Confidence is knowing handling the worst

You feel what you think. You become what you think. You control your mind. You have to fool yourself to be confident. You have to continuously tell yourself that you are powerful, intelligent and good looking. You have to keep on telling until and unless you feel powerful and confident about yourself. You feel inferior because you think others are better than you. And that snatches away your confidence from you.

One thing you need to learn if you want to be confident is that never consider others superior to you. Treating every human equally is the key to confidence. Walking on a road? Keep your head high like you are the king of that area. About to give a speech? Your listeners are humans just like you. Chill. They are not going to eat you if you make mistakes. Appearing for an interview? Your interviewer is a human being just like you and he pooped today morning like you. No matter how many books you read or videos you watch or seminars you attend for boosting your confidence, until and unless you don't change your thought process, you will never ever feel confident about yourself. Stand in front of the mirror every day, fall in love with Yourself every day.

Confidence is the degree to which you can trust yourself. We tend to confuse confidence for skill: we see someone who’s a great speaker, a serial entrepreneur, a daring athlete, and think “I wish I could be like them”. Able to show up and just do it. What we don’t see is the hundreds of times they tried and it didn’t work out. That’s how they built their skills: by having the confidence to show up again. Confidence is not knowing that you will win at whatever game you choose to play; it’s the certainty that you can take a punch (or a few).

That, when things won’t go the way you want them to, you will keep showing up and take another one on the chin. And again. Because that’s the best way to learn and get that level of skill where things work out great most of the time.Confidence is not about results, it’s about effort: do you trust yourself to keep showing up? Or will you give up and stop doing it? That’s why my hack to build confidence is to get used to doing things I don’t want to be doing. For example, I love running in the rain. Why? Because I used to hate it. All I wanted was to stay in and postpone the run, so I forced myself to run or train outside whenever it rains. That is how I trained myself in gaining confidence.

I used to hate cold water, so I took a cold shower every day. I wasn’t a great runner, so I ran a marathon with 4 weeks of training. I used to be uncomfortable talking to women, so I talked to 300 in a year. I didn’t feel confident speaking in public, so I joined a speaking group. I was scared to write online, so I started writing articles on social media regularly. I now feel confident at all the above, and more. And that’s how I built my confidence. By showing myself that I can trust me. No matter the result, I’m going to show up.

Believe me, it has helped me be confident in the toughest of the times. I look at it almost every morning, and had it as my wallpaper for a long time; both in my laptop and in my phone. If you don’t know what this is, let me take you out of this world. I first ask you to look at this picture for a minute. What could that Pale Blue Dot possibly be? Your pet that died two years ago. Your first kiss. Your first laugh, and your first tears. Your heartbreaks, your knee breaks, your graduation, your failures and subsequent successes. All of that. All the History of the world you know of. All the triumphs, all the defeats. All the folklores and the witch-hunting stories. Everything is in this Pale Blue Dot suspended in the sunbeam. This is the Earth.

In 1977, a spacecraft built by NASA, Voyager 1, was launched in space. It was on its mission of wandering when the Philosopher - astronomer Carl Sagan asked the mission control to turn one of its cameras toward its originating source. And then we saw the Earth, from 6 billion Kilometers. It could be so hard, almost unfathomable, to imagine something so vast being so tiny. But that's how it is. Now, imagine. There are millions of galaxies in the observable universe.

And in every galaxy, there are millions of stars and planetary systems. And in one of those beautiful galaxies, there is a star. Around that star, revolves a planet. In that planet, there are continents. Those continents have countries. The countries have states. The states have districts. The districts have areas. And in one of those areas, lives Emma Watson. In an area far away and cheaper, live you. At the end of the day, you are too tiny to even matter to the universe. Your problems, your rejections, your fears and trepidations, are tiny mumblings in front of the Universe and its systems. If Earth is a dot, what are you?

So, screw methods of becoming confident. You get one small life of 100 odd years. Out of which you have lived the first 23 and you will not be able to live the last 23, as you will be a bed ridden, arthritis laden scum. You have few years. You have few moments. Screw fear. You go ask that girl out. You get fit. You get money. You enjoy as much as you can. Don’t live the same day for the rest of your days. Ultimately, its about your joy and nothing else. Cheers!