The BOLD (Walking Towards a Run)
You know that rolling feeling in your stomach when you think about taking that action that scares you? If confidence is an ingredient of success, then what damage is that feeling doing to your chances of taking action and achieving your goal?
What if you could build your confidence with a slight adjustment of focus? We base our assessment of our fitness for a task and our chances of success on our beliefs about our skills and resources. That means that if we look too far down the road into the farther reaches of our goal, the gap widens.
It’s a good thing, then, that our leveling up is a step by step prospect. Mustering courage to step up one tread is a lot easier than steeling oneself for a leap from the bottom of the stairs to the stop.
The Whisper (Running Towards a Flight)
Is there something that you would like to do, to build, to accomplish? Three obstacles stand in your way—a lack of skills, a lack of resources and/or a lack of confidence. Skills can be learned. Resources can be gathered. Confidence, however, comes from an assessment we make as we determine if we are enough for the challenge. Confidence is our measurement of the gap between what we have and what we perceive that we will need to answer a challenge or pursue an opportunity.
Remember that time when you are 18 months old and you ran a marathon? Of course not. You had only just learned to walk. We understand that there is a progression to these things and that a child will learn to flip over, to push up, to crawl, to walk and then to run.
When you calculate your confidence, are you measuring the correct gap? Are you expecting yourself to leap up from a crawl and start to run as you progress towards your goal? By correctly referencing the nearest segment of your goal, you can bolster your confidence by preventing an unrealistic and demoralizing sense of your gap.
The Level Up
Sometimes the levels between where we are and where we want to go are obvious. Sometimes we don’t recognize the levels until after we have traveled through them. Either way, there is a progress to change and transformation.
Take Every Step
You will need lessons, resources, connections, and capacities from this level in order to proceed to and succeed on the next level. The arm strength that a baby develops as they push up serves them when they finally learn to coordinate their movements to crawl. The innate understanding of balance that they learn as they extend forward over their center of balance in the crawl informs their balance on two feet. If you try to help a tiny baby walk by holding him up and propping him on his feet…do not finish thinking about that.
Don’t skip steps. It is tempting to race through or try to skip unpleasant, difficult or monotonous portions of a lesson. However, they difficult bits may be the most important part of the work.
Give Each Step What it Needs
Not every step requires the same amount of time, effort, resources, or investment. When you approach your journey with patience you give yourself the time to apply your determination to each lesson and experience without careless rushing or mounting frustration. At the same time, there is no need to stay in an experience when the lesson has been learned. Be prepared for lightning rounds.
You Are Enough…Because You’re Not
You never have at the beginning what you will have at the end. The having comes from the doing. That means that if you take an inventory of your skills and resources at the beginning of an endeavor, you will always find that you do not have enough…yet. When you pin your confidence to your ability to learn and adjust, you are more likely to develop and maintain focus and momentum.
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