“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.”

Eleanor Roosevelt

I’ve always wished for more confidence. Occasionally I see people who really (appear to) have it. That used to make me quite envious.  What I finally realized that confidence isn’t really anything tangible. Confidence is a state of mind. Specifically it’s a state of mind that your reaction cannot dictate to me how I ought to feel.  Confidence is asking a woman to dance, to have tea with me, or even to have sex with me, and being totally ok if she says No. It has nothing to do with me. She could be married, freshly heartbroken, or have a urinary tract infection. None of that says anything about me. Yet, there are past instances where I beat myself up after getting a No for exactly those reasons, which I found out later. 

Further, beating ourselves up is never good for us. It does not serve our humility. It is superfluous and unnecessary.

I used to let other’s reactions dictate how I felt about me. If someone said no to something as innocuous as having a cup of chai and a likely fascinating conversation, I made that about me and the wrongness about me, dredging up all the past memories of when someone had said anything bad about me.

Now I realize confidence is really simply the reliance on my own powers, resources.  Essentially, the same way a gorgeous red Ferrari sportscar offering free test drives might have a lot of people decline to take a test drive, for various reasons that don’t say anything bad about the car, it means that people simply have reasons that are personally, not negative reflections on the beautiful car. People are busy, extremely environmentally conscious, unsure of their ability to handle that many horsepower, have a bad back making it difficult to get in and out of the car, are on their way to an important appointment, or have a suspended driver’s license, or a sick parent in the hospital. The car should not take anything personally. Nor should we.