subject: How To Gain Confidence - Change Your Beliefs And You Change Your Confidence [print this page] Your confidence is totally affected by your beliefs. The first step to changing your beliefs is to understand how these beliefs affect your confidence.
It might seem obvious, but you are having experiences from the moment you are born. What is less obvious (perhaps) is that each of these experiences, no matter how small is having an effect on our internal picture of the world. Some experiences boost our self-esteem. Others dont.
Lets take an example. Suppose that at school, you had a friend who was in the same maths class as you. If you were better than your friend at maths, you might conclude that you were good at maths. If you were worse than them, you might conclude that you were terrible at maths. Once you have the inklings of a belief, you will look for evidence to back it up. If you got 50% in a test, and thought that you werent good at maths, then you might focus on the 50% you got wrong.
But if we look closely at the example, we can see that our beliefs are not really based on logic or common sense. They are very fragile and often flawed. You might have been worse than your friend at maths, but your friend might have happened to be a genius. In which case your conclusion is possibly wrong. Or you might be better than your friend at maths, but only because they are absolutely awful at it. Again, you have drawn an incorrect conclusion.
Imagine, years later, still believing that you are either good or bad at maths, all because of that friend who you sat next to in class!
And many of our beliefs are formed in similar ways. They often have a very tenuous link to reality. It all comes down to interpretation.
And this explains why two individuals with the same level of ability can have two totally different views of themselves. They have each chosen to interpret their reality in a different way.
This especially applies to your beliefs about confidence. Whether you are confident in a particular area will have nothing to do with your actual abilities but more often your interpretation of previous events in your life. If you can change the interpretation, you can change your confidence.
