Deep Dive: Healthy Confidence
At Emerging Men, we do one Deep Dive into a relevant topic per week. Every other week, I facilitate the workshop and record the first minutes of it that I’m presenting (after that, we dive into application and discussion that I don’t record).
Here’s my take on the topic:
First, let’s make a distinction: there’s confidence and there’s cockiness.
Cockiness is about boasting about oneself and showing oneself to be more than one is or having more than one has.
Confidence is the belief in oneself. Confidence isn’t always visible. It doesn’t have to be. Cockiness needs to be visible because it’s ego-driven.
When thinking about healthy confidence, it’s about what’s going on within much more than about what one shows to the world.
It is about acceptance and authenticity. Let me tell you a story:
I entered the pub for a social gathering and saw lots of people inside, some of which I knew, some of which I didn’t know yet. I noticed that I hesitated going up to them and starting a conversation. I didn’t feel like it.
Immediately, my inner critic told me I was looking stupid standing in the door and just looking. Luckily, I caught myself. I accepted myself and disregarded the critic.
I’m allowed to just stand here.
A couple of moments later, my mood changed and I felt like talking to people again. So I went and had a great afternoon.
In this example, I was able to let go of the inner voice that was telling me about societal expectations. Instead, I was able to tune into my own truth: I didn’t feel like talking. And I even was able to honour it in that moment.
Who is more confident, the one who talks to people even though he doesn’t feel like it? Or the one who doesn’t talk to people because he doesn’t feel like it?
For me it’s obvious, confidence follows authenticity and self-acceptance.
So, if you’d like to be more confident, be more accepting of yourself, check in with yourself and ask yourself if you’re being authentic. The more authentic and accepting you are, the more confident you are, too.
When I give a speech on stage, my focus is on being authentic, not on being confident. I can control how authentic I am directly. By having that as a measure of success, it doesn’t matter what happens. I can even pee my pants and be authentic!
And guess what, the audiences love it when people are authentic and relatable. Much more so than people who are flawless.
To go deeper into the topic, I recommend you watch the mentioned recording here:
