Two Cents: Where Does Your Confidence Come From?

So I suck at basketball, right? But I do want to get better, so like many other millennials in their endeavors to become an quasi-expert, I watched a youtube video about basketball confidence. They say in sports that confidence is an integral part of doing well. Skills and drills are important but if you’re not confident then you won’t be very successful because you don’t believe that those practices will help you succeed. 

A while back, someone asked me where my confidence comes from. I translated that to a more ubiquitous thought; where does confidence or the feeling of being confident really come from? To be honest, I was super perplexed. I had no idea how to respond. I wanted to give some witty one-liner but then I realized that I’ve never really put much thought into it, like ever. So I went to the ultimate source of knowledge, only second to God: Google. The definition of confidence goes as follows: n. the feeling or belief that one can rely on someone or something; firm trust. After I read this definition, I thought “ok cool, but it still doesn’t really give me a definitive answer as to where confidence comes from”. Then, I thought about where trust comes from, and identity and an existential rabbit hole, so I just let it be then forgot about it. 

Flash-forward a bit, I’m eating at Sul and Bean and talking about this topic with two friends. And it really came down to this: confidence comes from taking ownership of (insert whatever you want here). In other words, you are confident in x y or z because you took ownership of said x y z. How you took ownership of that depends on the individual and the nature of x y z, and that's maybe for another time. But back to basketball. Some folks are very confident in their jumper (if you don’t know what a jumper is by now, you need to watch some Kobe Bryant, aka the GOAT, videos on youtube). But where does this confidence comes from? It comes from their belief that they own this skill because they put the time and effort into perfecting and practicing this shot, time and time again. They took ownership in their craft, through a means that they saw fit. 

So why does any of this even really matter? Well I don’t know about you but there’s a lot of things I’m not very confident in. Whether it be a job, a game, a class, or my three-point shot (if you ask me, this is the one I’m probably least confident in out of the list), there’s always something that we’re not comfortable with because we don’t own it. And I see a lot of folks, including myself, if we just put the time and effort into really working at it, it could be such an avenue for growth. But we get so lost in this idea that confidence has to be this metaphysical, genetic/intrinsic, psychological mumbo jumbo, that we lose sight of the idea that it can be developed. Confidence comes from practice and repetition, not necessarily from yourself, but from the process of doing.

To draw an illustration, I’m a pre-med student that has pretty crappy grades. Yes, it’s possible; yes, I'm freaking out; and yes, I’m still trying to go to med school. So its safe to say that my confidence is at an all-time low, especially after graduation. But how do I rebuild my confidence in pursuing after my dream? It’s not going to magically fall out of the sky or I can drink some serum that’ll change my GPA (but if there is, please send some). It really is just going back to my desk day in and day out, and studying more for the next step, and grinding it out. And by taking minor victories, I rebuild my confidence and keep moving forward. <- I’m not here yet, but I'm confident I will be, ha ha ha.

So the real question to ask ourselves is, are you willing to put in the work in refining ______ by doing ______ so that you can be confident in ______?

If you are, then see you in the lab. 

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*Discretion: Just because you’re confident doesn’t mean you’ll achieve everything in life. It’s just one aspect, but arguably a pretty big one.