And the Reviews Are In

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the role that self-confidence plays in any person who has dreams and ambitions. If you are a totally confident person, and I mean confident not only within yourself but also in what you want out of life, then you could end up really seeing everything you want become a reality. But not every one is that confident and I am beginning to realize that one of the main things that could really stop a person dead in their tracks on the way to making their dreams come to fruition is a lack of self-confidence. After all, if you don’t believe in yourself and your dreams then how is anyone else supposed to believe in you?

For those of us who have chosen the career of a writer we not only have to face the reviews and critiques of our peers but what’s truly important is facing the reviews and critiques that we make of ourselves. We spend so much time analyzing and criticizing and literally picking apart our accomplishments to figure out what mistakes we made that we forget to praise ourselves for the accomplishment in itself. This kind of obsessive self-criticism is what tears down our self-confidence eventually making us doubt every decision, every adventure, and every achievement we make leaving us in the position where we never take the risks that will move us forward and are always playing it safe.

Sometimes we project a sense of confidence on the outside to the rest of the world but inside we still hear those little voices telling us how much more we still have to do and how we still have to prove our worth to everyone who’s looking at us. But being confident does not mean proving your worth to anyone else but yourself. I believe that some people think that if they can achieve perfection then they will gain more confidence within themselves but being confident does not in any way mean being perfect. We have to expect less then perfection from ourselves and realize that we all do the best we can in any given moment. Life is abundant and has no shortage of opportunities but if we spend all of our time analyzing and criticizing ourselves, wondering what others will think, then we begin to loose the confidence we need to take the necessary risks we need to take.

Nothing succeeds like confidence and true confidence is in knowing that you are capable of accomplishing anything you want, mistakes and all. It is being able to cope with the disappointments instead of making the setbacks mean something about you. It is letting those setbacks make you more open to what’s next. Having true indestructible confidence within yourself is about owning your dream and saying yes to you. It is taking the bull by the horns and going after what it is you want and making it happen. You may never be 100% satisfied in whatever it is you do. You quite possibly will always be able to find some flaw in what others could very well see as damn near perfect. But if we let our own reviews of ourselves halt our progress then nothing will ever get done and the journey will be over before it can ever begin.

Jimmetta Carpenter