Confidence

[thebratqueen]

Okay, so in the advice thing, damoyre asked:

I'd probably ask you about confidence. *g* You always seem so outspoken and self-assured, very confident in everything you do. I'd ask "How do you do that?"

Which actually got me thinking, because these days I don't often think about being confident, I just do what I do and people call it that. Plus, to a certain extent, a lot of the things I do that people see as confident - speaking up, standing up for what I feel, etc - I've always done. Back in elementary school it got me branded as a kid with "attitude", now I'm "famously confident". Benefits of age I suppose ;)

However, there was a time in my life when I wouldn't have called myself confident, and that was a time when I had to rebuild myself from scratch. So, in honor of damoyre's question, I offer you this essay/trip down memory lane:



As anyone who read my 100 things about me list knows, when I was in college I became sick. I won't bore you with the details, but suffice it to say as a result of that and a few other life events I came down with depression. I also lost my sense of self. I went from someone who would have classified herself as fairly outgoing to someone who described herself as "shy and quiet" (or words to that effect) on her RA application form.

It was writing that down on that form which got me, because that was the first time I realized how much I'd changed over the years I'd been ill. Sure I knew there'd been changes, but I hadn't known that it had been such blatant changes to me, to who I was as a person.

So, I decided to change back.

I called this time rebuilding myself from scratch, because I really felt that's what I needed to do. Not just because of the depression but because the illness had robbed me of my energy, which had also eaten into my ability to define who and what I was. I was just this exhausted lump who was trying to get by. I wasn't really "TBQ" so to speak.

I can't really remember if there was an order to how I did all this, but these are all the things that I did. I offer them to you for what they're worth.

Deal with the stuff that needs help

First off, if you're sick and depressed like I was, this has got to be taken care of. Therapy, medication, whatever. Recognize that there are some things which are out of your control and get the help for them. If part of your lack of confidence is due to depression, none of the rah rah speeches in the world are going to help you. Depression is an illness. Illnesses can only be taken care of by doctors. Find one that works for you and go with it.

For me it was a combination of dealing with doctors until my physical illness was taken care of, combined with some group therapy sessions to help me deal with the other thing that was getting me down. Now I'm done with therapy, but I still take pills to keep my body chemistry in check, It's all good.

Figure out what's important to you

One of the greatest things my illness did for me was force me to prioritize. I had very little energy, so the energy I did have had to be spent on important things. It wasn't easy, but I really had to figure out what I could and could not spend my time on, because literally if I wasted what I had I'd have nothing left.

Sometimes this meant skipping one class because the one after had a test. Othertimes it meant not going out because I needed to go to classes.

Still other times, though, it meant knowing what arguments I wanted to get into, or what people I wanted to deal with. Energy was energy. If I wasted my energy with someone who wasn't really worth my attention, I didn't have the energy to be with my friends.

You can see how this would tie in to confidence. Practically everyone has to deal with things they actually don't want to put up with, but because they've got the energy to spare they go with the flow and deal with it anyway. They devalue their desire not to do it because they figure if they can do it then what's the big deal and why make a fuss and - sigh - they might as well do it.

I didn't have the luxury of an energy buffer. I either had it or I didn't. So I had to teach myself to know how to make boundaries. To know where my "no go" zones were. It was literally a matter of my own survival. So this gave me a crash course in getting the confidence to say "no" because if I didn't - well bad news for me.

So - I had to learn myself. What were my priorities? What did matter to me? And then, once I knew, those were the things that I protected. That doesn't mean I was rude about it (er - necessarily, I don't claim I'm always tactful ;) ) but it does mean that I had to find this core sense of self and defend it at all costs.

Putting it in touchy-feely terms, basically all you've got in life is you. And, frankly, the only person who has to take care of you is you. So if you're not doing it, who the Hell is?

Once you've figured out who you are and what matters to you, then you've found your starting place. You've got the ability to go forward because you know your basis of interactions with everything. From the big stuff like "I am Jewish" to "I do not like racism" to little things like "I like reading" and "I do not like sugar cookies".

I mean it sounds silly but so many people never once try to define themselves. They just go through life and try not to make waves. But if that's what you're doing, what kind of life are you living? Seriously, why are you even here? We have got, in all of the history of the universe, exactly one you. By definition this means that you fulfill a role that nobody else can. So - what is it? And I don't necessarily mean goals or anything like that (i.e. "I want to discover the cure for cancer"). All I mean is who are you? At your core, at your very being, who are you?

If you're a journaling type, this might be a good time to start writing stuff down. Start with the basics - what do you like? What do you not like? Who do you love? Who do you hate? What do you wish would happen? What do you wish would not happen? What are your goals? What are your fears? What makes you happy? What makes you sad?

Figure this out, get this innate sense of self, and then you can move on to the other steps.

Understand your fears

One of the biggest blocks to confidence, other than having nothing to be confident about (i.e. having no sense of self), is fear.

Now fear can be a good thing. Fear keeps you from doing something like walking off the edge of the Grand Canyon without a bungee cord or a parachute. Fear that keeps us alive is a good, good thing.

