Confidence is a trust or belief in someone or something. It is belief in the abilities or powers of that person or thing. Someone that has confidence has faith in that someone or something. When someone has confidence in themselves, they believe in their own abilities.
Confidence is a powerful sentiment. Just like faith, it is a type of trust and dedication to someone or something. Having that belief in something is a powerful tool. Having that belief in yourself has a strong impact on every aspect of your life.
Confidence is a complex feeling that comes from many different experiences. You didn’t develop a belief in your friends from one isolated experience. Your self confidence doesn’t come from one instance either. It’s a result of many varied experiences. High self confidence is not just a result of your successes. It is your idea of yourself rather than an objective description of how you measure up. Even if you are a better dancer than everyone you know, you can still have low self confidence. You can still believe that you are a bad dancer or you can still have a low sense of self worth. On the other hand, even if someone has had very few successes, they can still have high faith in themselves. They can still have a high sense of self worth. The worst dancer you know might still have confidence in their dancing and have a high level of general self-confidence. This is because self-confidence is a complicated concept. It is built from many different experiences with the help of different people in your life.
People with high self confidence believe in themselves and their abilities. When you have high self confidence in your effectiveness as a negotiator, you enter a negotiation believing you will be successful. You know that you can impact the other person’s outlook and eventually sway their opinion. You have faith in you.
Confidence does not apply to just work or social skills. It has to do with both your image of yourself as a whole as well as your situational belief in yourself. Your level of self confidence refers to both your self worth and your faith in specific abilities you have. Your sense of self worth refers to the general way you feel about yourself. It hints at how much control you feel you have over your own life and how overall effective you are. If you most often have a positive view of yourself, you likely have a good sense of self worth and self esteem.
Situational self confidence isn’t usually equal across the board. You probably feel great about yourself in one area but know that you aren’t great in some areas of your life. Even the most famous superstar has weaknesses. This is a common feeling, we believe in ourselves in some situations but feel nervous or like we are lacking in others.
Situational confidence is commonly a reaction to experiences we’ve had in that area. We may feel great about our math skills because we have had many successful experiences in mathematically related situations. We believe we are good at that thing and we have faith in our abilities in that area because we have met with success most of the times we have tried it. This works in reverse as well. If we notice, again and again that we come up short in one area of our lives, we are likely to attribute that to a lack of ability in that area. We then may have very little faith in our ability to do that thing.
Confidence doesn’t just have to do with how you feel from one circumstance to the next. It is also a general idea of how you feel about yourself. It is developed early in life from many many experiences, interactions, and the way that we interpret those. Interactions with important people early in life help us to draw conclusions about our worth. Being successful in a certain type of experience develops confidence in that area. We then interpret those experiences we have in our youth. We may see those failures as reason for low self confidence or read our successes as a reason for having a high sense of self worth. As we grow up, we have many many more experiences. Some of these will contribute to our ideas about ourselves. Some of these new experiences will refute what we have learned about ourselves. All of these things: interactions, experiences, and attributions add up to the complicated idea of confidence that we each carry around with us.
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