This is from a speech I prepared to talk at KMS Toastmaster Club and I think it’s worth to share here. The topic is about How to earn self-confidence.
We often lose our self-confidence once we fear something: fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear that I love her but that she doesn’t love me. Or we doubt: doubt about our success in the near future, doubt that she would love me as much as I would love her.
I also learned that we can gain more self-confidence by clearing those fears and those doubts within ourselves. Fortunately, I can do that by clearly answering two questions. Just two simple questions and you can escape from fears and doubts effectively. Let me share with you about those two.
Who am I?
The first question is Who am I? Have you ever run into this situation? You wake up in the morning. You go to work, and you work during the day. You seem busy with so many things. At the end of the day, you go home late. You feel tired. But it’s even worse. You start to feel empty, an emptiness in your mind, a feeling that you can’t explain. You don’t want anything. You don’t want to do anything next. You find it hard to sleep, though your body is exhausted.
I am asking the question once again. Have you ever run into that situation?
Usually, we are like a machine. We turn it on in the morning. And we turn it off in the evening. We keep doing things just because the engine is turned on. We are so busy not think and not to ask ourselves an important question. Who am I? What is the purpose of my life? What is my missions in this life? Why am I born in this life? The fact is that if we don’t ask, we don’t have the answer. And if we don’t know who we are, we don’t know our mission in this life, it is like we are steering a boat, but don’t know the destination. And if so, sooner or later, we are floating without any direction, floating. Yes, floating and we don’t have a direction for our lives. And that is why we feel emptiness / an empty mind once we go back home, after a hard working day.
Should it be that way? The empty mind?
Don’t you recall a time that you are busy, but you are happy, you are exhausted, but you are fulfilled? Don’t you recall the time we were doing charity together on a Saturday? We got back to town late, exhausted. But we all were happy. That was because we had done some thing meaningful.
To make it short, I believe that if you can have a clear picture of who you are, what is your life’s purpose, you will know where you are heading. You fear less, because you know the challenges from here to there, toward your destination. You doubt less because you are aware of what you are doing. And you would earn your confidence, inside out. Who am I?
What are my strengths?
The next question I would suggest you to ask yourself is What are my strengths? Do you know that we only use 10% of our brain? And 90% is left in there waiting. It means that we have quite a lot potential waiting for us to awake. However, remember one thing. You cannot be good at everything. It is almost impossible for a person to be good at everything. We all have strengths and weaknesses. That’s usual. We can’t have all strengths without any weaknesses. That’s how we were built up since we were in our mother’s stomach. It is usual that we are very good at doing a few things.So, what are they? Did you ask yourself that question: What are my strengths? I urge you do that.
The other thing is that we usually try to imitate the strengths of people that we admire. For example, if we are a fan of Quang Dung, the singer, we have the tendency to imitate his voice the best that we can. If we admire Bao Quoc, the humorous actor, we tend to imitate his way of acting. Yet, we are who we are. We can’t be that Quang Dung or Bao Quoc. And if we know exactly what our talents are, it would be a lot better to focus on maximizing our talents.
It is natural and easy for us to focus on our strengths and leverage the best out of it. That is the best way to maximize our values. So, have you ask yourself the question that What are my strengths? I urge you do that. And once you have the answer, you know things that you will do best and you also know that things you would not do well, if it is not falling into your strengths. If you are aware of that, you won’t be fearful or doubtful in whatever you do. And as a result, you’ll find confidence in yourself in whatever you do, don’t you agree?
Conclusion
You can’t earn self-confidence from anyone else. You will have to earn it from you, inside out. By asking the two questions of Who am I and What are my strengths, you can start the journey to understand about you, as a person. And from there, you are confident from within your mind. That is the strongest confidence you can have.
I have a good news for you. For the first question of Who am I, you can find meaningful answer by following the beliefs of one religion. Either it is Catholic, Buddhism or Hindu or any other religions, you’ll find it, I believe. To explore you strengths, you can find the book called StrengthsFinder 2.0. It’ll help you to explore the part of yourselves that you’ve never known before.
Good luck and thanks for reading.
Photo Credit: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_SZgfNcAnfI/TzujZNFyz6I/AAAAAAAAEb8/2rTb8nnfJy4/s1600/fandwmade.jpg
