Do We Even Need ‘Self-Belief’ to Perform Optimally?

When you consider the concept of self-belief, what does that mean to you?

Confidence?

Self-esteem?

Perhaps you could lump all of those words into one box.

Essentially, they are all ideas. Concepts. Subjective opinions that attempt to quantify personality.

They are bundles of thoughts we hold in our heads, held together by the sticky adhesive of memories and visions of ourselves in various contexts.

They are neither lies nor truths.

They are just thoughts.

And because they are thoughts, they are not accurate representations of reality.

I’ve spent a lot of wasted energy worrying about the significance of ‘self-belief’ as a concept.

If, for example, I’d see someone on a Ted X stage delivering an impassioned speech or someone who was relaxed in themselves around other people, I saw that person as possessing a tremendous amount of self-belief.

As for how they’d acquire that self-belief, was more of a mystery to me.

But I knew I needed to find more of it to better handle the challenges I was facing.

I knew I had self-belief in some things, like writing and drawing, but less of it for other things like public speaking.

Whenever I fell short in some way, I blamed my lack of self-belief or some ethereal and arbitrary label that defined my current confidence rating.

But in seeking out to attain more self-belief for me, I had my objectives wrong.

What I wish I’d known sooner was that a better strategy (if I can put it that way) for being at ease and ‘succeeding,’ was to drop the need to increase anything.

Instead, all I had to do was rediscover a more conscious state of being that I’d been neglecting.

When I say ‘conscious,’ I mean making full use of all my senses to be present with myself and my environment.

To rediscover a bliss in truly hearing, smelling, touching, observing, and merely being, free of judgement.

It is when we are entirely conscious like this that we can perform the most effectively in any situation.

I’m not saying that we need to stop thinking entirely. I pride myself in my thinking powers to plan and invent and visualise. The issue lies in living in perpetual thought, instead of using thought for its use as an occasional and powerful tool.

It is only then when our real confidence can come through — a confidence that is not based on any thought-created sense of who we are, but simply a confidence that reflects being in alignment with our real, original true selves, beneath thought.

Consciousness is about taking on the creative, in-the-moment, present state that looks outward, rather than the ego-driven, reactive state that continually worries about how we’re doing.

Yes, to do an excellent job of something, whether it’s communicating in an interview or fixing someone’s faulty plumbing, requires skill and practice. It is repetition that allows us to be more effective at a particular task at the level of technical expertise.

But to learn effectively in the first place requires presence, not belief. Skill is secondary to consciousness.

It is not self-belief one needs in facing any task, no matter how skilled — it is presence and stillness of thought.

When I try and be confident, or act like someone who has belief, I’m in my head, and this is never effective.

We don’t need to cling to having self-belief before starting things because these are thoughts that will hold us back.

We need to do more of what challenges us and bring as much consciousness as we can to each of these things. That is how to live an alive and continually moving and stretching life.

Interestingly the word ‘self-conscious’ is devoid of any real consciousness at all. It is its very opposite. To put our attention on ourselves when we could otherwise be present is to be lost in our thinking, which is unconscious.

Most of my life has been spent in unconsciousness; lost in various subjective opinions about things as a misguided means to make sense of the world.

I am rarely conscious for long stretches, but I have cultivated a general consciousness that builds every day.

I do see now that my years of unconsciousness were a tremendous gift.

The suffering this created drove me to find Consciousness and embracing her like a long lost child.

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If these ideas stirred something in you, I’d love to read your comment below. I read them all.

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Alex

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