Chris Mance II - Mental Skills Coach

Confidence and happiness often go hand and hand. Lacking confidence makes you vulnerable to negativity, triggers fear, and undermines focus. All of which can lead to unhappiness.

1. When you don’t know what to do next, you lack confidence. This lack of confidence then becomes frustration. When this frustration persists, it can lead to unhappiness.
2. Not having a support system of peers and mentors who can empathize with you and support you when you lack confidence can leads to unhappiness.
3. Making mistakes that delay or prevent the achievement of goals causes a lack of confidence which also can lead to unhappiness.

Any situation like one of these can trigger a loss of confidence that relates to unhappiness. But what if you learn to face these situations without letting them make you unhappy? That is how growth will happen and that requires you to become comfortable being uncomfortable when you lack confidence.

Furthermore, the only way to become comfortable being uncomfortable is through experience. So, it follows that to gain confidence you first must embrace your lack of confidence. You must find ways to persist through adversity and bounce back from any loss that happens when you lack confidence. In other words, be resilient while lacking confidence. Which in turn will show you that you don’t need comfort to be happy.

As the venerable stoic Marcus Aurelius observes:

Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.

In short, while it may be true that lacking confidence is uncomfortable, it is not true that being uncomfortable causes unhappiness. Instead, learning how to remain happy as one works through the uncomfortable process of lacking confidence is the key to gaining new levels of confidence.