The confidence con

If your confidence is based on anything outside of yourself, including competence and expertise, it will be limited and fragile

The purpose of this missive is to help you understand why you keep facing the same issues and what you can do about it.

If you want it, you’ve got to work it.

Not just your body or your business.

ESPECIALLY your family, your friends, your children.

Anything that genuinely matters to you is something worth the effort.

But then something funny happens – you get stuck. You get stuck and you find yourself circling in the same cycles.

You unfat yourself, then you get fat again.

You overcome a conflict with your spouse, then you face the same issues again.

You regain your focus, then you get distracted again.

Your business takes off, then you get bogged down in micromanagement.

You gain confidence in your competence, then you find yourself brimful of doubts once more.

The examples are countless. The pattern is the same.

You have a problem and you work it, then you end up with the same problem again.

Here’s the problem with your “problem”.

It’s not a problem that’s the problem.

It’s that you are chasing symptoms of an unresolved pattern of cognition or behavior that you haven’t brought into Awareness and fundamentally addressed.

You may put in the work to douse the fires, but you haven’t bothered to look for the arsonist.

Understand.

If you find yourself dealing with the same issues you seemed to have resolved earlier, you can be sure that you have a blind spot. You are missing something. Your approach is misdirected or incomplete.

Confidence is the perfect example of this because everyone has some experience with lack of confidence – about something, in some situation, in some domain of action.

Every guru and every coach will tell you that confidence comes with competence. You gain confidence as you gain experience doing something.

This is true, and also gets it completely backwards, setting you up for future bouts of doubt and lack of confidence. It’s an inductive observation without any effort to understand what really is going on. Because thinking takes time and it is scary. Let alone thinking about your own deranged thots and fillings.

So, what’s up?

Confidence isn’t a thing. When I am confident about something, I am not adding any special thought or feeling to my attitude or behavior. I don’t need to believe or experience anything in order to be confident about X. I can be perfectly confident about something I had never heard about until 3 seconds ago.

How?