Edel Coffey: Confidence is a truly magical ingredient in life
Edel Coffey: on the nature and importance of confidence. Photo: Ray Ryan
Last week, a friend told me that he had lost his confidence around women and love. He’s coming out of a bad, protracted, on-off breakup and his self-worth has taken a bashing.
People keep telling him to get back on the horse, put himself out there, get back in the game, even though he’s feeling low and unsure of himself.
He told me about a recent date. It went badly, there was no chemistry with the person and he doesn’t see any future, but she wants to see him again.
“I’ll probably go on another date with her,” he told me. But why, I asked. He shrugged. “Because I’ve lost my confidence,” he said.
When we’re feeling low, there’s nothing like the high of someone else’s interest, even someone we don’t like, to give us an ego boost.
I was thinking about confidence a lot last week. Due to circumstances (marriage), I’ve found myself being a passive viewer of the Masters golf tournament most years and have come to learn that confidence and nerve are as much a part of winning as talent and skill.
I have watched enough years now to know that once confidence is lost, all is lost. But isn’t it the same in all things? In work, in love, in life, when we lose our confidence, we lose our ability to be ourselves, to take full advantage of our natural abilities and to be joyful in our lives.
Losing confidence can be fatal to our sense of self. It makes us forget who we are. It makes us do things that we don’t want to do because we’re so uncertain about our own worth, failing to trust ourselves and our abilities because we have forgotten what we are capable of.
It seemed that everywhere I looked last week, confidence was on the agenda. Samantha Brick, the woman who was pilloried a decade ago for writing an article that claimed women didn’t like her because she was too confident and beautiful, wrote a follow-up article last week. The latest article dealt with the idea of confidence.
Brick said living in France, amongst French women, had supercharged her own confidence and she made a good point when she said that we don’t tend to like it when people like themselves. Now why is that?
Later that same day, I stumbled across the Derek Walcott poem ‘Love After Love’ which includes the line: ‘Give back your heart/to itself, to the stranger who has loved you/all your life, whom you ignored/for another.’
It made me think about how little we care for and value ourselves in general, and how if we liked ourselves just a little bit more, our confidence might find a more even keel.
It doesn’t help that confidence is such a nebulous thing that moves in and out of our lives like smoke. It reminds me of the gas in a hot air balloon. When we have it, we are buoyant and can reach such heady heights but without it we are deflated and land-bound, wondering how we ever possibly rode so high.
It’s amazing how fragile confidence is, how quickly it can disappear, or be pulled from under you, because of a careless cruel word or a thoughtless action. That can often be all it takes to completely puncture our confidence.
The loss of confidence in any area of our lives can be very damaging, paralysing even. As a writer, I lose confidence all the time but I am aware now that it’s part of the process. That doesn’t mean it’s easy and there have certainly been times in the past where I’ve lost my confidence for long periods of time.
I once worked with a particularly brutal editor who was so negative and aggressive that I almost left writing completely because my sense of my own ability was so reduced and diminished by the experience.
So how then do we protect this delicate human feature that is confidence and regain it if we have lost it? It’s good to turn to the facts sometimes, the objective, irrefutable facts. For me, with writing, I remind myself that I have managed to earn a living from writing for more than 20 years now.
Likewise with love, or other areas of life, it’s important to remind ourselves of the positive experiences we have had, the good things we have achieved, as a way of reconnecting with our inner confidence.
Because confidence is a truly magical ingredient in life with the power to greatly improve and transform our lives, to enhance our natural abilities and our enjoyment of life.
As Rory McIlroy finished his final round of the Masters in second place, having started the day in tenth, he spoke about his mindset that morning. “I asked myself why not me,” he said. It’s a question we should all have the confidence to ask ourselves a little more often.
