There are two important foundational pillars of achieving success in any field of life- Competence and Confidence. These two complement each other and both are required to achieve anything of significance. In our educational and sports institutions, a lot of focus is given to building competence but the onus of knowing and following the process to build confidence is left to individuals. Everyone says and knows that confidence is important, but how to gain, enhance and sustain it is not clearly communicated. Confidence means having the awareness that we know something so well and that we have practiced enough to be able to provide an appropriate response under any circumstance without conscious effort.
The question is what process do we need to follow to build such confidence in any of our abilities?
Confidence is not something you can gain once and be done with it. It is a continuous process of creative and positive thinking, which largely depends on two factors:
The first factor is to learn from our successes and register that in our memory, and the second factor is to restructure experiences of failures in such a way that we can extract learning from them without getting entrapped into the vicious cycle of regrets.
Confidence is a fragile thing. Therefore, it is important to give constant attention to enhancing it and put consistent efforts to prevent any erosion. Just experiencing success does not enhance confidence. We have to extract relevant learning and consciously commit that to our memory to enhance our confidence. Similarly, failure does not necessarily reduces confidence. We have to observe failures with a detachment to learn from them without getting sucked into the quagmire of negative thoughts.
In summary, the growth of confidence does not depend on our experiences of life but on how we interpret them and what we choose to retain in our memory. Our confidence then is the net result of the positive and negative deposits we make in our psychological bank.
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