(Special Message to
final years)
©Leah Scott
2nd May, 2008
Marcus Garvey once
said “If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in
the race of life. With confidence you have won even before you’ve
started.” This simply means that you have success even before you
attempt whatever you want to do. Having confidence in yourself is therefore
crucial.
Low self esteem, shyness,
or self doubt is a prerequisite for immediate failure. You wouldn’t
achieve anything worth achieving with that kind of attitude. You won’t
go anywhere. You won’t gain anything. In fact, if you are not progressing
in life, you’re regressing. There is no stagnancy – you’re either
moving forward or going backward.
I remember when I was
in secondary school and I used to have a real problem with self esteem.
I was self conscious because I needed braces. I believed I was ugly
and I was extra skinny. So put them all together, I was a walking freak
in my own eyes, and my self confidence, or lack of it, transferred onto
all those who came in contact with me. One thing I have realized is
that we as people are only concerned with how things affect us. We are
only interested in what will benefit us and what makes us feel good
about ourselves. The last thing we need is someone who has a low self
esteem and no self-confidence to be around us. We don’t want that
transfer of negative energy around us. We want people who are high spirited,
and funny, are people-persons and who have a high self-esteem and confidence
because we feel good around them. We want that kind of energy that they
have. We might feel compelled to take on the burden of helping someone
to build their self esteem, but if they persist in wallowing in their
own self pity, we get depressed and we give up on trying to help them.
We don’t enjoy being around people like that because they take away
our own joy in order to focus on their sorrow.
That was the effect
that I was having on people. I thought I was being humble like the good
book says, while meanwhile I was chasing people away from me because
of my negative vibes. Like magnets with similar poles, I was repelling
them. You know, magnets are very interesting to look at. ‘A magnet
has two opposite poles, referred to as north and south. Opposite magnetic
poles attract each other, and similar magnetic poles repel each other’
(Encarta). I was repelling people, not because I was different from
them but because I revealed a similar trait of theirs that they did
not want to acknowledge. In my own experience, those who are attracted
to people with high self-confidence are people who are opposite from
them – they wish to be like them. Of course this is not universal.
There are times when like attracts like and opposites repel, but in
my case, the former was more true. I loved to be around people who were
confident and I envied them more than anything. I wished I could be
that self assured and somehow being around them made me feel like I
was growing. However, I may have had the opposite effect on them. A
Low self esteem and lack of confidence – these are negative character
traits and people tend to avoid them because, in an already depressing
world, they need as much positive vibes as possible, not added negative
ones.
I slowly began to shed
the layers of low self-esteem and I began to gain self-confidence. The
more I observed strong people, the more I modeled them. Sometimes when
faced with a challenge that demanded confidence, I asked ‘What would
X do’? Would she speak first, would he fight back?’ By adopting
these habits, little by little I found that they became natural to me.
I didn’t even notice that, after a while, I was attracting more than
I was repelling. When I was more self-confident, I felt happier, I felt
that I could be more effective, and I felt that I could get what I wanted
for myself instead of waiting for people to give it to me. I loved to
help people and I realized that I could do so much better with confidence
in myself, than by being shy and quiet and supposedly humble.
Confidence is assurance,
faith, belief, conviction, a certainty in oneself. Believe in yourself
in whatever you aim to achieve. Whether that means walking up to someone
you admire or are interested in and saying ‘Hi my name is X, what’s
yours.’ Whether that means trying a new way of doing something you
believe will work, even though no one else thinks that it will. Whatever
you do or whoever you are, just remember that if you spend your life
living for people, you won’t have time to live for you. Yes there
are certain things that might follow you around like a shadow if you
do it, but you have to decide on whether it is worth it or not. If it
might help you overcome your fears in the future – then go for it!
If it might help other people – then by all means!
Bertrand Russell says
‘The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the
intelligent full of doubt.’ Have you ever witnessed a debate or argument
where the person who is dead wrong is the one who makes the most noise?
He speaks confidently and so sure of himself that anyone would think
he knows what he is talking about. Whereas, the one who is right, allows
the person who is wrong to dominate, because he doubts himself or because
he doesn’t speak confidently enough to persuade others. I am not telling
you to act like a fool in order portray an atmosphere of confidence
– if you are confident in yourself and believe in what you are about,
whether or not you talk loudly, your confidence will reveal itself.
How to Become a
World-Class Individual written by Ben Henry suggests that one of
the ways to be successful is to keep a positive attitude at all times.
Positivity includes having confidence and a good self-esteem. He goes
on to suggest that ‘Your attitude creates your altitude’ – i.e.
how high you go in life. ‘Our attitude can turn our problems into
blessings. He quotes J. Sidlow Baxter who asks ‘What is the difference
between an obstacle and an opportunity? [Answer:] Our attitude towards
it. Every opportunity has a difficulty, and every difficulty has an
opportunity.’ “The pessimist says the glass is half empty; the optimist
says the glass is half full.” Henry also uses the story of David and
Goliath to bring out John Maxwell’s belief ‘that our attitude can
give us an uncommonly positive perspective. When Goliath came up against
the Israelites, the soldiers all thought, “He is too big. We can never
kill him.” David looked at the same giant and thought, “He is so
big I can’t miss!”’
