- Confidence is an attitude about your skills.
It's about your abilities.
It's about how good you are in different situations.
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It means being realistic about your abilities
including about your strengths and your weaknesses.
For me, an attitude of confidence comes from...
Look, I see in therapy a lot people get down on themselves
and I like to tell them that
if you're full of yourself
and all you see is the positive
and all you see is what you're great at
or you overestimate how great you are at things
that is lying to yourself.
But it's just as much of a lie to live in the space
where you think that you suck
and that you're terrible at everything.
The fact is, literally, everybody on the planet
is a collection of strengths and weaknesses.
Literally, everybody on the planet
has things that they were born to do
that they come naturally to them, come easy to them,
they can learn them quickly, pick them up
and every single person has things
that are hard for them to do, hard for them to learn,
take a lot of effort,
and maybe they never even fully get there
no matter how hard they try, every person.
The issue is that we often compare our weaknesses
to another person's strength, and then we feel deficient.
If you're in this head space that you stink
and that you're no good, you're lying to yourself.
You're lying to yourself
as much as that narcissistic egomaniac that you see
that thinks they're so special
and that their poop smells like dandelions,
you're lying to yourself as much as them.
There are things that you're not great at.
Okay.
So play to your strengths.
What were you put here to do?
The things that you're good at,
the things that you're passionate about
can be your gift to the world.
You just gotta get creative.
Look at me, for example,
I'm known for talking about movies
and TV shows on the internet.
I, for a long time I didn't think
that was a marketable skill.
(laughs)
I thought, okay, there's already people
who talk about movies and TV shows on the internet.
I'm not gonna do it any better than they can.
And then I realize I can do it in a way that helps people,
and that's my secret sauce.
But I literally geek out about Star Wars
and I feed my family doing that.
What are you good at?
You may think it's not marketable.
I promise you it is.
You may think that it doesn't benefit society.
I promise you it can.
Whatever you're good at, whatever you're passionate about
that is something that you can give to the world.
And yeah, maybe right now you can't make a living doing it.
Maybe you have to do something on the side to pay the bills
while you figure out how to make a living
doing the thing that you love the most.
Or maybe you never make a living
doing the thing you love the most.
That's just the thing you do that makes you happy.
You pay the bill some other way.
But the point is, your confidence comes from recognizing
that you are good at things
and that the things you're good at
have worth and value simply by virtue
of you being a human being and you have strengths
that you can put out into the world
or don't put 'em out into the world.
You have strengths that can be used
just to bring you happiness and joy.
A lot of us lack confidence because of our weaknesses.
And what's interesting is that
the people who lack confidence because of their weaknesses,
are usually very forgiving towards others
and their weaknesses and their flaws,
they're usually very loving and accepting of others
because that's what they want for themselves.
But they don't give that to themselves.
They wait for somebody else to give it to them.
I know because I was that person for a long time.
In college I did stage comedy.
I won the Campus-Wide Talent Show.
I was pretty popular.
You would never know that most days
I completely hated myself.
I guess completely is a little strong.
I hated myself about 80, 85%
because my weaknesses and my flaws and my struggles
were all magnified and amplified in my own mind.
And in my mind they took away from my worth.
They took away from my value.
And as I said, everybody else,
everybody else was worthy of compassion, but not me.
And then I had to ask myself,
what makes you so special
that your weaknesses and your flaws
make you worthy of contempt?
But everybody else deserves compassion?
And I started to give it to myself,
and I started to work on my weaknesses
to turn them into strengths.
And this is where an attitude of confidence comes from.
That I am good at things
and that the things that I'm not great at
I can become great at.
If I want to, if I care enough to,
there's some things that I'm not great at folks
and I don't care.
(laughs)
I am never gonna become amazing at cross-stitching.
I honor and respect the cross-stitchers of the world.
More power to you.
I don't care enough to get good at that
and so that doesn't keep me up at night.
But what about the things I do care about?
Like not letting my family down,
like not letting you down,
like rising up to my potential as a person,
and attitude of confidence helps with that.
Henry Ford said, whether you believe you can
or whether you believe you can't, you're right.
So what do you believe?
This is what an attitude of confidence is.
We've touched a little bit on how to march towards it
and how to achieve it.
But in our next video we're really gonna cover
how to get there,
how to build that attitude of confidence in yourself.
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