But there's another kind of fear. Fear of embarrassment. Fear of fucking up. Fear of mistakes.

You have got to let that go.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and make a bold statement. Fear of embarrassment does JACK SHIT for you. Not to be all After School Special about it, but nobody dies from embarrassment.

Think about it. What is a lack of confidence? It's being afraid to do things - give a speech, ask someone out, try a new skill, etc.

Why do we get scared of stuff like this? Because it's the unknown. Anything could happen, so we expect the worst. Even on things we've done before there's that fear of not knowing the outcome. We can give the speech and be brilliant, or everyone could be bored or laugh at us. We've got no idea.

As a rule, we don't like the unknown. We like the comfortable and familiar. I know that nobody is laughing at me now so I want to keep on doing what I'm doing because the outcome of my current action is certain. If, on the other hand, I try to do something new I don't have that guarantee. It gets scary. We're in that murky unpredictable future again. I'd rather stay over here, in the light.

Which is fine, if all you want to be is a lump.

Here's the thing - not only does embarrassment do nothing for you, but neither does comfort. Well - comfort is nice, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying throw out your favorite fluffy bathrobe in place of a hairshirt. But what I am saying is learn to recognize when your fear is saying "do this to save your life!" and when it's saying "do this to stay comfortable!"

Because, to go with another one of those bold statements again, I would say that not only is giving in to that comfort fear useless, but it can also directly contradict that first (and more important) fear which saves your life.

I mean think about it - how many stories have you heard of someone who, upon seeing a guy who gave them the wig, don't cross the street/get out of the elevator/call the cops/tell a guy to fuck off when they should have because they were scared of making a scene? Or of overreacting? Or looking silly? Their comfort fear overrode their life fear and thus put them in danger.

Can you start to see now how ridiculous your comfort fear is? Not only is this fear not interested in helping you, it actually would much rather you got killed! Well screw that shit.

Learn to ignore your comfort fear. In fact, learn to do the exact opposite of your comfort fear. Back when I was rebuilding myself I actually tacked a saying to my wall: If it frightens you - do it! Anytime that comfort fear reared its ugly head, I made a point to do the thing it was telling me to be scared of.

Embrace the negative

The thing about comfort fear is that it likes the positive. In other words, the known. It knows that if you do X, then Y, you get Z. It likes that. It would be very happy with X, Y, Z for the rest of your so-called life.

However, the kicker here is that comfort fear directly contradicts not only your desire to stay alive, but also your need to define your life.

Which brings us back to our sense of self.

You may have noticed that when I gave you questions to define yourself I gave you balanced questions. What makes you happy and what makes you sad. What do you like and what don't you like.

I did that deliberately. Reason being - positive answers aren't answers.

Sure, they're information. I'm not saying otherwise. But what I am saying is that they're not the full picture.

Let's play a game.

My social psychology teacher did this one to demonstrate a point, and I'm going to steal it to do the exact same thing.

Here's the game. We all have decks of cards. I'm going to lay out 3 cards in a pattern. I will not tell you what that pattern is. It's your job to guess the pattern. The way that you do that is by laying down a card next to my 3 and I'll tell you if the card fits the pattern or doesn't. When you're ready, you can make your guesses as to what the pattern is, based on the information you get. You can have as many tries as you like.

Got it? Okay.

I go through my deck and put down the 2, 4 and 6 of diamonds.

Okay, you think, that's easy. You put down the 8 of diamonds. I tell you that card fits my pattern. Wanting to be absolutely certain, you put down the 10 of diamonds. I tell you that card also fits my pattern.

Great, you say. The pattern is to go up by 2s in the diamonds suit.

WRONG.

But - but - but! I can hear you protesting, All your guesses were right!

To which I say - yeah, they were. And they helped you find out what the pattern is, but they did not help you find out what the pattern isn't.

You saw 2, 4, 6 of diamonds and went for the known. You could see that going up by 2 in the diamonds suit worked so you did all your guesses accordingly. This was known it was safe.

It was also useless.

The point wasn't to be safe, it was to guess the pattern. And this wasn't a math problem. I wasn't asking you to relive the SATs by guessing the next number in the sequence. I was asking you, point blank, to figure out the pattern via as many guesses and tries as you needed. Now yeah, maybe you could've had a moment of insight in all of your positive answers and guessed the pattern I was thinking of, but you could've definitely figured out the pattern if you tested it.

What was the pattern? To put down any red suited card that was higher than the card that came before. So yeah, 8 of diamonds worked. But so would the 8 of hearts, or the Jack of diamonds for that matter.

You didn't know that because you didn't try the unknown. You didn't go for any "no" answers. You didn't try putting down a black card to see if that worked (no), or a red Queen to see if that would work (yes).

Learning who you are in life isn't just a matter of knowing who you are. It's knowing who you aren't.

