This content is locked. Please login or become a member.
Courage
Several years ago, while interviewing Dani Shapiro, she came into my office and saw that I had a stack of books on my desk about confidence. For whatever reason, at that time, a whole slew of books had come out, and I had always seen confidence as the holy grail, that if you have confidence, you could accomplish anything. And Dani looked at the stack of books, looked back at me, and said she thought that confidence was overrated. I asked her what she meant, and she said that people that exuded too much confidence just felt really annoying and she felt what was far more important than confidence was courage, that the courage to step into something you didn’t know how to do, that you didn’t have the confidence for, was far more noble a search than the search for confidence.
Confidence is really just the successful repetition of any endeavor. If you know the chances of doing something successfully before you engage in doing it, that is what breeds confidence. One example that I now give my students about things we’re confident about without even realizing it is driving a car. When we first start taking our driving lessons, we’re really nervous, we’re scared, we’re wondering if we’re going to pass the test, and then we pass the test, and then we start driving, and years later, we all have car confidence.
So the only way to actually build confidence is to take that step into courage, to do the thing for the first time. I think that courage becomes the birthplace for confidence.
Resilience
We live in this sort of cultural conundrum where we are waiting for confidence to do something when in fact, the confidence will only come after we do it. It won’t come unless we experiment with that lack of confidence to then build mastery over time to be able to give us a sense predictably, from pattern recognition, that we’ll be able to do it again if we’ve already done it.
Sometimes it doesn’t happen that way. Every time you do something doesn’t guarantee because you’ve done it successfully in the past you’re going to do it successfully in the future, especially if you evolve or begin to change or try new things.
One thing that I think people get really paralyzed by is the fear that they’re going to fail at something and somehow that fear will be all that remains and that failure will be all that exists. And I think one thing that we forget in anticipating that is that almost all of our emotions and our reactions to things, we metabolize, we metabolize over time. We experience an emotion. It could be an emotion of grief, it could be an emotion of great accomplishment, and what happens over time? We metabolize that experience, we metabolize the sadness, we might still be able to recall what that feels like, but the intensity of that experience is not quite the same.
So, if you want to do something but you’re afraid of failing, know that you can recover from that failure, you’ll metabolize that failure, hopefully you’ll learn from that failure, and it’s only a failure if you accept defeat. If you keep trying to make something happen and iterate the way in which you approach doing it, then it’s just another attempt at making something really important happen.
In my experience, the only thing that we can’t metabolize is regret because there’s no closure. It’s when you stop trying that you then begin to wonder, “I would’ve, I could have, I should have,” and that is just a never-ending cycle that could never metabolize because there’s always an iteration that you can fantasize. The only way to ensure that you’re going to be stuck in some sort of angst is to not try to do what you really want to do. If you try to do what you want to do, you metabolize the way you do it until you can actually do it, or if you don’t do it, you are paralyzed in that moment of wonder. Which do you want to choose? It’s a pretty easy choice if you ask me.