CONFIDENCE – IF YOU DON’T HAVE IT, YOU NEED IT URGENTLY!

“People who got things done usually had a lot of persistence and a bit of luck. If we persisted enough, luck usually arrived. But most people couldn’t wait for luck, so they gave up.” (Charles Bukowski)

Jean-Paul Sartre, a contemporary French philosopher, said that anguish arises at the exact moment when man realizes his irrevocable condemnation to freedom. In other words, man is condemned to be free. There will never be a condition where we won’t have the chance to choose. There will always be an option to choose, even if the choice is not to choose.

The fact is that anguish is present in our lives. It brings with it doubts that fill our minds, which at times seem to weigh heavily on our heads, undermining our best intentions, generating insecurity, and at other times, a horrible feeling of vulnerability. This psychological perception, characterized by a sense of helplessness, shortness of breath, tightness in the chest, anxiety, insecurity, lack of humor, and accompanied by resentments allied with some pain, is actually a sensor that we carry within us that is directly connected to our feelings and is usually triggered when we become aware of the choices we are making. What can we do when this happens?

Of course, the easiest path I could tell you here is that from now on, no more negative thoughts — you have to be optimistic, believe in yourself, and always imagine yourself with superpowers. The rule is optimism!

Well! Anyone who has fallen for this knows that it doesn’t work and that all of this is a big load of nonsense; in fact, it’s ideas like these that help us become even more “mentally ill.” It’s no surprise that depression, anxiety, OCD, anger, and similar feelings are related to this kind of proposal. Many psychological disorders arise precisely because of not only the lack of clarity of reality but also the fantasies we are induced to believe. The idea that all it takes for a good life is to think positively is as absurd as me telling you today to take chloroquine to immunize yourself from COVID. Perhaps for this very reason, there is no research to contest the fact that self-help books and movies are top sellers at the same speed that people suffer more from psychological problems. Thousands of people have embraced the belief that there is an easier way to deal with the reality of life, and therefore fall victim to the charms of the Law of Attraction and even adapt absurdly ridiculous and unfounded concepts of the imaginative “quantum physics” to facilitate the achievement of happiness, the car or job of their dreams. There is no shortage of people to tell us that everything is transcendental. I love words like energy, field, among other “quantum” nonsense, however, that’s not what I’m going to talk about; on the contrary, I want to return to reality and dialogue with you about Confidence from the perspective of behavioral sciences and neuroscience.

Back to reality. It is true that believing in oneself is not always easy. But perhaps this helps us a lot to learn to live with anguish. Who knows, with that, the plan that is now within you will really be seen as something good: investing in the project you dream of so much, perhaps expressing your position on an important issue will actually be interesting during the next meeting, participating in the challenge of a significant sports competition will help increase your self-esteem or simply inviting that person who catches your eye so much for a pleasant coffee. All of this involves choices! Now, when it comes time to take the lead and put it into practice, we all have a certain level of difficulty in the confidence needed to decide to take the decisive step. So, suddenly, doubts torment us and anguish dominates us: Is it worth risking like this? Am I really willing? Can I do this? What happens if it goes wrong? And, amid variations of emotions and feelings that dominate us is fear, which almost always turns on that red light instead of motivating us to seize an opportunity, and often, unprepared, we easily end up letting another chance slip away.

I want to write about this topic precisely because what has caught my attention the most is the significant increase in clients seeking my work both in coaching and behavioral therapy, precisely because they need the encouraging words coming from others, since often they seem to trust the opinion of others more than their own. Why?

But, after all, what does “trusting yourself” really mean?

Although the term, which is typical of psychology, therapeutic literature, and also self-help, is often used synonymously with self-esteem and self-acceptance. However, these relationships are a mistake. Self-confidence always refers to personal competence, and we will clearly see its importance and differences with other psychic issues such as self-esteem and self-acceptance. This is because, for example, self-esteem is about how each person describes the way they see their own value. In other words, how much you appreciate and like yourself. It is about the assessment that the person makes of themselves, expressing an attitude of approval or aversion as well as their abilities and value, both for themselves and for the environment in which they live. So, in summary, self-esteem does not necessarily refer to abilities; it is actually the respect you have for yourself, your own appreciation. Self-acceptance follows in the same direction, it has more to do with how the person feels about themselves. It is about self-respect, with all its virtues and flaws. It is about accepting with respect and value who you are today — not who you want to be or who you were. With self-acceptance, you practice, or should practice, a conscious daily care of yourself. And this will strengthen you as a whole.