Mahatma Gandhi’s
message on positivity says,
“Keep my words positive;
words become my behavior;
Keep my behaviours
positive; Behaviours become my habits;
Keep my habits positive;
Habits become my values;
Keep my values positive;
Values become my destiny;
There is no dress rehersal;
This is one day in YOUR life.”
Being confident, not
only means having faith in yourself, but also in others. I, at many
times, would have liked to approach certain persons and talk to them,
but what prevented me from doing so were the images of rejection and
humiliation. I was afraid that I’d look like an idiot, approaching
people that I didn’t know, people who may not even be interested in
getting to know me. I wasn’t confident enough in myself or in the
other person to have enough courage to go and talk to them.
Confidence begets courage.
When you are confident in yourself, you will then have the courage to
act on that confidence. Courage is said to be synonymous with boldness,
bravery and resoluteness. Courage does not mean the absence of fear;
courage means the ability to face danger or difficulty and not being
overcome with fear. Rudolph Giuliani says “Courage is realizing you’re
afraid and still acting”. By using Ben Carson’s Best/Worst Analysis,
decide which risks to take, then utilize courage to do them. Arthur
Koestler suggests “If the creator had a purpose in equipping us with
a neck, he surely meant [for] us to stick it out.”
Many Bible characters
‘stuck their neck out’ during the course of their lives: David with
Goliath; Daniel with the interpretation of the king’s dream; Jacob
with wrestling the stranger; and Joseph with his decision to tell his
brothers his dream. What all these people had in common was that they
were confident about themselves and their confidence was revealed in
their actions. Confidence is the thinking process, while courage is
the acting process. Sometimes our self-confidence might seem to others
as cockiness, or overconfidence. We might seem pompous or full-of-ourselves.
But what they think is of no importance to us, because deep inside they
too desire to have the same kind of confidence and courage.
But you might say,
I like reading about these Bible characters and how they defeated whole
armies and turned sticks into snakes, but how does this translate and
help me in the 21st century? Good point. Maybe I should use
an example that is a little closer to home.
Marcus Garvey might
not be the spiritual model for confidence and courage, but an understanding
of the early part of his political life might help to put this topic
in focus. We know about how Garvey led a revolution of Black Nationalism
in America, Africa and the Caribbean. We know about his influence and
his popularity. We know about his impact on future Civil rights leaders.
What we may not know is that it took a lot of self confidence and courage
to do what Garvey did.
He started a revolution
during a time when America was still involved in the First World War.
He started a revolution that was ½ a century after the abolition of
slavery and ½ a century before the Civil rights era. He started a revolution
as a Black, Caribbean outsider in the metropolis of America. His probability
of succeeding in America was ridiculously minute especially when you
compare the fact that, at that time, his own society did not acknowledge
his efforts. He was riding the horse of success backwards. Yet somehow,
he managed to effect miraculous change in a country where Blacks were
physically free, but not free socially, politically and intellectually.
Why was this so? If one reads his speeches or quotes, what is clear
is that he believes in what he says and what he is about. No doubt lingers
in his words. His self confidence seeps through what he says more than
how he says it. And the fact that he believes what he says, enough to
act on it, is how he reveals his level of courage.
Many of us believe
in something, but not enough to act on it. Something is said about our
level of confidence, when we are unable to be courageous in regards
to what we say we believe in. If I say I can ride a bike but I do not
have enough confidence in myself to do it, then I won’t have the courage
to actually get on the bike and try it. The Biblical characters mentioned
earlier acted on their belief or confidence in themselves. If David
had confidence in himself that he could defeat Goliath, what would stop
him from acting on that belief? If I have confidence in myself that
I could succeed in something, what would stop me from pursuing it? The
amount of confidence you have in yourself, determines the level of courage
you will have to do what you are confident about. Being confident, like
courage, does not mean that you are not a little fearful about what
you want. Fear is a human emotion. There is nothing wrong or embarrassing
about it. But it should not be so great that it overwhelms your confidence
(your belief in yourself) and prevents you from acting or being courageous.
In whatever career
you find yourself in, in whatever relationship you develop, its success
depends on your own confidence and courage. What you put in it, is what
you will get out. Think of a bottle of water – when we fill the bottle
from the tap, what goes in is water. What we pour out of that same bottle
is water. We cannot expect to get soda from the bottle because we did
not put soda in it. Similarly, what we put in whatever we want to do,
is what we will get out of it. If you put in fear, you will get failure.
If you put in low self-esteem, you will get failure. But if you put
in confidence and courage, you will get success. God has made us powerful
enough that when we make up our minds about anything, we can achieve
it. Why do you think God confused the people’s language at the tower
of Babel? He says with his own lips in Genesis 11: 6 “Nothing will
be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do”. Isn’t
that amazing? Nothing that we imagine or desire will be kept from us
once we have enough confidence and courage to do it!
So, as I leave you
to go your individual ways in search of success by being confident and
courageous, I leave you with Nelson Mandela’s Triumph of the Spirit
which goes like this:
“Our worst fear is
not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is
that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not
our darkness that frightens us.
We ask ourselves: “Who
am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented or fabulous?”
You are a child of
God.
Your playing small
doesn’t serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened
about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.
We were born to make
manifest the glory of God within us.
It is not just in some
of us – it is in everyone.
And as we let our light
shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated
from our own fears, our presence automatically liberates others.”
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