Confidence

0 0 1 415 2369 Reaching Out 2 U 19 5 2779 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE

Confidence: full trust; belief in the powers, trustworthiness, or reliability of a person or thing

You look good, you feel good. When you feel good, you play good. When you play good, the pay is good – Deion Sanders

Prime time was one of the most confident players I have ever seen on the football field. Some would say he was borderline cocky. Some would say it he was arrogant. I’m not going to go there because I am a Deion fan but the qualities and characteristics he possessed is what made him a Hall of Fame player. I think his example of confidence is one that I believe is transferable to any arena in life. If you don’t believe in your own abilities no one else will.

What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? That’s kind of a deep question. I wonder how far would we push the limits of our own imaginations if this were true. I believe we can be our own worst enemy when it comes to this. We allow our previous failures to dictate how we behave in the future which hinders us from being successful in the future. So what you failed at doing something. Perhaps you made a simple mistake in planning and preparing that can easily be fixed with a little tweaking. Each victory in life is one step away but you’ll never get there if you never make a move. I worked with a lot of teens and what seems to hinder most of them from excelling and getting to the next level is a lack of confidence. They could be on the brink of a breakthrough but the cloud of defeat, disappointment and failure looms over their every movement. The fear of failure sometimes is too much to overcome and they end up retreating instead of being confident in their abilities. 

It’s one thing to be confident in another person or thing but to be confident in oneself is an entirely different animal. What I want to improve upon as I continue to work on with the people in my leadership program is instilling self-confidence in them. There is much to be learned from victories but much more can be learned in defeat. In victory you can learn that you are capable of completing tasks and goals but there are times when you may not know exactly how you got there. Sometimes you kind of just fall into a win. In a defeat you are able to identify weaknesses in yourself and strategies you previously implemented and work on improving them so that the next time you can be successful. Bill Belichick coach of the NFL New England Patriots has a saying “victories don’t reveal character but character is revealed in defeat.” How a person handles a defeat tells a lot about a person. It can reveal how much mental toughness and resiliency a person has. I’m challenging myself to be that example of resilience because I don’t want to expect anything them to do something I am not willing to do myself.