Self Esteem And Confidence by Mark Tyrrell

Being under-confident can really block us from enjoying our lives and actually grabbing opportunities and progressing towards our goals. There’s a wonderful old story which can mean all kinds of things, but one aspect of this story tells us something very important about self-confidence and self-esteem. There was this young lion who’d never, ever seen his own reflection before. And as he wandered into the forest, he got thirstier and thirstier, and he was desperate for a drink of water. Eventually, he came to a clear, delicious-looking pool of water, and the lion looked into the water and saw this other fearsome lion looking back at him. He was so desperate to drink the water, but he was terrified of this lion - because he’d never seen his own reflection before. He thought, perhaps, that if he tried to drink the water, the other lion would attack him. But eventually, he became so desperate to get what he really needed that he threw caution to the wind, jumped into the pool of water, and found that the other lion just disappeared and he was able to drink from that delicious pool of water. Now, self-confidence really means feeling comfortable, optimistic, and relaxed in what we do in life. So challenges aren’t seen as overwhelming, but something to be at least given a try. We can do public speaking, go on dates, have job interviews, and so forth, just relaxing with not knowing exactly how stuff’s gonna work out. A common misconception about confidence is that confident people always assume that everything’s going to go well or they think that they’re going to master everything. But confidence has much more to do with being relaxed with not knowing how things are going to work out. You might remember those ‘Magic Eye’ images that were popular back in the 1990s; these computer-generated images would contain a hologram - a 3-D image - but you couldn’t see them immediately. If you tried too hard to see the image, then you wouldn’t be able to see it; and if you gave up too quickly, of course you wouldn’t see the 3-D image emerge from the ‘Magic Eye’. But when you relaxed and just let the image emerge in its own time, then you’d see what there was to see. It’s the same with self-confidence. You go into a meeting or you go into a new relationship or you go into a public speaking situation or whatever it might be, and you don’t know exactly how it’s going to go. You don’t know exactly how you’re going to perform; but you can relax with that not knowing, and that’s the key and the heart to real self-confidence. When we talk about self-esteem, which is often coupled with self-confidence, either high or low, then we’re really talking about the way a person feels when they reflect about who they are as a person. People with low self-esteem are doing what very arrogant people do, in the sense they’re not seeing themselves clearly. I’ll often use the analogy of looking into a pool of water: if there’s a storm blowing, if it’s very agitated, you won’t see your reflection clearly; your reflection will be distorted. But once everything becomes calm, you start to see yourself as you really are. So it’s not that people with healthy self-esteem always go round thinking they’re wonderful even if they’re behaving badly. It’s that they can see themselves in the round; they can see their good parts and their not-so-good parts. They can work to improve their not-so-good parts, but be fair enough on themselves to see which parts of themselves are good, workable, and adaptive to living life in a healthy way. So improving self-confidence for people is partly about managing their emotions, undoing past conditioning - often people with low self-esteem have been extremely criticized in their past and they’ve taken on that kind of brainwashing, if you like. So overcoming that, getting them to feel much more relaxed about themselves, much more hopeful, much more fair on themselves, and also able to deal with situations in a more ‘relaxing with uncertainty’ kind of a way, which is the key of self-confidence.