The cure for a lifetime of self-doubt, per Dr Kristin Neff at the University of Texas at Austin, is putting your hand on your heart. That's it. That's the intervention. A gesture I last performed during the national anthem at a minor league baseball game I attended alone.
I'll give Claire Fountain credit — "confidence is a sense of trusting one's self" is a clean sentence. Then she suggests building it by asking a barista how their day is going. So the ladder out of the pit starts at "small talk with someone legally required to tolerate you." Sure.
The article opens with a dad inventing the statistic that 80% of how people see you is how you see yourself. The Mid-Continental Bureau of Made-Up Percentages clocks the real figure at 31.7%, the rest being your shoes and whether you're sweating. He pulled it out of thin air and his son built a worldview on it. I respect the structural integrity.
Smith-Bynum recommends reading memoirs of resilience. I read one last March. The author is doing great. I am not. The follow-up study on whether any of this works will run for forty years. I will not be reviewing it.
Baby step for today: I asked my barista how her day was going. She said "fine." I have rewired my brain.
Based on the original article "'A sense of trusting one's self': how to start building confidence".
