Regaining Your Confidence

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Regaining Your Confidence

by Carl Greer, PhD, PsyD

Do you lose confidence after a loss or failure? If it’s a particularly big loss or failure, or part of a series of failures, it may be difficult to have faith in yourself afterward. Lost confidence can affect you for years and become embedded in your story as a recurring theme that seems to have a life of its own.

Even if you try to hide your insecurity, others may pick up on it because you telegraph it though your words, actions, attitudes, and body language. Then, no matter how much you try, you seem to have bad luck. You sabotage your successes and don’t know why. Failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We’ve all known someone who seems to have an air of desperation and fear about achieving a goal—and that person may be us! Most have experienced a loss of confidence and a resulting fear that we’ll never get it back.

It can be helpful to think of lost confidence as a lost soul part that separated from you and can be reclaimed and reabsorbed and reintegrated into who you are. Through discovering the part of yourself that has confidence in some arena, you can reclaim the energy of confidence and let it propel you forward. If you have failed at business after business or job after job, you might spend some time pursuing an interest that you have achieved success in. You might even discover the seed for a new business. Many entrepreneurs have built successful businesses around a talent or skill they had previously undervalued.

Then too, the energetic imprint of being a failure is simply an aspect of being vulnerable. When we feel insecure, we’re recognizing that we don’t have expertise, that our control is limited, and that we have much to learn. Vulnerability and what the Buddhists call ‘beginner’s mind’ can be an asset if you need to learn something new.

Confidence may build as you achieve mastery. Recognizing that you are not a master is the first step in becoming one. You may need to learn more about developing a healthy relationship or business partnership. You may need to learn the art of tolerating your discomfort in discovering your weaknesses and holes in your understanding.

OM Times is a leading voice of the Conscious Community with articles covering the full spectrum of Conscious Living. Click here to see all we share.