CONFIDENCE

C.O.N.F.I.D.E.N.C.E. Confidence, the power of emotional control over your own well being in life. For me the key to having self confidence, is the ability to look after yourself and see yourself as the most amazing person you can be. For yourself. You cannot think of yourself as being the best for anyone but yourself. If you are trying too hard to be confident for someone else - then it is not real confidence you are showing off, but a false sense of confidence - worn like a mask over how you really feel about your life, and the lives of those around you. Real self confidence comes from within. It is a feeling of self worth and ability to do the best you can do for yourself in your life. Confidence is a self-fulfilling prophecy, as in those who think they have it, have it. While those who don’t think they have it, don’t have it. In reality confidence comes from within, it is a feeling of self worth. It can only be judged against your feelings of yourself. It cannot be judged against other people or compared to anyone else.

For me self confidence is when I look in the mirror and see all the good things about myself in it. The dimple of my cheek when I smile. The way that my chosen clothing for the day fits, perfectly accentuating my curves in just the right places. Everyone can look in the mirror and find something you don’t like about yourself, but it is harder to find things you do like about yourself. I try and think of five good things about myself at any given time -right now, I am thankful for having glasses to see what I’m typing on the laptop. Thankful for the television next to me for playing entertaining shows, I am currently writing during the advert breaks while watching an episode of Fresh off the Boat. Humour and being able to laugh is another one. That is three, two more. Happy to know I have the support and love from my Boyfriend who is sitting at his desk behind me. And excited to have baked a muesli slice today without any Asthma symptoms happening! This is big for me, as the Baker’s Lung I battle daily did not affect my baking earlier today! (Win!)

Confidence also comes from those around us. When I have positive people around me it makes me more happy and confident too. Negative people easily bring others around them down. This is why I try and keep positive, happy people around me as much as possible. I am also prone to depressive episodes myself, so the more happy people I can surround myself with the better it is for me when I do feel down. They quickly make me feel happier again. Of course that is not to say that everyone with depression reacts in the same way. I also have moments when I am down and just do not want to be around happy people. I get paranoid that they’re out to have fun and I am just living my life to be all down and depressed. It may sound sad, but it is true. I have had plenty of moments in my life where I would rather be left alone in bed, crying and feeling down about myself and my situation. Other times I am happier to get up and out and about and being super social.

Right now I am a mixture of shaking in my metaphorical shoes and being excited about having a new writing opportunity come my way. I help the Editor of a Journal with proofreading and spell checking and the like, but the Editor has been quite busy the past few months with work, so has not had time to be doing so much of the work for the Journal. I being on break from university have jumped at the chance to extend my writing skills. (This time free is also why I signed up to do the fifty thousand word challenge.) In the process of this work today I was asked to write the Editorial for the next Issue of the Journal. No big deal. I’ve got this. Right? Right?!

It turns out I have plenty of confidence for some parts of my life. Like I can be sure I will have a delicious meal prepared for the Boyfriend when he comes home after a long day at work. I can be sure I will feel confident wearing my favourite clothes. But when it comes to something new or unusual. I am not so sure. I become more nervous. More withdrawn. I can only try my best to do what is required of me and hope like heck I do a good enough job. I am not perfect. There are mistakes that get through my eyes when I’m proofreading. I can make mistakes when I start to ramble on and on and on in an essay. Or when writing an article. But then I am also thankful and happy that I was even given the chance to try something I would not normally get to do.

So for right now. I am thankful and every day I try to be confident in myself. For believing in myself to do the best I can do for me. To be the best I can be, as a person, for myself. At the end of the day I think everyone can have self confidence, and it does not matter if you are extroverted or introverted or a mixture of the two. For some things I am very extroverted, self confident and not afraid to try things. For other things I’m more like a nervous wreck. Scared to do the task at hand. Having a fear of failure. Of feeling like I am not good enough to do the task at hand. Even though that is completely irrational. That I am good enough. I do have the skills to do things well. Being introverted or extroverted is not the definition of having or not having self confidence though. That comes from within. It is not something seen by others. It is something felt by yourself. That should not be sounding dirty like it does!

Confidence has to come from within yourself. It is how you see yourself. How you see your life as an emotion. When things go well and you feel happy, you feel like you swell up with joy. When things go wrong you feel deflated like a balloon that has lost all of its puff. And so it is with confidence, when you’re up, you feel high, like you’re on top of the world. You are higher than a kite flying freely on a warm spring day. People who are around us can make us get these feelings too. When we are with those we love we have feelings of joy and overwhelming happiness when we see them and can spend time with them. When we are alone however we can feel lost, abandoned and without hope. Friends and family can surround us and fill us with positive emotions or bring us down to their level.  

Same too with relationships, if we choose a faithful partner who is kind and encourages us to reach our full potential, we are embraced with love and the feeling that we can be anyone, do anything and be surrounded by love for what we are doing. When you reverse that, with a partner who is not loving, kind or compassionate to our cause; You can feel alone, unworthy and become distrustful of those you should be looking up to. I have been in both sorts of relationships, in the one with the partner who was distrusting, I ended up self isolating from my friends. Once he tried to forbid me from seeing my family - particularly the few members who spoke out against him to me. He didn’t like that. They do not like when people speak against them. Or decide things for themselves that goes against what the other wants.

Now I am in a loving relationship, one where we bring each other up, and push both ourselves, and each other, to reach our full potentials. Where we tell each other to go further, reach our goals and follow our dreams. It is hard work, but hard work always pays off in the long run. We have shared dreams. And individual ones. Like how I want to work overseas teaching English, and he wants to create his own business so he can work from home. How one day when we both settle down somewhere I want to create a ‘classroom’ within our home. Basically an office space, but with a large table to be able to teach lessons at. A professional space in which I can work from home with my students coming to me to learn. Right now the ideal space for me is to use the public library or the university campus because we share an apartment with our flatmate and that is not fair to have their space taken over by students. Plus the apartment is too small to even have a dedicated office space, so Boyfriend and I have our desks set up in the main lounge, living space.

How does shared and individual goals relate to confidence? It is about having the idea and making it a reality, being brave enough to share the goal or dream with someone else and getting their page to match up with your own. Getting them on board to help you make your dreams a reality. It isn’t an easy task and that is how and why I have linked it to having confidence. Having the ability to say yes. I can do this. We can do this. We can make this happen.