I have been disabled for life since I was six months old. I lost my ability to walk like ordinary people. I felt unwanted and not good enough for several years. The first thing that I missed from my personality is self-confidence. That lack disturbed me for a long while.
Later in life, I observed the phenomenon of self-confidence as a performance scientist. I found that there seems to be a powerful, iterative relationship between self-confidence and a sense of achievement. The fundamental premise of this theory is that the mind does not seem to distinguish where your confidence comes from. It simply keeps storing self-confidence as a pool or reservoir, which we can use for anything in any setting.
WHERE THE CONFIDENCE COMES FROM
The source of confidence is a ‘sense of achievement or accomplishment.’ Our mind simply needs such a sense to feel confident. It does not care where that sense of achievement comes from. It does not care much about the level of achievement or its nature either.
When you get more sense of achievement, it tops ups that pool of self-confidence. Sometimes, even a bit of a sense of accomplishment adds incrementally to fill that pool. Essentially, you don’t have to be successful at the exact same task or domain in which you require to be more confident. This sense of achievement can be drawn from even completely irrelevant tasks or domains.