Confidence Or Self-Worth?

Confidence is a great feeling – you feel capable, strong and ready. We can boost our confidence in many ways; putting on a stylish, well-fitting suit, wearing a gorgeous watch or pair of shoes, getting a new qualification, hearing a compliment, etc. However, splashing water on your trousers or ketchup on your jacket just before an important presentation can send your confidence plummeting. Like a game of snakes and ladders, your confidence can climb high one minute and slide right to the bottom in the next.

Some questions seem so obvious (stupid even) that they’re really worth asking. The answers help us understand our motivations and behaviours, adding to our self-awareness. As Socrates said ‘To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.’ As such, ‘Why do we want to feel confident?’ is a great question. What does it give us?

According to Dr Greg Baer, the transient feeling of confidence gives us four key things: praise, pleasure, power and safety to varying degrees. These four things are emotional boosts, and I call them drugs because they give us a temporary high, and then we come down.

Praise

Praise is the approval of others, their favourable judgment. We are seen to be good or successful and in that way avoid disapproval too. When we get praised, then there’s a brief moment of relief that we’re not wrong, mistaken or bad.

Praise and approval, are based on the judgment of others whether they like what we do. So if they change their minds, the praise is gone. Once the moment is over, we need to work at earning praise again; it’s not a permanent, one-time judgment. Also, the bar gets raised with people’s expectations, making it a continuous cycle of earning praise.

If your mother beamed and clapped her hands when you buttoned your shirt correctly at the age of four, it would have been celebrating quite a milestone. The same praise at age 35, would feel odd, fake and patronising even. The most drug-like aspect of praise, however, is that we can get addicted to it. Not only in continually seeking our next fix by performing well, people-pleasing or manipulating for it, but also that we get accustomed to a certain level of praise. Just like a drug addict who gets accustomed to the drug and needs a higher dose to get a hit.

This explains why some celebrities get high on the approval and applause in performance but need greater adoration to feel good, and the feeling quickly goes away. In business, we occasionally see a leader surround themselves with yes-men, seeking continual praise and dismissing any dissenting voices much to the detriment of the organisation they lead.

Pleasure

We enjoy things that lead to a feeling of confidence, such as the stylish suit, watch or shoes. If we place a high value on these things, then we can get even more pleasure at that moment. When we look to material things to give us pleasure, similarly we get accustomed to them. Even things that enthralled us when they were new can soon become part of the normal background of life, however, and not nearly so exciting.

The drug-like nature of pleasure is a cliché even, as we crave the latest gadget, or the more expensive, bigger or newer toy. This means that that fabulous tailored-made suit will give less of a confidence boost after you’ve worn it many times; the high wears off.

Power

Power is feeling strong and competent and powerful compared to those around us. Many people feel confident by feeling stronger than the people around them. More in control.

However if our confidence comes from comparing ourselves to others, we’ll always lose. This power only feels good in the moment but we can’t hold on to it. Tables turn, situations change, and jobs, careers, companies and even countries can be lost at the drop of a hat. Defending our power can be a lifetime struggle too, constantly shoring up our position. Because our confidence is dependent upon feeling powerful, when we lose it for whatever reason we can feel weak, incompetent, a failure and lost.

Safety

Safety can come from a sense of being in control and knowing all the angles so that we’re unlikely to get caught out and end up disadvantaged or in pain of some sort. We seek a sense of safety to protect ourselves from imagined pain, and it tends to make us risk-averse and unwilling to fully engage in life. Or we might become controlling and want to be able to predict and control everyone and everything around us. Think of people you know who need to micro-manage, they're looking to feel safer. It's an illusion that if we control everything then we are safe, because we can't control everything, particularly not people.

The same drug-like nature can be seen in seeking power and safety; we need more of it, the high we get doesn’t last, and we want even more.

The emotional boost we get from feeling confident is unstable, tenuous and short-lived. It’s a fickle thing, dependent upon things you can control and, unfortunately, things you cannot. Back in the 1950’s Dr Carl Rogers, a founding father of Clinical Psychology, identified what we’re actually searching for when we hope to feel confident is a sense of unconditional worth.

Unconditional Worth

When we know that our inherent worth as a human being does not depend on what we do, say or think then we get a tremendous feeling of freedom, calm and fearlessness. It may sound similar to confidence, but they’re miles apart.

Feeling unconditionally worthy cannot be altered by the opinion of others, does not depend on being perfect or doing things perfectly, and mistakes don’t make us a failure, they’re simply learning experiences. Unlike confidence, this feeling is permanent and unshakable.

A sense of unconditional worth is something we need to be happy, to get into the flow state of peak performance and reach our maximum human potential. Dr Rogers described it as the fundamental need we have once our minimum survival needs have been met. Not a nice-to-have, but absolutely essential.

Dr Baer formulated a practical way to help people develop a sense of unconditional worth, which he’s been using for the last 25 years. He estimates that only 1 in 100,000 people come out of childhood feeling unconditionally worthy. The reason why is no mystery.

Our whole society buys into the lie that what we do determines our value – like an object that is compared to others, weighed, judged and assessed. Right from birth, we’re taught in hundreds of ways every day that when we’re quiet, convenient, clean and obedient, then we are good. Many of us would have got smiles and approval from our parents, teachers and peers. However when we’re noisy, messy, loud and inconvenient, then we get disapproval ranging from a small sigh and rolled eyes to anger, shouting and sometimes beating. We deduce with our child’s reasoning that when we are wrong and make a mistake, then we’re bad.

No-one is to blame here, we all learned this from our parents who learned it from their parents and the continual reinforcement of society every single day. We even get Santa Claus in on the act, to reward us for ‘being good’. It’s such a fundamental belief that, like the proverbial fish that doesn’t notice the water, we don’t even know it’s a belief. We never see that we have an alternative because we have never seen an alternative.

What we do instead is grab for the closest thing we can, which is a desire to feel confident and the emotional drugs of praise, pleasure, power and safety we then get. That’s the best we can see. But it's exhausting continually chasing that better feeling that doesn't last.

Does this mean all is lost? Not at all. Seeing the lie is the first step towards changing it. It’s not confidence we need but a sense of our worth.

The million dollar question then changes from ‘how can I be more confident’ to ‘how can I develop unshakable, unconditional worth?’

Tara Halliday is a Transformational Coach who develops unconditional worth in successful people.