Being confident=Please be Yourself

Jan 25 , 2019 10 min read 1387 Views 2 Likes 0 Comments

Just Be Confident

How many times have we come across this piece of advice from our beloved friends, parent, teachers, mentor etc? The answer is a thousand many times maybe while going for a job interview or mostly while facing an audience, presentation before class fellows or simply confronting someone, talking your heart aloud (Ironies of our times that one needs to be confident to do this, something as natural as this requires confidence).

Have you seen an auto driver, have you seen a seller in railway coach from small kids to women’s, physically disabled persons, or people selling stuff on the roads? Have you seen the courage, fearlessness in their body? Have any of you ever wondered what makes them so fearless and confident? See speaking among an audience of thousands is a skill, yes and so is to sell products running from one street to another.

On one hand, we have institutions training people to learn how to be a salesperson, on the other hand, we have these people unlearned, unpolished yet doing their job. On one hand, people are acquiring these so-called skills in business schools, on the other hand, these poor people do it daily.

Does their confidence stem from the issue of money and hunger alone? Like "Jab pet ka sawal hota hai to kuch bhi karna padta hai”.I would say no.

So do we need to create extreme conditions to generate this level of confidence for another well off people? Yes, I agree it’s the harshness and the bitterness, the poor conditions of living but these people are fearless.

Then why is that people belonging to other social strata are often stung by low confidence. Why they need classes and lectures for confidence. Is it that because they are more privileged in life. Is their privilege a source of their lesser confidence? True. One who’s not privileged will develop confidence as it’s the only survival skill. And if confidence counts as survival skill then in the true-sense most of us are not even surviving. See these people know it. They were never told to be confident. Small kids selling clothes in shop deals with customers ranging from 20yr to 80yr yet the casualty of the transaction doesn’t make one mark out the difference of the small kids from that of the elder.

It’s also because they are projecting themselves truly. They are there as shopkeeper selling things because they need money to feed themselves.

In all the above instances in the first paragraph maybe we are trying to project something else. And hence the confidence dilemma. We are not true in our communication in all these incidents that’s why confidence goes up and down. When we start speaking truly, speaking truth to oneself, saying clearly that’s when we get informal, casual, no need to fear.

What does it mean to be confident: it simply means to be oneself, to be oneself. The moment one rejects oneself mentally in any instance, for example, you are in front of the audience to speak and you tell yourself that you are not good enough. What happens then?

Why speaking before a crowd becomes difficult. Why it is not difficult for a 10-year-old child selling toys on the street or a vendor to do the same thing. Why?

Let’s just be ourselves.