Note that it is not easy to differentiate these inquiries and psychologists have been dealing with these issues for decades. The fact is that it is not so clear-cut to separate self-confidence from other terms that are often related. However, it is a fundamental part for those seeking good mental health to understand the concept of self-confidence. In summary, it mainly refers to valuing your own abilities as a whole. When it comes to individual skills, researchers typically tend to use terms like self-efficacy or specific self-confidence. For example, a person may be efficient in engineering-related matters but have low performance in human relations — of course, without disregarding that we all have the ability to develop skills where we did not previously have them, that is, self-efficacy is something that can be developed in one area or another.

DOUBTS INDEED!

The fundamental issue of self-confidence lies in understanding how we can effectively do something significant to enhance our ability to cope with our anxieties and thus develop psychic mechanisms that effectively help us increase the chances of moving forward with confidence without external assistance. In other words, how to improve our sense of trusting in our abilities, starting from our own feelings. How to do this?

No matter how much research I’ve done on this subject to serve my clients or even to write this article, I have to confess that perhaps no one knows the exact answer. But don’t be discouraged. We have several clues that can help us find an identity understanding capable of explaining from what is within ourselves.

Most likely, like most other psychosocial behaviors and characteristics, it is known that in the formation of our mind there is a great genetic impact responsible for the constitution of each person’s personality, and this has to do with our ability to trust that begins to manifest itself from adolescence to adulthood. When we study the behavior of children, it is easily perceived that there are some who simply do what they want, on their own. Others do not have such ease, and when adults, this perspective manifests itself strongly.

The environment also plays an important role. Self-efficacy is determined, among other things, by the experience we build throughout life. Behavioral studies indicate that doubts about our abilities tend to arise from comparison with others. This is explained when we simply observe the people who are part of our daily lives. Introspectively notice that there is always a self-suggestion that there is always someone better than us. If you compare your own weaknesses with the strengths of other people, you will always feel this doubt, right? It is normal for people who compare themselves, in general, to have been objects of comparison, made by adults (emotionally important to them), in relation to other children. Doubts, however, are not inherently bad — as long as self-control is not lost. The truth is that routinely questioning one’s own performance is not a problem, it even helps us improve, but chronically putting oneself in check harms mental health, human relationships, and performance.

Bringing it into practice, when I conduct a thorough analysis with my clients about their abilities, I notice that they all occasionally doubt themselves, and this is not a problem, as already mentioned, it is even healthy; it helps to resignify limiting beliefs, as it makes the person have more lucidity about reality even regarding ego, narcissism, and vanity. The problem I have been increasingly observing is cases of clients who chronically distrust their own abilities, and this has affected their mental health and, sometimes, their relationships and also their professional performance. In the studies I have researched and followed through behavioral processes with my clients, I have been able to find a very close relationship between self-esteem and self-confidence. In some cases, for example, I ask my client to fill out a questionnaire in which they are asked to state to what extent certain adjectives apply to them. Subsequently, the idea is to find out from them how confident they were in their answers. With this, I noticed that those with low self-esteem show less confidence in their ability to self-assess. But it is not always like this. There are also clients who showed low self-esteem but great certainty in their self-assessments. (This may be unfavorable, but it helps me a lot in the process of both coaching and therapy (CBT). This information is essential for devising approach strategies and helping the client to know themselves better).

EXTERNAL INFLUENCES

In behavioral psychology, it is a fact that the more we believe in ourselves and in our own abilities, the greater the impact on our decision-making and resilience behavior. For example, it can affect the assessment and suggestion of dealing with our willingness to make certain decisions even if they have proven to be more challenging or are related to other past situations in which we were not successful. Those plagued by doubts suffer from decision anxiety, which impairs the quality of seeking information, relying on their own beliefs, seeking references often from unreliable sources, just as they hesitate to commit. Strengthening counterfactual thoughts.

