Confidence and how to get it.

“Would you say you had confidence?” she asked.

“Well, not bags of it.”

And I never saw her again.

To be fair, I wasn’t presenting much value. I wouldn’t have dated me either.

That January, I realised that I had been in a slump for quite some time, and had no idea how to get momentum going again. Gym was off because of my shoulder, the career was off because of the wrong mindset, and I wasn’t keeping my house very tidy. I was a pretty low effort guy.

I wasn’t having that, especially if it was going to cost me an awesome woman, so I had some work to do. I would find what confidence was, and get some. And clean my damn bathroom.

I had limited resources and a tough choice whether to join this group or that, without knowing what either future may hold.

So what is confidence? The certainty of an outcome of a given action, sure, but if you have not done that action before, it can’t be confidence, so what comes before it?

Courage, it turns out. Taking action without knowing the outcome.

David J Schwartz (The Magic of Thinking Big) tells us that a lack of confidence is caused by fear, and that the cure to that is to take action. If you overthink on whether this is the right action, then you sap your courage along with your momentum.

So I joined both groups.

Ah! No! That’s not courage! Here I lacked the courage to make a decision: To cut off the other course of action, which then didn’t allow me to do either particularly well. So one trundled along ineffectually, and the other imploded spectacularly.

Still, that was a learning experience. Learned to go all-in and make something work. Learned that I can’t receive confidence without giving it. Lean in unreservedly. Half-arsing it will give neither success nor a learning experience (except to not do things half-arsed).

So for the past year I have done this: With a goal in mind, I come up with actions toward it, decide on one without overthinking, and threw myself in to it with all the courage I have. Give it my full attention. Do the actions. See what happens.

As a result, I no longer fret about petty things, no longer seek to stay who I am, but reach onward with optimism and growth. I am back at the gym, room is much cleaner and career-enhancing tasks getting done at a rapid pace.

Still plenty of work to do, but I’m barrelling along in something of the right direction, with courage if not confidence.