I’ve always hated the advice ‘fake it until you make it’ as though confidence is just an illusion that doesn’t come from anything but our feelings.
Confidence is a real result of a real accomplishment.
What is a real accomplishment?
It’s not something you thought you should do or something someone told you to do.
It’s something you did with choice, deliberation, perhaps a great deal of fear and apprehension and yet you were successful.
It’s something you did, a problem you solved, that removed your anxiety and your insecurity and gave you clarity in a particular area.
Writing these blogs is something I’m doing to develop my confidence with writing.
How does it help me develop confidence?
Because it helps me learn how to predict problems and then solve them.
Confidence can be a tricky thing because it has less to do with positive outcome and more to do with negative outcome.
My confidence isn’t high in a matter because I think it will go well it’s high because I think I can predict what might go wrong and I’ve already developed a solution to it.
The key to it is having the solution. Having the solution means you have a very clear goal in mind and you are simply trying to get to that goal.
When trying to get to a goal sometimes we realize that a goal is too big for us to achieve. It is outside our reality. This is when we need to start to problem solve it.
Because real confidence comes from being able to be successful in reality.
When we hit the wall of reality it’s very hard not to project past the wall.
Example. If I really like a man but I get evidence that he does not like me back I might get depressed or I might try harder to make him like me or maybe I’ll delude myself, none of these problem solve for reality.
So none of them give me confidence.
If I want to develop my confidence I need to work with the real issue.
Which is an incredible individual process. There is no blue print for it. That’s why real confidence is hard to develop. We have to problem solve the issues for ourselves. Essentially we have to invent our own solutions.
I’ll use how I’m handling my writing this blog as an example.
So I want to be a writer.
What is the reality I am currently facing?
I don’t make money from writing.
I’ve never published anything.
All I have is the many, many, many unfinished projects scattered throughout hard drives.
I also have this blog.
Okay so in reality I have two things.
I have a lot of unfinished writing.
And I have this blog.
I’ll start with my unfinished writing.
A solution might be simply that I finish the writing projects I currently have.
But see, the obstacle there is that I’ve never been able to finish anything.
I started writing when I was eight years old. I’m freaking thirty four years old now. Still nothing is finished. Why in the hell would I be able to finish it now?
I’m not able to. Because I have tried to force myself to finish projects many, many, many, many times.
I tried sticking to one project no matter what. It always ends in absolute chaos.
I tried shortening my projects. Writing short stories.
The same problem arises. I get sixty to eighty percent done and then it falls into nonsensical chaos.
But shorter stories though still chaos were more manageable chaos than trying to write books.
So it was a wee bit of solution. From there I forbid myself from writing books and I instead was only allowed to work on short stories.
Pretty much the same thing happened, I ended up with hundreds of unfinished short stories.
So I went down another step.
Out of fiction into non fiction.
In fiction problems are abstract. They are up in the air with millions of solutions and interpretations and possibilities. Everything is conceptual.
But in nonfiction there are rules. Everything is one the ground. Things are concrete. There is a right and wrong. There’s real information.
That is what I was lacking.
Basic structure.
With nonfiction I’m able to figure out how to problem solve the things I couldn’t solve in fiction.
I found a solution to my own unique struggle with a problem.
I now do a lot of study on nonfiction because I can finish nonfiction and it’s giving me the confidence to tackle fiction again.
The other thing I have in actual reality and is not conceptualized by my desire to be a writer is this blog.
This blog is helpful because it gives me some interaction with reality. With real people’s interests and opinions.
It’s giving me some practice in anticipating what the reactions will be and then dealing with the real life reactions.
Thus I’m calibrating myself to reality instead of my concept of reality.
Even if the reactions are bad or even if I get zero reactions it’s giving my mind the data so I can anticipate these things and be able to handle them.
I’m going to switch examples to explain this better. Let’s take my other vulnerable point in my life.
Dating.
I’m starting to get quite confident with dating.
Why is that?
Because I have found my own unique and effective solutions to problems I was previously terrified of.
One example of many I could provide, is that I’m terrified of having to reject men. It makes me feel very guilty and Ive spent a lot of time avoiding it. But since I’ve been putting myself out there I’ve had no choice but to reject men. To their very faces.
Tell them straight up that I do not like them enough to go out with them.
Because I’ve had to do it I’ve learned what is most effective in rejecting men. It allows me to entertain more dates because I feel like I can now handle rejecting men and I feel like I can do so politely and with proper respect. So I feel less guilty.
I thus have more confidence with going on dates.
We’re not stupid creatures.
We are incredibly intelligent and aware.
We know when we are fooling ourselves.
Fooling ourselves serves a purpose too. Sometimes we need to fool ourselves so I suppose there is some merit to the advice ‘fake it until you make it’ but that is a survival strategy.
It is not real confidence. And when we do not develop real confidence it creates a lot of psychological stress. It creates a lot of reactions and emotions and a lot of things we have no control over.
It’s not very pleasant.
So while it’s not always possible to boldly face reality, while sometimes we need to fool ourselves by falling into some depression or some delusion, we definitely do fool ourselves far more often than we need to.
And it causes a great deal of dissatisfaction, uneasiness and straight up anxiety in life.
And it’s not worth it.
It is easier to just deal in reality wherever possible.
Jess lanai 