The Confidence Paradox — Understand this and you’ll be more confident forever

Description: The secret to confidence. Dr. Stephanie Lang describes the paradox of confidence. As you understand it and act on it, you’ll find your self-confidence shooting through the roof.

Transcript: Hi. A very common question that I receive is, “Dr. Lang, how do I become more confident?” To answer it most directly. It is a huge paradox to life that in order to feel happy and confident and joyful, we have to feel like we’re growing. We have to feel like we’re growing spiritually, like we’re bettering ourselves in our behavior, in our mindset and so forth. Well growth, to grow, requires that we get uncomfortable. So we have to grow to be happy, but to grow means we’ve got to be unhappy! Or uncomfortable. It becomes less and less ‘unhappy’ the more you get used to it. It gets to more like an ‘uncomfortable’.

So, what do we do about this? Well, life is going to have, everybody has pain and uncomfortableness. And I believe that the more you push yourself toward the type of uncomfortableness that is growth producing – like pushing yourself to speak in public if that makes you really anxious, or go beyond in your creativity. Or go beyond what you have ever done before at work, so that you get nervous. When we do, when we focus on putting that kind of uncomfortable in our life, we’re going to have less of the other kind, the negative sorts of uncomfortable which are things like relationship break-ups, and car crashes, and just these – drama, lots of drama in our life. We’ll have less of it, and when it does happen, it’s not going to be a big deal to us, because we’re so focused on our passion and growing ourselves. Be like, maybe we have a little fender bender. “Oh well whatever,” you know, it is so minor. We don’t even spend any time thinking about it or even tell anyone about it, because we don’t care.

If we, if we aren’t pushing ourselves to grow, and get, have that kind of uncomfortableness, we will make little things into big deals and dramas and so forth, because we need to have conflict. We actually need to have uncomfortableness in our life in order to feel happy with our life!  We will get, we will get down and actually even go into depression if we don’t have enough conflict.

It is kind of like, it is just like movies, people who make movies. A movie has to have conflict right, in order for it to be interesting. If it is just happy, everybody’s just happy and going along, you get bored after a while. And then if you had to watch that, you would start to feel eeerugh, annoyed, and even down, down, down into depression, if you, as you uh, try to bury that feeling of annoyance. So hey, if movies need conflict in order to keep us interested and happy, so do our lives, our lives. You get it? We need conflict. So if we don’t create a positive conflict – which is growth, you know, if we don’t push ourselves to become uncomfortable to grow, we are going to bring in to our lives the negative conflict, the energy. Because our energy, yeah, we’ll want drama (i.e., conflict/uncomfortableness) in order to have interest.

So what I challenge you to do is, What, you know what it is, What are the things that you, actions you can take in your life that would make you nervous, but it’s just a little bit beyond your comfort zone? So you’re not—, you don’t want to push yourself so far. But you want to push yourself a little bit more each time. I am sure you know of the famous movie maker Steven Spielberg? Well he says that with each movie, he goes above and beyond, what he has ever done before. You know, whether it, it’s technique, whatever it is. He said he pushes himself so much that he gets really like, even feeling nauseous and anxious and so forth. And if he doesn’t have that feeling, he knows that he’s not doing a growth orientated, he’s not making himself grow like he wants to. I’ve heard actors say that unless a part causes them a little anxiety, they won’t take it. Good actors always want to grow, have each part help them to grow. And that’s, people who grow in their jobs are—, feel like they’re growing, feel like their jobs are growing them, emotionally, spiritually, behaviorally. Those are very happy, tend to be very happy, confident people.

So that’s what we need ultimately, that’s a core of what we need for confidence—is, self-growth. So what would give you self-growth? And not only self-growth, so if you’re listening to like audiobooks and things like, videos like this, you’re growing and that’s going to help your confidence. You also need the kind of growth where you get uncomfortable. And that’s a very different kind of uncomfortable than the kind of uncomfortable you might feel when, say you’re dating a guy and something’s not right. You can’t put your finger on it, but it’s this really uneasy feeling? That’s a different sort of uncomfortable feeling, than the kind you feel when you’re pushing yourself. For me to like give a talk in public, that kind of uncomfortable, I know deep down inside is going to be good for me to push through it. So it’s important to distinguish those, and be in touch with your inner voice and your feelings, to know the difference. (whispering) So apply this to your life. And have a great day.