The problem of confidence.

And two ways how to build it.

Recently, well not that recently, but I had a talk with my nephew. He was going to a university and had his fears around it. And I dived into how does he build a confidence. “When I know something and then..” Confidence based on knowledge. We were talking about it, and I was probably trying to wait for my moment to sell him meditation. That he refused, with the same and opposite push.

Now, there are basically two ways how you can build confidence. Watching a presenter on a stage, he is so good and so well versed at what he talks about, that you see the confidence. The confidence in information he presents.

You can build it slowly. You research a lot, read a lot and then only after you cross a certain threshold, of a new question coming your way, that you have answers for, you get confidence. Confidence to talk about it.

The other way, is the confidence in yourself. It seems like they are not separate things. You may be more confidante when you focus on something and live in that place for a longer time. But ultimately, you would reach out. Each moment you find the edge of your knowing you plunge into the uncertainty. Some question arrives from the Q&A that you didn’t expect. And anxiety.

You can brush it off with “I don’t know,” or you can let yourself there in a chaos. See what appears. But for that you need to have the trust. Trust in yourself.

And I see this building a confidence a very peculiar thing.

Yesterday, I was trying to solve a problem. Or something that was bringing me anxiety. I took a bundling blocks, cubes, small cubes kids play with. I tried to go for what I am 100 percent sure. Made three blocks each representing an information and immediately the third one broad the doubt. “is this really an axiom?” The more unsure building blocks I’ve had the harder it was for me, to build a conclusion on top of it. Almost like it was too far away, to see the connections.

It was a nice exercise.

I went to a computer and draw it along the way of speaking over it. Or rather mumbling. And I saw how much harder it is to find a common place. A place from which you draw a connection.

Take a graph for example. It’s so obvious that you start at the 0. Both of the lines start there, but is it really? Like it is something we take for granted, but it’s not really obvious. And those anchor points at least in my case did help me, or rather keep me away from the uncertainty land.

A land of not knowing. And in that land, when you live there, you just need something to stand on. And that’s where the trust in yourself comes into a place.

So maybe, don’t be so hardcore on yourself, when solving a problem. True discoveries almost always start in the pure not knowing. Knowing that is to be discovered.

Well I didn’t say how to build the confidence in yourself. Maybe, that’s the start. Don’t look for it outside.