Richard Hogan: How thinking differently can make you more confident, and help you thrive

Richard Hogan: . Photograph Moya Nolan

Did you know that the chances of you being you are roughly, 400 quadrillion to the power of 150,000? That's some odds. You're being here is miraculous. You are precious. So, what do you do with that miracle? Throw it away? Give it to someone random? Allow someone you don’t really know or, for that matter, like to tarnish it? 

Or, do you hold onto it, and protect it, and worship it? Well, I think we know what you should do, but what we should do and what we actually do can often be two very different things. 

You were plucked from the obscurity of darkness into this incredible light, this gift, this life. And what do we do with the gift, this almost zero chance of life? We often allow others to tarnish it. As I have said many times in this column, there is nothing as important as the relationship you have with yourself. 

When that relationship is unhealthy, you must look at where you developed that inner negative voice. That inner critic can do so much harm in your life. Everything is tainted through its toxic lens.

Two weeks ago I wrote a column on how to build your confidence. I had such a huge response, I’ve decided to revisit the topic and give a few more practical tips. Internal and external attribution are important concepts when thinking about how we process success or failure in our lives. I often meet clients in my clinic who struggle with this concept. In my experience people who lack confidence attribute all failure to an internal deficit while all success is attributed to an external oversight or failure. 

Let me give you an example, I had a client who told me that she hadn’t performed well in the exam because she wasn’t as bright as the other girls, and in the following session she explained that she had achieved a top mark in one of her other exams, "but that was because the corrector was lenient". 

How we evaluate the ups and downs of our life will determine whether we are confident or not. How we think, impacts on how we behave and the more we behave a particular way the more that becomes what we classify as our personality. And so, the more we don’t take part in things or refuse to offer our opinion on something that we want to, brings us closer to the rather impecunious logic, "that’s just me, I’m not confident". 

But we can all be more confident, we can all think differently, and we can all thrive in life. So, think about how you attribute success or failure in your life and if you notice that you might be leaning more towards internal attribution, ask yourself why you think that is? What would you need to do to change that? Attributions are the reasons people give to explain why something happened. If you have a distortion in your thinking, you will constantly view mistakes as your fault. 

So, the next time something doesn’t go your way, or you don’t succeed in an endeavour, rather than beating yourself up about it, wouldn’t it make better sense to think you’ll learn from this moment and try again? That would be a more confident way to think about what is happening in your life.

Confidence takes work, we all have dips in our confidence from time to time. But the more we are intentional about our thinking the more we will start to think positively. The more we expect positive things to happen in our life, the more likely it is that we will see them when they do happen. I meet so many clients who are operating under a very negative belief system. They believe to be open and optimistic will hurt them when something inevitably bad happens, so they expect nothing good to happen in their life, and when it doesn’t happen (because they can’t see what they don’t expect) it confirms their terrible logic for them. 

We must be bold in life, if we believe that good things will happen, we will be open to seeing them when they do. Times when we don’t succeed are wonderful learning moments, as Bill Gates said, "Success is a very poor educator’" Work on your thinking, so that you don’t tarnish that gift you got all those years ago.