do with aspects of your life where it cannot be translated? Okay, now’s a good moment to get back to those two main cases of general self-confidence.
You are approaching or already interacting with the person you like. How could your confidence in a specific skill or quality help you have that general confidence? First, let’s assume that this person doesn’t care about the skills and qualities in which you’ve built confidence, or at least you don’t know they do. So let’s take the first example we used in Part 1: waking up on time. It would be kind of stupid to expect that you can seduce someone simply based on the fact that you are not hitting the snooze button. So how can this translate to general self-confidence? Well, you are not just waking up on time. You’ve proven to yourself that you are a reliable person. You start each day by proving that you can rely on yourself. And if anyone else is going to rely on you, first you need to be able to rely on yourself. Everyone likes a reliable person. You know that, if this person decides to take a chance on getting to know you better, you’ll be able to demonstrate that you are a reliable person. Because of that, you know that they should take that chance. Does this guarantee that they will? Absolutely not. But you have a genuine reason to be confident. You didn’t enter this interaction trying to create false confidence out of nothing. You have developed a good relationship with yourself by keeping the promises you made to yourself. You have become someone that you would like to meet. Why wouldn’t you be confident when meeting someone?
This was built on the example of one of the objectively most boring qualities we could come up with: waking up on time. Now take any other example and it will be even easier to see how it translates to a more general quality of you as a person. Whether that specific thing proves that you are a reliable person, a person who likes to learn, or anything else, it will give you a genuine reason to be confident because you are a person that you would like to meet.
Now let’s take the second case.
You don’t have a specific thing that you want to be confident in at this moment. But as you move through life, you might want to learn a programming language or overcome your fear of public speaking. How can confidence that’s built in a specific area be translated into more general self-confidence so that you feel confident in tackling any of those things that you want to do in the future?
Once again, let’s take as an example something that has nothing to do with the skills mentioned above. You started building self-confidence by being disciplined with your diet and losing a significant amount of weight. If you said out loud that you were confident in your ability to learn a programming language because you lost weight, it might sound like nonsense. But in reality, it makes perfect sense. Because you haven’t just lost weight. You kept the promises that you made to yourself. And you did it on a daily basis for an extended period of time. That’s what getting better at anything comes down to. If we took the reverse situation it would be equally true. The fact that you were able to learn a programming language should make you confident in your ability to lose weight.
It doesn’t matter if it’s learning a programming language, getting better at public speaking, or becoming proficient at knife juggling; if you've already proved that you can keep a promise that you made to yourself, you have a reason to be confident at this new thing as well. (For the record, I am not recommending you try knife juggling.)
Although my initial statement that general self-confidence doesn’t exist might have sounded discouraging, I hope that by now you feel the opposite way.
There are two main things that I want you to take away from this:
-This idea we have of general self-confidence as some magical thing that you are either born with or not is wrong. It’s not the case that you are either already a person confident in all aspects of their life or you’ll never become one.
-Build general self-confidence by laying the foundation with confidence in specific skills and qualities as discussed in Part 1. As we’ve seen, simply waking up on time or being disciplined with your diet goes a long way and has a positive effect on seemingly unrelated aspects of your life. You might decide to start building self-confidence with different things, but all that matters is that you start.
I hope you found this helpful. If there is any other aspect of developing self-confidence that you would like me to address, please let me know in the comments.
As always, thank you for reading.
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