Can confidence be nurtured or are we born with it?

Have you ever really noticed a child? When a baby is born, he’s free and full of confidence. The child is clear and confident about what he wants, and he clearly communicates it without prejudice or hesitation. Almost till the age of 6-10 years, there is an abundance of self-confidence and effectiveness in communication.

Contrary to what many industry experts, courses, programmes, workshops and training sessions would have you believe — everyone is born with the level of confidence they require to live out their life, their purpose and their journey.

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After childhood, we start gathering the baggage of life. Every time someone says — “Are you sure?”, “Work hard so you don’t fail”, or  “A lot depends upon you!”, we feel the fear of failing and slowly start to resist taking on big challenges, so, as not to face that fear. Over time (years) even though people outside may stop saying it, our mind remembers all the times we failed at something and slowly the self-doubt  layers start to add up. Now a confident, outspoken and fully self-expressed child slowly starts to doubt and second guess himself.

We are filled with experiences of failures, rejections and belief in our incompetency. And as there is a need for confidence in the market and different industries. We sometimes, put up a façade of false self-confidence and project it to the world, hoping no one would find out.

However, inside there is a huge conflict between what we are really feeling and what we are pretending to be, so, that we may be accepted, acknowledged and appreciated. Over time this gap continues to eat us inside, like a termite and it increases the feeling of something lacking in our lives.

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Time and again, it has been proved that potential is never an issue with human beings. We can achieve whatever we believe — but most of us carry a lot of unconscious beliefs in our failures, our rejections and our lack of success. The more pressure we apply to be confident and self-assured, the more the absence of it shows up. What we resist persists. We resist failure, un-surety, and lack of confidence and that is what we continuously and ongoingly attract in our life.

Over time, the amount of pressure and fear that we carry increases to a tremendous amount — the pressure that no one should find out about our lack of self-confidence and it slowly starts to affect our communication, our performance and overall self-esteem. When someone says you are confident, you feel validated. It is like what you are trying to prove has been accepted. But that confidence is very short-lived and we need to put a lot of pressure on ourselves to perform, every time.

To access that inherent and inborn self-confidence, instead of adding anything new, acquiring any new knowledge or training, or attending a workshop, we need to work on removing the years of conditioning. We need to work on removing those old limiting beliefs that are not serving us. Beliefs that limit us and hold us back from living our truest potential. We need to break through the years of layering of self-doubt, judgment and fear of failure and reconnect to that confidence that is already there inside us all.