One of the best things you can pass onto your child is confidence. Without real and solid confidence gained in childhood, adult life can turn out to be pretty tricky and filled with lots of disappointment.
People, who suffer from low confidence often choose safer, less aspirational career paths, because they don’t believe they can do something out of the ordinary or follow their “unrealistic” dreams until it becomes a reality.
Safer career choices often mean working in places that only pay the bills, not in places that could get them excited every morning before leaving for work. Despite their personal ambition and high education, those people often get trapped in jobs that are way below their qualifications and education level. All because lack of confidence won’t allow them to move on.
If, from a young age, you are told that certain things in life are impossible to achieve and dreaming more realistically is more practical and safer (as if dreams should be more realistic, practical, or safer), it’s easy to give up on yourself, when the real-life starts throwing obstacles on our way.
To build up real confidence, you would have to put a lot of work and effort in slowly gaining self-esteem. That gigantic work often requires a lot of energy, time, and financial resources. However, once your confidence levels start raising, and you start feeling it from the inside out, that will do amazing things to your life. Your life instantly will become easier, better in many areas, and much more enjoyable.
Often, people who lack confidence try to focus on perfection in every project they undertake. From my own experience, I know that perfection can get people stuck in their non-confidence zone even deeper.
Besides, perfection usually clashes with creativity. Those two elements simply contradict each other. If your main focus is on achieving perfection, you cannot be genuinely creative and open to innovative solutions at the same time. Instead of trying to look for creative solutions to the challenges you are facing, the lack of confidence will drive your focus towards perfection. Perfection feels like a much safer option for people who lack confidence because it gives you this false safety net that you don’t finish something, only because you’re constantly trying to make it better.
In real life, there are no shortcuts for adults to learn and grow in confidence (that’s why it’s essential to teach children from a very young age how to be confident and how to grow the confidence). Once you start working on increasing your confidence, the process is often long and emotionally painful, full of confusing twists and turns. But, at the end of that, you will emerge stronger and much more secure than ever before. You will have clarity about who you are, what you want, and where you are going, and in my opinion, that journey is worth all the trouble.