Building confidence is a skill.

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For there are many ways to look at confidence.

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We often do not think about where it comes from.

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Or how do we increase it.

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One of the biggest problems is we think confidence is only this one, huge thing.

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The truth is there are many types of confidence.

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We may feel confident in one area of our life and not another.

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Having confidence in our career but not our relationships, as an example.

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We might feel that we are not a confident person in general.

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Yet that general feeling is made up of lots of little feelings.

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We can be confident in many ways in our life that we do not recognize or take for granted.

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Are we confident to walk? To eat? To bathe?

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Do we feel confident to drive a car or get around on public transit?

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How do we feel about being able use a phone or a computer?

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Or even how to use a pen or pencil?

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We are not monolithic.

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We are made up of many confidences and non-confidences.

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Confidence is specific to the task at hand.

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And confidence can also be transferred from one skill to another.

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Are you confident at learning a new skill?

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Perhaps you learned how to fix your bike when something goes wrong.

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Maybe now you can help someone change a tire on a car, when you never did it before.

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On the opposite side, perhaps you tried your hand at a business and if failed.

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Now someone brings you a new opportunity.

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Because of your past experience you don't have confidence you can be successful at it.

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Yet you feel quite confident at your job.

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When we stop approaching confidence as just one giant thing in our lives, we can start to build our confidence systematically.

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For confidence is not about ability, it is about belief.

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Do you believe you can do something? Learn something? Experience something?

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When we take inventory of all things we are confident about in our life, we can build our overall confidence.

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If we come across something that we are not confident about, we can try to find something close to it that we are confident about.

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We can transfer that confidence from one activity to another.

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The key is finding the right activity.

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Confidence is not only about our history.

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It is about how we look at that history and how we decide to use it to serve us.

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So where are you lacking confidence?

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Is there something else you are confident about that you can use to help you build your confidence in it?

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~ Sam Liebowitz, The Conscious Consultant

Host of The Conscious Consultant Hour