I was watching a video on YouTube recently of Darryl Anka, who was channeling Bashar, answering questions from the audience. Someone in the crowd said, “I used to be very confident in myself.” It’s the kind of thing a lot of us have said or thought at some point, but regardless of what anyone may think about channeling, Bashar’s response caught my attention.
“You’re still confident,” he told her. “It’s just that you’re now confident about your lack of confidence.” The audience laughed. Then he continued, “I’m serious. You cannot be not confident. You’re always confident about something. It’s just that now your belief systems are revealing themselves to show you that one of the things you’re most confident about is that you lack confidence. But you’re confident about that, so you don’t lack confidence. There’s the paradox for you to play with.”
At first it sounds like Bashar’s just being clever. But it made more sense the longer I thought about it. Most of us don’t even talk about it the way the woman in the video did, like something we used to have and lost. Instead, we just say it flat out. I don’t have the confidence, or I lack confidence. Different words, but the same idea underneath, minus any story about where it went. And when we say it that way, we’re not actually describing an absence. We’re making a confident statement, and we’re certain about it. That’s easy to miss.
How many times have we all thought or said, “I’m just not confident enough to do that”? I know I have. And it’s not just something we’ve said about ourselves. Most of us have seen it in other people too, a family member, a friend, or a coworker talking themselves out of something before they even gave it a real shot. We’ve watched the pattern happen from both sides, and every time, the person saying “I can’t” sounds just as certain as the person saying “I can.”
Think about some of the things we tell ourselves. I know I’m going to screw this up. I know I’m not ready. I know I’m not good enough. I know they’re going to say no. I know I can’t do that. There’s a lot of certainty packed into those statements. We don’t say maybe, we say it with certainty.
“Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.” — commonly attributed to Henry Ford
I’d heard that quote plenty of times before, but I started looking at it differently after hearing Bashar’s response. There’s confidence on both sides of it. I think I can and I think I can’t. Neither one knows what’s going to happen this time. But somehow the first one is considered confident and the second one is considered lacking. Maybe that’s not entirely true. Maybe both are confident, but they’re just confident about different outcomes.
It’s worth asking where that certainty actually comes from. Over time we build beliefs about ourselves. Some come from experience, some from failure, some from what other people have told us, and some have been repeated in our heads for so long we don’t even remember where they started, until eventually we stop treating them as beliefs and start treating them as facts. I’m not good at that. I’ve never been that kind of person. I don’t have the discipline. I’m too old. I’m not smart enough. That’s just who I am. But how many of those things do we actually know to be true, versus how many have we just repeated enough times that they started to feel true?
Sometimes it’s not even an old failure we’re replaying. Sometimes we’re just afraid of a new one, so afraid that we skip straight past not knowing and land on certain. Although we haven’t lived it yet, we’ve already made the decision of how it ends.
If we’re always confident about something whether we realize it or not, maybe the issue isn’t that confidence is missing. Maybe it’s where we’ve been placing it. What’s missing is knowing what we’d prefer to be confident about.
So the next time we hear ourselves say, “I don’t have the confidence,” maybe instead of stopping there we ask a different question: what are we so confident is going to happen? Once we have that answer, we ask one more: how do we know? Maybe we have evidence for it, maybe we don’t. Maybe we’ve failed at it before, someone told us we couldn’t, or we’ve repeated the same story to ourselves so many times that we stopped questioning whether it was ever true.
I don’t think this means we should blindly tell ourselves we can do anything. There are things we’re not ready for, things we’re not good at yet, and things we might try and initially fail at. But there’s a real difference between acknowledging that we don’t know what will happen and being confident that we already do.
So maybe we don’t need to learn how to have more confidence. Maybe we just need to get clearer on what we’d prefer to be confident about, and start pointing the confidence we already have in that direction instead.
#MotivationMonday
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