Self-Confidence

I was recently catching up over coffee with a former coaching client, now a friend and confidante. As we ruminated over the trajectory of his relatively young career and the opportunities at hand, he said, “if only I had enough self-confidence”. I stopped mid-way from taking my sip of coffee and said, “You know, that’s really interesting. I’m presently coaching three similar very competent, smart, hard-working, upwardly mobile, relatively young clients who, on the surface present themselves as very confident. But they all share this yearning for more self-confidence. What’s with that?”

What is with that? What is self-confidence, how does one “get” it, and why does it matter?

We can all point to the those we know who appear to be confident. They walk in and own the room. They speak and hold the audience. They move with swagger and grace and speak with eloquence and presence. But looks and talk can simply mask a person’s lack of confidence. That person who we see as oozing with confidence can very well be completely overcome with insecurity.

Confidence comes from a Latin word “fidere” which means “to trust”; therefore, having a self-confidence is having trust in one's self. And trusting in one’s self is much more profound and complicated than looking and sounding as if we do.

Are we born with self-confidence? Is there a special “self-confidence” gene pool? Or is it something we learn, build on, block by block – a skill to be mastered? The research on both sides of this debate is rich and inconclusive.

I belong in the camp that believe that self-confidence can be learned, developed, and ultimately, mastered. My work as a Coach has made this conclusion self-evident, and I’d like to share some of my observations.

Let me first say that the “blame” for lack of self-confidence is shared, often-times with people who truly love and want the best of us. Our dear parents often make the unintended mistake of protecting us from any possibility of getting hurt or failing. So, they try to plan everything – every step for us – this way, they eliminate the risk of failure. Even when we’re old enough to handle the responsibility: attending to our own school homework, completing and sending college application forms, doing our own laundry or cleaning up our rooms, planning and booking home visits, living on a budget and paying for our personal expenses. Advice or help from dad or mom is just a text away, so we succumb to that convenience: we ask them what to do, or -worse - they do it for us before we ask. We do not make mistakes – but the unintended consequence is - we do not learn. We do not become aware of what it means to make our own judgments, solve our own problems, trust in our own process for discerning and deciding.

This pattern of parental behavior seems to be particularly prevalent among the baby-boomers, who have millennials for their children. Baby-boomers who may unwittingly be “making-up” for the distance they felt from their own parents. Prior to era of cell phones and instant messages, baby-boomers were mostly left to their own devices. Sure, there was some parental supervision, but those of us born between 1944 and 1964 mostly did our own homework, made our own beds, found our way to our colleges, figured out how and when we were coming home to visit, found jobs, and most of us were able to financially support ourselves by age 21. We were not wealthy nor lived comfortable lives but didn’t ask for financial help from our parents for our basic needs. In fact, we felt compelled to give back, pay forward if you will. We did not call to ask mom or dad (long-distance calls were expensive and only used in emergencies) – we did what we thought was right, and if we made a mistake, we learned. We learned to trust our judgement, our instincts, ourselves.

Let me clarify: all parents who protect their children from making mistakes and from failing are guilty – regardless of when they became parents. They have, mostly with good but unknowing intentions – participated in disabling their children from learning how to trust their own abilities to discern, solve problems, learn from mistakes and failures – thus robbing them of the very important gift of trusting their own selves. This dependency by the way is not limited to the parent-child relationship but can extend to some other “trusted” other: a boss, a life-partner, a sibling, a friend. But, as most responsibility for our personal and professional growth, as soon as you become aware that this is what is going on, the enabler/enabled, each, independently – can start transitioning out of the pattern of dependency.

So… if this resonates with you, it does not matter if you are the enabler or the enabled (arguably, we can say “disabler or disabled”). If you are the enabler, encourage the other person to make his/her/their own choice. If you are the enabled, resist the instinct to defer or ask. Take the first step. Take the risk. Make a choice. An informed choice. Your choice will either prove (or feel) right or wrong. Either way, you will learn. If you made the wrong choice, don’t let that stop you from making the next one. You are building muscle memory towards trusting your judgment and building confidence in your ability to do so. It could be the most important gift you can give yourself or your loved one.