Playing sports taught me that if you don’t have confidence in your ability to do a thing, you won’t succeed at it. You have to believe you’ll catch the ball, bring the runner to the ground, or land your sword against your target.
If you don’t believe you can do it, you hesitate, you finch, you weaken.
Gaining that belief when you don’t have it can feel like trying to teach yourself mental telepathy. Or at least like putting the cart before the horse you haven’t got. In sports, and in most life skills, you gain confidence through practice and incremental improvement. Like a child learning to read will learn a few letters to start. You have to accept not being good at the thing so you can become better at the thing.
The problem is that we adults lose our patience with starting at the beginning. We want to pick up a thing and just do it! Why can’t I be good right now? I already got the fancy pajamas!
(That is a reference to this seminal work on learning patience.)
We –or, okay, me at least– punish ourselves mentally for not being instantly good at things. Rather than give ourselves time to learn and grow in our skills, we think things like “I’m no good at this! Why am I so bad at this? I should be good at this! I suck!”
And then… here comes that lack of confidence! That hesitation! That faltering blow. We’ve mentally talked ourselves into being even worse at the thing we’re already bad at!
If you are like me you can think of a skill you tried and tried and tried to master and ended up always terrible at. I took longer learning the basics of playing football than anyone had a right to. Because I was so afraid of doing it badly that I didn’t let myself do it badly, and doing it badly was the only way to learn.
I wish I had jumped offsides more. I wish I had thrown myself foolishly forward and thought about it less. I wish I had made a fool of myself more.
So that’s all… the advice this week is: make a fool of yourself. It’s the only way to build confidence. Give yourself permission to be bad at things. Don’t just dance like no one is looking. Write like no one is looking. Play football like no one is looking. Whatever the thing is that you are having trouble building confidence at, do it, do it badly, foolishly, simply… because in the end, what really matters is that you did it.
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