What is true confidence? True confidence is knowing with every cell in your being, that you will persevere because you have “something” no one can take away from you. It’s knowing that no matter the circumstance, you have “it”. But confidence comes in a variety of different forms. Put an army general in an operating room and his “confidence” will dwindle. Put a lawyer in a cockpit and he may begin panicking and calling for his mommy. Not literally, but metaphorically. Confidence is contextual, and the more experiences you have in life, the more likely you are to be perceived as “confident” across the board. This isn’t the type of confidence I’m talking about. I’m not talking about being confident in EVERY situation no matter what— that is almost impossible to achieve. You will not be confident in everything, because you can’t physically know absolutely everything—and if you think you are, you’re just faking it.

True confidence is a “feeling” or mentality that can be applied to absolutely every situation. True confidence differs from being contextually confident because true confidence does not require previous experience. However, true confidence does require something— a specific ingredient.

True confidence requires that you have one thing you are EXCESSIVELY confident about. Something, that absolutely no one can take from you no matter what, and moreover something that is almost completely unique to you. To give an example, a person that has been driving taxis for 30 years of his/her life may not appear or be perceived to be a confident person in different situations (contextual confidence), but that person absolutely has true confidence. Only a small percentage of people can tell that taxi driver a thing or two about driving taxis, and even then that person’s philosophies are already so set and stone that advice from someone of similar stature would probably be arbitrary.

The only issue with this is, not everyone has it, and you are required to go out and get this “thing”. The good news is, more likely than not, you already have this thing, you just haven’t tapped into it or been introspective and analytical enough to realize it. Some people may have been fortunate or unfortunate enough to go through something extremely traumatic or life changing— anything from a family member passing to getting brutally abused from different things (all relative of course). It is only through torment, tension, and hardship, that true confidence can be rightfully acquired. It requires someone to have gone through something so traumatic and so pervasive, that even “time” fails to remove that from their memory. It requires repetitive hardship to a point where the feeling of getting struck by a baseball bat goes to wanting to get hit by the baseball bat because it feels great. Once any one hardship almost becomes a form of pleasure, you have acquired the ingredient for being truly confident. It is at that point, when you have explored the depths of hell and allowed yourself to taste death repeatedly, that you know absolutely nothing else can come close. This can be applied to a plethora of different situations/ life experiences. Like I previously stated, you can drive taxis for 30 years or having gone through the worst abuse ever for a year of your life. The less emotionally tormenting the experience (subjective of course), the more time is required in order to gain that sense of true confidence. With the taxi driver example, the form of “hardship” or “torment” isn’t driving the taxis, it’s the driving the taxis for 30 years of his life, the time.

Here’s a formula for greater clarity:

TF: true confidence t: time H: hardship

TF= H • t

To reiterate the relationship, the more time you spend, the less hardship is required. Have a lot of hardship over a long period of time, and you have a golden recipe for developing true confidence.

So true confidence? It’s knowing you will win at something because you know you’ve “lost it all” so many times. It’s knowing you will find the light because darkness is your norm. It’s having the delusional feeling that you will succeed, EVENTUALLY. And it can only come from knowing you’ve done it—time and time and time again.