Mistakes, and why we should learn to love fuckups

Comfort fear is a fear of that possible chance that we will screw up. But the thing is, we have to screw up. Screw ups are negative answers. I try A then B and I don't get X - that tells me something! I immediately learned something! A plus B does not equal X. That's cool! That's information! And that's information I never would've gotten from a lifetime of X, Y, Z.

I've never spoken at a con before. However, I see that the next con I'm going to has a panel on a TV show that I really like and nobody's volunteered to mod it yet. If I don't do it, it's entirely possible there won't be a panel.

Don't do it! My comfort fear says. You've never spoken at a con before, you don't know any of the people who will show up, you have no idea if you're going to babble and make a total fool of yourself and have everyone make fun of you not only at the con but when they get home and start posting in their LJs about it! Abort! Pull up! Don't do it!!!

Now I could do that. I could not volunteer, let there not be a panel, and keep going as I did. That's comfortable. But I've learned nothing from this.

Instead - I mod the panel.

Now obviously if things go well there's an obvious lesson here - I tried something I never did before and I learned that I was actually pretty good at it. Go me! I chanced that negative and I came out with a positive. Win/win.

But let's say my fears come true. I totally suck. Nobody liked my topics, I couldn't keep control of the group, everybody hated it and half the people there left early.

Total failure, right?

Wrong! This was still a success. Because I learned something - I learned I'm no good at modding panels in this way! Great! I didn't know that about myself before, and now I do. Next time I'll know to try to mod the panel differently. If I couldn't keep control of the group by doing X, next time I'll know to try Y. If nobody liked panel topic ABC, then next time I'll try DEF.

(Or, possibly, I learned that if I want to help out a con then I should volunteer for other activities and not modding panels. Or I learned that I'm more miserable modding a panel than I am missing a panel that couldn't take place because nobody modded it. Etc. No matter what, I've still learned something.)

Everybody knows the old adage that practice makes perfect and if at first you don't succeed try try again. We get that and we nod and move on in life.

But nobody really gets why we should do these things.

If I'm teaching myself how to rollerblade - which one of these centuries, god help me, I will do - and I try it and I fall, I don't just have a situation where I didn't learn how to rollerblade and now I try again. I have a situation where I learned how not to rollerblade. If I move my arms one way and I fall down, then now I know not to move my arms that way.

Everything in life is a matter of constantly coming up against these questions. What can we do and what can't we do? What do we like and what do we not like? If we constantly give in to our comfort fears, we'll never have this information.

Taking this back to when I rebuilt myself from scratch, I started out by just getting my core self. Then I went out and grew as a human being by not shying away from those questions.

Now, granted, I'm not saying this is easy, or that once I discovered this I never had comfort fear again. I think comfort fear pretty much stays with us throughout all our lives. But once I could recognize that comfort fear shouldn't be listened to (since it would cheerfully kill me if it could) and moreover that ignoring it would give me valuable lessons, it gave me the tools I needed to go ahead and explore new things.

Other stuff that helps

Everything I said above is, I think, good life philosophy stuff to help you gain confidence. There are other skills that help, though. In no particular order:

Remember that people aren't psychic.
None of your problems are going to get solved if you keep your mouth shut. Neighbor playing the radio too loud? Person giving you a hard time at the video store? Best friend treating you like an asshole? Open your mouth and say so. The phrase to remember here is "Piss or get off the pot". Yeah, vent and complain if it helps you keep your blood pressure down, but if you don't speak up for yourself and do something about the problem then shut up.

Learn how to talk to people.
Confidence gets you in front of a person and ready to talk. Knowing how to talk allows you to actually have conversation. I used to think this stuff was intuitive but I'm seeing a lot of people on LJ who post about stuff going on in their lives who, honestly, really don't know how to talk to people, esp. people giving them problems. There's a whole host of lessons here that would be too long to get into right now, but there's books on the subject too. Funnily enough one of the best I read was How to Talk So Your Kids Will Listen and Listen So Your Kids Will Talk. Obviously there's a lot of parenting advice in there, but the basic lessons of how to talk, how to express your displeasure (or pleasure) about something and how to let people face the natural consequences of their actions is very helpful.

Educate yourself.
I'm not saying you need a master's degree to open your mouth - or even a GED. But it can be easier to talk with people if you actually know what you're talking about. Or, conversely, at least know what you don't know and then ignore your comfort fear and ask questions when things don't make sense. If I see somebody posting something like "Of course the people of New Orleans were all Protestant while under French and Spanish rule" I know I can get in on that debate because I know my New Orleans history and no, they weren't. OTOH if somebody's posting something like "I support the war in Iraq because…" I can also get into a conversation with them not because I'm an expert in Iraqi history (far from it) but because I know what I know and I'm not afraid to admit my ignorance or ask questions. In fact conversations like that can be better than the "safe" New Orleans conversation because - you guessed it - I'd be learning something.

Final Thoughts

So there's Confidence 101 TBQ-style. Learn who you are, directly challenge your comfort fear, embrace the opportunity to be wrong and therefore learn about yourself, and gain the skills you may need to know how to talk to people.

Um - any questions? =)