Managing and building self-confidence
I am self-confident most of the time but the fact of the matter is that I am not taking charge of my confidence level. By chance, I am naturally handed a set of skills, behavior and attractiveness that provides me with a certain level of confidence. Much less intentional than it might seem, I further engage in confidence-building activities, such as sports, expanding on my formal education, building a career, spend time with friends, or aim for the approval of women. As I am thinking about it, the last one seems counter-productive in the long run and I have largely abandoned that path since I started dating my girlfriend.
When I think about my friends and colleagues, I am starting to believe that some of them perform certain activities that they know are favorable to them under almost any condition, a ritual directly targeted at achieving a certain base-confidence. Or to level up before, during or after critical events in their private or professional life. Further, I am now starting to remember hours of podcast interviews where psychological tricks like power poses and self-affirmation were discussed in great detail — potentially valuable material that I had been passively [read: carelessly] consuming as if it was tap water.
Anything bad about this? Well, I have made it here and I am writing this down at the age of 28 with a well-paid job, a flat in Downtown Zurich, steady reduction of my student debt, and a decent outlook on my life going forward. All of this could be one of fifteen notches better but the easy answer is a clear “No”. I have been doing well for myself and we are talking upper-quartile-of-first-world problems. But despite these realizations and me listing things that I deem important and determinants of my confidence level at this particular point in time, there are moments in life where none of it matters and I feel like crap. Just like for other people (maybe not all), my mood turns sour, I have less energy, I don’t engage socially or physically, the fridge gets emptied, Netflix and the internet are becoming close allies. And those things I do not necessarily wish to happen.
The careful reader had a few chances to understand that while not necessarily with full awareness, (1) I am doing something to get through these valleys of reduced confidence and (2) I am doing it well enough to have an acceptable standard of living.
In order to proceed, a good research question is needed. For example:
How can I build and actively manage my confidence level?
The good news: after typing “How to build confid + ↓ + [Enter]”, Google kindly gave me 0.57 seconds of their time to look up 277 Million results on that matter. So it seems possible to come up with ideas. The bad news: I still have to find out what works and what not and I am not eager to spend the rest of my life reading through Google’s kind compilation. In the end, I am looking for two things: a credible indication on my confidence and then a few fire crackers that I can light up when I go below a certain level.
Whenever I have new ideas, I test them with whoever is in sight and looks ready to take an odd question. My flatmate is a serial victim and told me two interesting things that work for him: First, he goes running at least twice a week. Running seems to provide him with a base confidence that allows for taller buildings to be built on top. Second, he makes use of power poses. This way, he joins the ranks with no other than the embodiment of power, Angela Merkel with her Merkel Diamond. His name for these things is placebos, which I think is an excellent analogy for what they do.
Only about 3.5 more paragraphs and we are both through with this. I don’t like medium posts that are split up in several stories (to do what… get more clicks and claps?) so this should end with some results. Fast forward!
While typing all this, I tried the power pose of my flatmate. It did work but of course I immediately told myself “ahh, that was just the placebo… AAAAHHH! Nice!” Introducing the placebo effect of the placebo — perfect! It was late that night so the heavier stuff had to be postponed. The next day I swapped lunch with my colleagues for a light run and — of course — it felt great, no surprises there. However, contrary to every other day I had done this at work, I made a commitment to myself that I was going to take a run at least every third day of the week, no matter what, for 90 days. Despite winter coming, I had experience with harder things for 90 days and the challenge was accepted.
After those three months I sat back down and checked what happened. On the surface, I did get over 30 runs under my belt during that time which is above my long-term average. I also tried the power poses and, while in the beginning I spent about half the posing time ridiculing myself, I did note that my mood lightened up after I did the exercise. I had already experienced a similar effect after meditation but I was surprised to see first results after just posing a few seconds.
While those two seem to be working for me, I regard both as more near-time measures that give me a good baseline confidence — I call it manage confidence. Looking ahead, I am curious to experiment with other habits which help me building my long-term confidence level — you probably guessed: build confidence.
This probably involves some more work but if through that process I find the right buttons to push, good things lay ahead of me!
What are your experiences with this? What is working for you and what not? I am curious to read about it!
