You often hear people describe others as being confident or shy. Like you can either be one or the other. Like you have it or you don’t. And like you will choose to be shy or choose to be confident for your entire life, as if it is a personality trait that you carry or you don’t.
But I think you can be both.
At different stages in your life, you can carry confidence or have the confidence knocked out of you.
People often ask me how am I able to stand in front of a lot of people and sing? They tell me I must have buckets of confidence to do that. And I think at some point, I must have. I must have believed in myself enough to push myself to achieve what I wanted to achieve. Being a singer was all I ever wanted, and I had the confidence in my abilities that I could do it. Actually I didn’t even take the time to question whether I could, I just worked hard to become one.
But it doesn't mean I will be confident in every performance.
There are moments when you are on stage and you get a certain vibe from the audience and you suddenly don’t feel comfortable. There are moments when someone might look at you in a certain way and you are convinced your boob must be hanging out or they must be thinking how bad you are. There are moments when something doesn’t go to plan and you want the ground to swallow you up or to run off stage and never step foot out there again.
But would you ever know my self doubt? Absolutely not. You would look up and probably think, ‘There is a girl who oozes confidence’, and most of the time that is just not true.
So where did my confidence in myself go? It has been slowly chipped away by a situation I have been in, or a comment someone has made. By one thoughtless Trip Advisor comment in a page of 100 positive ones. It has been lost in the people who have let me down and left me to believe the reason they did that was my fault. And most of all, it has been overpowered by thoughts in my own head, things I have thought so often, I have convinced myself they are true.
But confidence is key. If you can muster up the confidence to have that chat, to ask for help, to challenge yourself and believe that you can achieve it, then you will live a happier and healthy life in your body and mind. And that is what I strive to do every day, because I once was confident, and I can definitely be confident again.
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