Build Confidence by Embracing This Uncomfortable Truth.

I think it's really important that you think of yourself as being the best. And I mean that. That you see yourself in whatever it is you do with yourself or your life, that you think about yourself in terms of being the best. Part of you might recoil from hearing me say that, which I'll explain. And I'll explain my reasoning around this. It sounds almost like bravado or persona that we're buying into, but I'll explain it. So why is it important? It's important for confidence, right? To start seeing yourself in terms of being the best at what it is that you do. So how can we do this? Because there'll be a resistance to it because we have been conditioned to think about that term as being the best as a competition with other people, right? So if the more... And you may have lived with that, I'm trying to be the best. I'm in this competitive thing and I'm trying to exceed here and do this and achieve that and think of myself in those terms. And if we're in that mindset, the counterpart that comes in with that is the shadow of unworthiness and I'm not good enough, right? Here I am telling you to think of yourself as the best. What we need to do with it is you can't then tell yourself, okay, I'm going to drop this idea of being the best. Because all that happens is effectively you end up back in the bad room or the shadow where you feel unworthy. Now you might be dressing that up and saying, I'm okay, I'm fine. But really that means the same thing as not quite good enough, usually. So what we do with the shadow and the defective stuff and I'm not good enough is we question it and we just let it go, right? Or you can take out of it the golden shadow that Jung talked about, which is my vulnerability, right? My vulnerability is my strength. It makes me human and relatable, for instance, right? But with this persona of being the best, we look at, okay, what's the corrupted egoic version of that that I may have been living from up to now? And that involves looking at the fine print already. Well, what does that mean? Due to all the conditioning I've had in my life, what does it really mean if I'm trying to be the best? And we'll find that it means being better than other people, being in a competition, being dominant over others, right? Winning at all costs, et cetera, et cetera. That's really what that means. And that's why it doesn't work. And at least it was going back into this guilt thing. But what we can do is we don't have to drop that concept. We take it for ourselves and we reframe it and we make it mean something completely different, right? And because there's so much conditioning around it, it's a very hard thing to let go of. So you're not actually asked to let go of it. You're asked to take it for yourself and reinterpret and change the definition or change what it really means. So how you can start to think of yourself as being the best is this is the first part of it. It's like if you want to think about this hierarchy of things, right? You exist here. You're at the very top of it. This is how you should see yourself. Now, does that mean that other people must be down here for me to be the best? No, what it means is this is where I exist. This is where I see myself as. And I am more than willing to help other people come up and join me at this level. There's no competition in it at all, but this is where I am. Being the best effectively means acknowledging to yourself that there's no one better than you in what you do or who you are, right? But there's no competition in it. You're actually more than willing. In fact, you prefer to have company up there, right? That's a much healthier way to see it then. If I'm here, well, what if somebody goes there or I have to keep these people down here? That's the conditioning, the egoic conditioning we really have from this. But if you can see yourself as this is where I exist, I am trying to bring other people up here to join me. That feels like a part of what it is to be the best. There is no competition, really. You start to see yourself as unique, really, in this regard. And you start to see through being the best has nothing to do with other people, in fact. It's just a permanent part of how you see yourself and the story you're telling yourself about your life. So other people and how they act and behave and what they're doing and accomplishing and not accomplishing becomes irrelevant, right? So in terms of building confidence, should you try and be the Buddha and forgo any sense of being good at it or being different to it? No, you're allowed to acknowledge, I'm really good. In fact, I'm the best at this. But internally, you've worked with that concept and you've healed that concept and you've taken all the anxiety and stress and competition out of it. So the point where it actually now is working for you and it's facilitating more ease, more cooperation, more connection with other people rather than the competition, et cetera, et cetera. So keep that in mind. That can be a thing to do a little bit of journaling about. You're allowed to tell yourself you're the best, but what does it mean? That is the key issue in this. So this would be a project to look at if you have some of that ambition, right? Certainly if you want to feel better about yourself. There's nothing wrong with ambition. Ambition, you could say another word for ambition is fulfilling my potential or acknowledging my own virtues and talent. So I hope that's useful. Keep it short and keep that in mind. You're allowed to tell yourself you're the best. Just look at the definition. Take care. Talk soon. Bye-bye.