Have you ever wonder why you are confident sometimes and not so confident sometimes? The answer to this question will make sense to you when you realize that confidence is always within you and you are just letting it come out or choose to hide it. You also need to have enough self-awareness to identify those moments and ask yourself why you choose it hide yourself sometimes while other times you are free to let your natural confidence come out. Everybody's personal life experience is unique and therefore the answer to your question is very personal and nobody can find that answer for you but you.
Search in your memories, find the moments when you are very confident and comfortable. How did you feel at those moments, why were you so confident? If you have trouble finding those experiences, maybe I can give you a few from the list and see if it applies to you.
1. You are in a grocery store and you run into a high level executives from your previous company who recognizes you and start talking.
2. You are visiting your best friend from the childhood who is now a successful CEO but he really hasn't changed much in your eyes.
3. Your little sister who is now the most popular girl in her school, so many guys are nervous around her, what about you?
4. Your friend is asking you to drive his car to pick him up from the airport and you decide to take this task
5. You have to make an announcement to your family members and visitors, its a good news but you have to speak up in front of 15 people in your family party.
6. You are good at math and physics in your college, your neighbor is asking you to tutor their middle-school son.
The list goes on.
No matter how stupid, retarded, fat, ugly and useless you think you are in your life, if you are mentally normal and have read this article up to this point, you are good enough, because I am sure in your life you have had moments similar to the above when you felt you were confident about performing certain task or in certain situation. Why? Because things are within your comfort zone and you have done it before, hence you know you can do it again.
However, when you are outside of your comfort zone, when your sense of confidence requires external validation, or in other words when you constantly needs external feed-backs to enforce your state of 'knowing' about yourself, you don't have confidence and you never will.
Having said that, it is still important to identify the moments in your life when you were very confident about certain things even if they were based on external responses, and recognize those feels and recall it. When you get familiar again with those feelings and memories, it actually helps you to become truly confident because your body and mind, every cell of body remembers those things, it can be tapped in again.
The real confidence is still the same feeling and same sensations, it's just triggered differently. It doesn't require any external feeding into your 'Knowing' of self, the 'knowing' comes from you and what you tell yourself, and therefore it doesn't change much based on external environments.
So do you have real confidence? or you think you do?