Look, in everyday life, we often encounter situations that require an explanation, leading us to ask how and why they happened, thus triggering explanatory causal processes that are the basis for our choices. Similarly, many other events induce, instead of a causal explanation, a thought about how we could have avoided or prevented a given outcome, that is, how things could have been changed if we had acted differently or if some aspect of the situation had been just a little different. We call this cognitive process counterfactual thinking. People who cannot develop self-confidence become victims of this type of thinking, and limiting beliefs narrow their analytical capacity, clinging only to what reinforces their already established beliefs. In fact, it’s an unconscious struggle between reason and anguish that often leads to the development of mental disorders. It’s no wonder that even our consumer behavior is visibly determined by our self-confidence.

This biased formulation suggests that the relationship between our choices and reality, which should be the focus of attention, shares an unbalanced relationship. On the one hand, a counterfactual proposition of the “if…then” type necessarily entails a causal nature insofar as there is a cause-effect relationship between an antecedent and a consequent, and speculative causal knowledge and sometimes empty influences the counterfactuals that people generate for themselves.

Thus, counterfactual thinking becomes an inference of self-confidence. As a facilitation and dissociation effect of activation by another, one of the ways to establish causality involves simulating counterfactual scenarios that test the plausibility of various possible causes. The processes have several characteristics in common, both in terms of their activation and in terms of the functions they perform, being activated by surprising, negative, or self-perception-violating situations and tends to have consequences at the level of that same perception of lucidity of reality and mainly distorting the valuation of their own abilities as a whole. Lack of self-confidence tends to block cognitive sensitivity to new opportunities.

As an example of the consequence of this, it can be seen in various educational studies in schools that show, for example, that in cities or even neighborhoods where patriarchy dominates, girls tend to have lower productivity and worse grades in mathematics than boys because they have less confidence in their problem-solving abilities. If we compare only the results of boys and girls in regions where there is no such trend, and which have an equally high level of belief for both sexes in their mathematical abilities, no difference can be seen in the results. Another example is in studies that demonstrate that people who have more confidence in their own abilities perform better on exams. To do this, social psychology researchers pretended to the volunteers that the answers to an upcoming general knowledge test would be presented to them on a screen for a fraction of a second beforehand. In fact, only completely meaningless words flickered on the monitor. However, subsequently, the participants performed better on the test than members of the control group, who had to take the test without the “special preparation.”

ROOTS OF SELF-CONFIDENCE

Flexibility and tolerance with oneself seem to be key words when it comes to enduring one’s own difficulties and, thus, ironically, valuing competencies. You might still be wondering: But isn’t self-confidence something normal in people, after all, everyone likes to feel capable, powerful, secure? It seems somewhat paradoxical. It appears that people, mostly, sometimes even overexert themselves in demonstrating these characteristics to hide their own fragility!

Yes. This is true. In fact, often people identify so much with the “mask” of self-confidence that they start to excessively convey it, which can be equally harmful in the long run — this happens when people think they know more than they actually do, which can lead them to make decisions that are not in their interest because they lack sufficient information.

Therefore, I want to return here to self-questioning. Both comparison and self-questioning have their importance in dealing with one’s own convictions, fundamentally important also to consider whether it is really worth trusting oneself and others and not being the victim of counterfactual thoughts. It is essential to understand this because, contrary to what is thought, the excess of self-confidence to which people tend in this form of self-validation is not directly related to belief in oneself. On the contrary, behavioral studies have shown that they are actually shadows. In other words, they are the ones who fear most to come into contact with their vulnerabilities, and therefore prefer to quickly conclude that they are correct.

In the consultations, the most frequent questions I hear are: How can self-confidence be strengthened?

To address this question, I always engage in an exercise with the client to help them understand that flexibility and tolerance with oneself must represent key words when it comes to coping with one’s own difficulties and, thus, through sessions and self-analysis exercises, learn to value their own competencies. For example, suggesting them to recall and write down occasions when they succeeded or were confident about a decision; recollection is a great tool to help connect them with an emotional state of security.

