Believing in Yourself is Overrated, You need to Build Confidence to Achieve Your Goals
Believing in yourself is overrated, rather you need to create the evidence(i.e. do the work) so that you can build the confidence to believe in yourself.
Believing in Yourself
Most self-help books advocate that you must believe in yourself in order to achieve your personal goals. High self-esteem has positive effects on your overall mental health; however, it has its limits as you grow older and start experiencing real-world complex challenges.
Like every working professional, I have always believed in myself, this high self-esteem has helped me to graduate at top of my class in college. However, as I entered the job marketplace this strategy started failing me dismally.
In the real world(i.e. job marketplace) just believing in yourself is really not going to work; because you have to work on complex projects with a lot of unknown unknowns and uncertainty.
High self-esteem overestimates your capabilities and skills which makes it difficult for you to perform and deliver the high standards required by the marketplace.
Hence, believing in yourself is OVERRATED.
So what is the solution?
You need to build confidence in yourself.
But how does one build self-confidence?
Create the Evidence, Build Self-Confidence
The most sustainable way to build self-confidence is through creating evidence that you are capable of performing a certain task or skill.
If you want to build your self-confidence in your software programming skills take an online course on Udemy/Coursera and do freelance coding work to practice your learnings. By doing this theoretical and practical work; you will gain confidence in yourself because you have EVIDENCE to prove you can do the work.
If you want to build your self-confidence in public speaking skills; join a toastmasters club. The club will give theoretical knowledge and practical experience in public speaking. The more you practice the theory the more your mind gets confident that you are a good public speaker.
In other words, you created the EVIDENCE that you can do the work, you didn't just believe you can do the work; you can back up your confidence in public speaking skills with the EVIDENCE you have created for yourself.
In conclusion, I have tried to prove that just believing in yourself (i.e. having high self-esteem) is not a sustainable strategy in the 21st century to achieve your personal goals and to deal with the uncertainty which lies ahead in the future.
So by adopting a practical learning mindset, you learn new knowledge, skills and ultimately you start creating solid EVIDENCE for yourself in order to build the required confidence to BELIEVE in your own capabilities and skills.
