Everyone wants to be confident. There are so many different suggestions on how to develop confidence, and I’m sure there are plenty of good ways to do it, but there’s only one way I know for sure. How do I know? I know because I found the answer the Eclectic Method way: by being a scientist, experimenting, and finding the truth through experience.
I tried a lot of different ways to build confidence, and through my experiments I found that the way to build confidence is through building self-trust. The cornerstone of confidence is self-trust because having self-trust is knowing you can rely on yourself. You can trust yourself to do what must be done. It is knowing that when things get rough, you will get through it and you won’t break under pressure. And the best way I know how to build self-trust is through consistent exercise.
Building Self-Trust
Exercising consistently is an excellent way to build self-trust. It doesn’t matter if it’s running, going to the gym, martial arts, or sports, but you need to be exercising. The important part about how you exercise is that you’re making it difficult enough that you have to push yourself slightly beyond what you’re comfortable with.
It’s not supposed to be easy. You don’t learn to trust yourself when you’re playing life on easy mode.
Pushing yourself more than you’re comfortable with during exercise is important because doing so means that you’re not always going to want to do it. It requires discipline, and developing discipline is essential because you cannot be confident as an undisciplined person.
Try to name one person you know who is undisciplined that also has your full trust and confidence. If you can name someone you’re lying to yourself, and if you can’t, you see my point.
When you tell yourself that you’re gonna do something and you do it regardless of the difficulty involved, you build self-trust. You are developing discipline, and if you do difficult things consistently, and you push yourself slightly beyond your current limit consistently, you will begin to trust yourself.
Trust is easy when things are easy. Trust is only true when it’s tested through difficulty. Think about how you develop trust with other people. It’s easy when there’s nothing around to threaten your trust in them, but when your trust is put to the test, that’s when you find out if you can trust them or not.
When you are trying to be better, to be more than you currently are, but you can’t get yourself to do what you know you need to do to get to the next level, then you can’t trust yourself. You can’t grow in confidence because your actions are always proving you can’t handle more. The evidence supports the case that you aren’t any better. So why would you expect your confidence to grow?
When you exercise not only will your body become more capable, but your mind will grow stronger as well. The mind and the body have a degree of correspondence, and it should not be ignored. When you are exercising and your body sends signals of distress to the brain, but your Will orders the body to keep going despite the pain and emotion, you gain control over the body. When you develop control over the body, you gain control over the mind as well.
Mens sana en corpre sano. A healthy mind in a healthy body. A rising tide raises all ships. When you develop strength of body, naturally the mind is also strengthened. Things that are strong can withstand opposition. You can trust a strong thing to not break. You are confident in its strength and its ability to stand firm when faced with a challenge. When your mind and body are strong, your mental attitude will be one of calmness and confidence.
Improve yourself daily with exercise and overtime you begin to trust yourself. When you trust yourself to handle hard things, you can have confidence in the face of challenge, which is really the only time confidence counts.
When you decide to exercise consistently and you do what you resolved to do, you begin to trust yourself. You are proving to yourself that if you set your mind to something, you can do it. You develop self-reliance and that builds confidence, but of course the looks that come from exercise help too.
Strength boosts confidence, but the root of confidence is trust in yourself. It comes from knowing that when push comes to shove, you will do what is necessary, and you will not shy away from difficulty.
Trust comes from proof and from evidence. By consistently exercising you are gathering proof that you can trust yourself. You are gathering evidence that you can handle challenges and responsibility and that is what builds confidence. Eventually, there begins to be overwhelming evidence of strength and discipline, and confidence is a byproduct of those qualities.
We are not aiming for confidence, we are developing the qualities that produce it.
Have you ever known someone who said “you should trust me,” and then their actions and behavior prove otherwise? I’ve known such people, and I’ve never been able to trust them. I can’t trust them because there’s no proof, no evidence that they are trustworthy. In fact, the evidence says the opposite.
Their actions and behaviors aren’t consistent with their word, and so its impossible to fully trust them. You can’t have confidence in that kind of person, so how can you trust yourself if you do the same? How can you be confident in yourself when the evidence says otherwise? Would you give someone who you didn’t trust a task or a mission or a secret that was important to you? No, because you don’t have confidence in them. The same concept applies to the relationship you have with yourself.
The clues are in the language. When you trust someone to do something, you say you have confidence in them.
Building Familiarity
Consistent exercise develops a familiarity with difficulty. When you’ve developed familiarity with difficulty and life throws you a difficult situation or a difficult decision, you can handle it because you’ve been collecting evidence daily that you can handle difficulty through exercise. Not only have you been collecting the evidence, but actually doing hard things builds your capability to do even more difficult things.
It is natural as human beings to fear the unknown. So when we become friends with difficulty through exercise, we don’t fear the unknown so much anymore. If you are pushing yourself during your workout, that means that you are going beyond what you know you are capable of, and if you do that often enough, you stop being so scared of taking on more than you think you can handle.
You know that you can trust yourself to attempt something you might not be capable of and know that you will not break if you fail because you’ve been there before. You can either be familiar with the disappointment of coming close, or with the disappointment of knowing you never got close at all. When you exercise consistently, you develop familiarity with failure, and you learn not to fear it.
In fact, with time and experience, you will seek pushing your limits to failure because you understand that you don’t actually know limits until you fail. Going beyond limits means putting yourself in a position to fail time and time again.
When you are constantly pushing yourself to your limits during exercise, you are guaranteed to fail, and you do so often. When you’re familiar with failure, and you know that your world will not shatter if you fail, you begin to fear failure less and less.
You will become comfortable and confident in the face of difficulty. You may even start to seek it out. The confident embrace challenge, and the insecure run from anything that may expose their shortcomings.
When you take on more than you might be capable of by exercising consistently, you develop familiarity with challenges, and you aren’t afraid of them when they appear.
You are creating familiarity with discomfort so when life throws something at you that creates discomfort, you’ve already built up a capacity to withstand it, and when your capacity to withstand discomfort is large, then the confidence in your ability to overcome it will be so as well.
Sometimes when we face challenges, part of the reason why we experience fear is because we are unsure of our abilities. By engaging in consistent exercise, you get an accurate account of your abilities, you know what you are capable of because you’ve tested it.
Learn to trust yourself. Strengthen mind and body. Then confidence will come naturally.
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