BODY POSTURE AND PRAISE AT THE RIGHT TIME

As a behavioral language specialist, the tip is to understand that walking through life with both the head held too high and with a hunched posture can bring difficulties. Yes, this is a fact! Recent behavioral studies along with neuroscience have shown the importance of body posture in shaping feelings, and consequently thoughts and the ability to deal with emotions, thus, how to react to anguish, for example. I invite you to a simple experiment. Try solving simple math problems while sitting upright, slouched in the chair, and lying down. You will see a significant difference in your cognitive ability depending on your posture. It is much more difficult with a hunched posture or lying down to accomplish the task. Never forget, an upright position embodies self-confidence — posture affects not only how others see us but also how we perceive, think, and act.

The appropriate level of recognition also plays an important role. Here I want leaders, educators, but especially parents, to reflect on the subject as a true warning. Excessive praise and exaggerated expressions such as “extraordinary” or “incredible” towards people, especially children, can greatly impair their ability to connect realistically with self-confidence. This can even lead to depression, generate stress, or even anxiety and OCD. Deeply impairing the ability to deal with self-confidence and self-esteem because, over time, they establish unattainable standards for themselves, becoming hypersensitive to frustration. There is also the risk that constant overvaluation creates the narcissistic illusion of superiority. Never forget that praise is very important for everyone, especially for children, but it has appropriate time and place — more important than valuing the result obtained is appreciating their effort – and celebrating it, without trivializing the situation.

Golden tip: In some of my sessions, I usually give my clients a reading exercise where they describe opportunities to improve skills through learning and effort. Subsequently, I have them fill out a self-assessment questionnaire after completing several small tasks. With this, clients learn that their own abilities can be changed and they are less likely to be disturbed by doubt and complete tasks better. It is worth noting that if someone believes that competence is not a fixed quality, doubts do not have such a negative effect on well-being. Therefore, I want to conclude this article by leaving a practical suggestion: Whenever you need your self-confidence, try to recall occasions when you acted with confidence, succeeded, or were confident about a decision. This recollection can connect you with an emotional state of security.

Now, for you parents and other adults close to children, when it comes to wanting the best for them, remember that it is fundamental for the development of a healthy dose of self-confidence from early in life — we should not constantly overwhelm the little ones or always pay attention to or call attention to what they do wrong. It is better to discuss together how the solution to a problem will be than to go straight to reprimand. It is important for the child to perceive that they have support and can solve problems and tasks independently. We learn from pain, suffering, as well as from our own mistakes. Just as self-confidence begins from a young age, it needs to be practiced throughout life!

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Hello, I’m Marcello de Souza! I started my career in 1997 as a leader and manager in a large company in the IT and Telecommunications market. Since then, I have participated in important projects of structuring, implementation, and optimization of telecommunications networks in Brazil. Restless and passionate about behavioral and social psychology. In 2008, I decided to delve into the universe of the human mind.

Since then, I have become a professional passionate about deciphering the secrets of human behavior and catalyzing positive changes in individuals and organizations. Doctor in Social Psychology, with over 25 years of experience in Cognitive Behavioral and Human Organizational Development. With a wide-ranging career, I highlight my role as:

– Master Senior Coach and Trainer: Guiding my clients in the pursuit of goals and personal and professional development, achieving extraordinary results.

– Chief Happiness Officer (CHO): Fostering an organizational culture of happiness and well-being, boosting productivity and employee engagement.

– Expert in Language and Behavioral Development: Enhancing communication and self-awareness skills, empowering individuals to face challenges with resilience.

– Cognitive Behavioral Therapist: Using cutting-edge cognitive-behavioral therapy to help overcome obstacles and achieve a balanced mind.

– Speaker, Professor, Writer, and Researcher: Sharing valuable knowledge and ideas in events, training, and publications to inspire positive changes.

– Consultant and Mentor: Leveraging my experience in leadership and project management to identify growth opportunities and propose personalized strategies.

My solid academic background includes four postgraduates and a doctorate in Social Psychology, along with international certifications in Management, Leadership, and Cognitive Behavioral Development. My contributions in the field are widely recognized in hundreds of classes, training sessions, conferences, and published articles.

Co-author of the book “The Secret of Coaching” and author of “The Map Is Not the Territory, the Territory Is You” and “The Diet Society” (the first of a trilogy on human behavior in contemporaneity – 05/2024).

Allow me to be your companion on this journey of self-discovery and success. Together, we will unravel a universe of behavioral possibilities and achieve extraordinary results.

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