Self-Confidence
Have you ever heard the phrase “Comparison is the death of joy”? Or its companion phrase “Comparison is the thief of joy”? These quotes, from Mark Twain and President Theodore Roosevelt, respectively, may sound like important advice but what do they have to do with self-confidence?
Well, everything.
Self-confidence is defined as “certainty in oneself and one’s powers and abilities.” Faith is defined as “a firm belief in something for which there is no proof.”
Here’s an example. Remember the scene in “The Sound of Music” where Sister Maria is on her way to meet the Von Trapp family for the first time?
I love this scene. I can’t help but smile when I watch it, and somehow it makes me want to jump out of my chair and do something productive!
Sister Maria has been an absolute failure as a nun. To wit, the head of the abbey sends her away to work as a governess for a family whose unruly children are so rebellious that they can’t keep a babysitter in the house for more than a few days.
It’s as if Maria’s being punished twice for her lack of success as a nun – first kicked out of the abbey, then sent to an impossible job where everyone before her has failed. Quite a blow for a young girl who only wanted to do something good with her life by serving others.
Nevertheless, in this scene, Maria’s joy, energy, and optimism are palpable. The song she sings is called “I Have Confidence.”
What I love about Maria’s approach to her situation is that she is brimming with self-confidence even though by common standards she should be crying about her loss, wallowing in depression, railing against the injustice in the world, and feeling guilty for failing her friends (and God).
Think of a situation in which you feel like you’ve “failed” at something, be it work, school, a relationship with a family member or friend, a health issue, a choice you’ve made, or even a broken New Year’s resolution.
What is it that makes you feel like you’ve failed?
Not sure? Wait for it. Can you guess?
Comparison.
Let’s take Maria as an example. How would she be feeling if she were comparing herself to the other girls at the abbey? Pretty bad. None of them had to be sent away; they were all living together enjoying the life that Maria had wanted for herself. They didn’t have any problem following the rules; they managed to show up on time for matins, chores, and meals.
Leaving the nuns aside, what if Maria compared herself to the other governesses that had either quit or been fired because they couldn’t take care of the Von Trapp children? Those governesses had decades of experience, teaching degrees, training in child psychology, recommendations from superior institutions, glowing references from other families, but even they couldn’t do the job.
Who was Maria to think that she, an untrained dropout from a convent with no experience, would fare any better than they did?
This is what comparison does to us – it robs us of our joy and erodes all vestiges of self-confidence.
Sometimes it can be so debilitating as to paralyze us from trying something new, for fear that we will fail – or worse, be judged.
Comparing ourselves to others or what we (and others) expect kills our joy and destroys our self-confidence. It makes us feel like we are “less than” others, which is a lie we sometimes tell ourselves to keep from shining our brightest.
Don’t believe the lie!
And if you need a boost of self-confidence, look no further than our friend, William Shakespeare, whose Sonnet 18 tells us what we really are, deep down:
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”
#confidence #self-confidence #shine #sing #dance #love #eternalsummer #thesoundofmusic #mariavontrapp #sonnet18 #shakespeare #williamshakespeare
