Cm331 Growth and Self-Development

I believe we’ve all played ball sports when we were kids. You’d get into teams and pick a captain. Usually, the most popular or best-skilled kid gets chosen, and we’d all be fine with that. However, on some occasions, such a person wouldn’t be around to take your thunder, which means it’s probably your time to shine. Right? Well, you’d take a quick glimpse around the pack, reaffirming that the threat is really gone, and say to yourself, “Hmm, maybe I could try being captain?” But just before you know it some else stands up and takes the wheel and damn, you start blaming yourself for not having acted sooner.

Now growing up I’ve run into countless situations like this, and there always happen to be this one guy who upvoted for himself which eventually everybody agreed upon, so often that I would have to assign a generic name to him. Let’s call him Matt. I believe in the back of our heads we all know that Matt isn’t that much better than the rest of the group. However, for some reason, he has the magic ability to get things to move the way he wanted whenever there was a decision to make. And for a long period, I wondered why. Matt doesn’t dribble like Tim, nor is he better at shooting than John. So what on earth did Matt possess that made everyone accept and respect his decision? As I got older, I realized: It was confidence.

Confidence is unarguably a great thing to have, especially when you lack it. But people more often than not would associate confidence with competence; one would say you can’t have confidence if you are not competent enough to account for it. But I am here to tell you that’s not true, at all. How do I prove it? Well, you’d probably think that this guy came here today with at least some thoughtful insight to offer. But what if I tell you, no, unfortunately, I don’t have anything original up my sleeve? In fact, what I am about to say might have already been said a million times, yet here I am, sounding as confident as I can to make a point.

All the Matts taught me one thing---confidence is not justified by the result, but rather by the how you do it. The interesting thing is once Matt started seeing himself as confident and able, those around him started to do so as well. Though he wasn’t always the best, his energy led the group to believing that we were better off having him as captain than not.

The key to unlocking true confidence is actually very simple and does not rely on how many shots you can make or how well you can deliver a speech, though of course, it would help. To start gaining true confidence one would only require a flip of a mindset. Confidence isn’t walking into a room with the nose high up in the air, it’s walking into a room and being able to accept that someone is better than you, but feel perfectly comfortable with it.

The idea is simple, but when it comes down to reality, obstacles get in the way. In modern-day societies, we’ve been taught the hard truth of competition, but it turns out that it has a lot to do with influencing one’s state of confidence. Studies reveal that out of every ten college students, only three feel confident in their skills to find jobs and succeed in the job market due to increasing competition. I cannot stop thinking, why do we have to constantly place ourselves in this endless race of whose better and whose worse? The moment the comparison mindset kicks in, we get stuck in a meaningless search for self and outside approval. The route that I humbly encourage us to take would allow us to bypass one of these obstacles. To lessen the effect of competition on our mindsets, we could for a start to change how we perceive our surroundings. Start to view yourself as part of a group that is working towards a collaborative goal.