Is your confidence confining your performance?

BirdieChao
Jul 30, 2017
5 min read

This is Birdie's 18th personal article

As students, I think all of us will have a certain expectation on ourselves on our performance. Be it academics results or socialising, the amount of confidence we have in ourselves will make a huge difference in our performances. Especially in competitive sports, not having enough confidence in yourself will cause a lot of problems in the game. However, we rarely notice that it is actually confidence behind the scenes, instead we think of our skills or even our personality. So today, let’s talk about confidence.

- The Bird that need to put more efforts in academics recently

Before I start, let’s define the term of confidence and performance so everybody knows where I’m going into. The definitions are created by me for this article, not from any dictionary or so.

- Confidence: Self-esteem, self-trust.

- Performance: The way of doing things/work.

Great! From these 2 definition, I hope I help you to gain a better clarity of what I’m introducing next.

Confidence is something that’s out of our mind most of the time when we are reflecting on our poor or not up to standard performances. We often look at the more straightforward reasons then take it one step deeper to look into our psychological state.

Here are some situations that we might have faced before but have you wonder why?

- You are in a freshmen orientation camp and everybody around you is a stranger. You have the strong urge in you to start a conversation with your group mates, but you are too shy to do so. Why?

- You are playing some sport with you friend. But somehow, you just always under-performed when you are around that one specific friend. Why?

- You are recommended for a leadership for a big event, the person appointing you have a lot trust in you that you can carry out the role well but you just don’t dare to take up the role. Why?

Now that I’ve already exposed that I’m talking about confidence, it is not hard for you to see that all the root reason for the above situations are all caused by low confidence level. Aka low self-esteem.

But how does low self-esteem affect our performances? It’s not like there’s someone tangible in front you stopping you to do anything. But it just affects your performance so much sometimes.

Reason being is very simple, although there nothing tangible in front of you stopping you, but there’s someone intangible in front of you giving you the resistance to perform till your normal standard. And the “intangible someone” is no one else but you, yourself.

You are the one applying that kind of unknown forces that prevents you to do anything up to your normal standard because the lack of trust in yourself and unable to convince yourself positively is actually forming the “intangible YOU”!

And the “intangible you” will be demoralising you because it will make you feel that you just can’t do the things you want to do and make yourself feel that you are useless. Then once you get affected by that kind of emotion and didn’t want to fight back, the “intangible you” will grow. And it does not have a size limit like our height, it’s unlimited.

The “intangible you” sometimes is growing so fast that you are unable to fight back in any way, till the extreme that you might go into depression. Of course, I’m nor cursing you to be into depression, my main point here is once you let the “intangible you” grow within you, the speed of it’s growth will be so rapid that if you didn’t try to stop it from growing, it will consume you.

I don’t know about you, but when I feel that the “intangible me” growing inside me, my world will turn black and white and make me feel very unmotivated. And I’m being legit over here, because I experience it during my basketball competition L. And how do I get back positivity back is really because that I have lovely teammates that make me feel loved.

You might be a bit lost on why did I go from confidence to self-esteem to positivity within yourself. I made this one big round on a purpose, it’s because all of these things are all about you. And all of these is the more, the merrier. When one of them is gone, the other 2 will follow and vice-versa.

Recall the moments when you achieved something. Think, which time did you not feel all these 3 feelings. No matter which comes first, the other 2 will come along.

From this we can actually see that being happy is one of the key to build your self-esteem and confidence because there is always positivity in you when you are happy. So the more happy times you have, the more positivity you have, the more other 2 will follow, the smaller the “intangible you will be!

So here, to make you my lovely readers happy, I will be giving my top secret on how to stay positive and happy with your life. It is something that I realise myself and find that it really works for me.

The secret is “Get the F*** out of your house and have fun.”

Here have fun has no limitations, you can choose the activities yourself. Going out with friend, go sightseeing, go do anything you like but just don’t stay at home.

The reason being home is somewhere we rest at home and it provides a very comfortable sensation. However, this sensation will cut off the happiness level of us because we, humans, are meant to go out and play and have fun.

If you argue that staying home and watch your favourite drama series will give you happiness, I can’t deny that. But what happens after that is emptiness. So what you will do is to find a new drama to replace the old one and the cycle continues.

However, with going out and interacting with friends or with yourself will give a different level of happiness. Because the happiness that we get from going out is actually much harder to get from staying at home, so our brain will actually appreciate this kind of happiness more. Therefore this happiness level is much higher that we will recall it and taste the happiness come back sometimes.

I personally would recommend to go out alone more, because it’s actually more about yourself instead of you guys. So, spend some time yourself and go have some fun. Joining the strangers for activities is a good way to kick start.

That’s the reason why I’ve been going to events and thing alone and experiencing things by myself. Because I realise that sometimes when we go with our friends, we need to take care of our friends needs and happiness as well. So sometimes you might not get what you want the most. However, by going yourself, you have no such restriction and you can really do whatever you want. And this control that you have over yourself. Isn’t it a way to show that you are confident about the choices you make you happy?

It's your choice

To live in your dreams or to be living your dreams

-BirdieChao