Do you remember a time when you drove home, completely safely, but unaware of the journey? You may be able to touch-type without thinking about it. You could be a pianist. Or it may be enough to remember that you don’t have to remember how to do some many skills like writing your signature.

This state of excellence is sometimes called, “Unconscious Competence.”

Today, I’d like us to swap out one the words and exchange it with another. Let’s swap ‘competence’ with ‘confidence’. How would it feel if you were naturally, and unconsciously confident?

Confidence in someone, some concept, or some outcome is a belief. I believe the best of someone; I believe ‘x’ as a concept; I believe we will achieve ‘y’. Many psychologists suggests we get what we hold to be true – what we believe in.

I want to believe I have a future and a hope – I want to be confident in that future and in that hope. If you want to share that belief, we can work on this together. If that’s not an issue for you, then the model can be applied to someone or something or some outcome you’d prefer to your current experience.

There seem to be four steps:

1)   Unconsciously lacking-in-confidence – or Unconsciously Unconfident – a state in which we may sense something doesn’t feel right but we may not know what that ‘something’ is. A general sense of unease.

2)   Consciously Unconfident – when we realise we have a problem – a lack of confidence in someone, something, or some outcome. Here, we exploring our hope and our future, so that would mean we are not confident that there is a bright future ahead of us.

3)   The switch comes when we work on becoming Consciously Confident in the future and build hope. To do this, we must change our way of thinking AND gather evidence to support our emerging belief AND maybe get some new skills to support the move in this fresh direction. The fast-track to this switch is to change location or those you associate with or both. Of course, you need to choose a better location and group of associates! Bad company corrupts even good character!

4)   One day, when you’re not noticing, the magic will happen. You’ll ‘catch’ yourself feeling confident with zero effort. That’s the point beyond where you mysteriously became ‘Unconsciously Confident’.

Let’s invest time and energy this week in actively – even proactively – seeking out the experiences that would boost our confidence in the future, and bring us hope. Let’s not rely on a passive miracle but rather go hunting for jollies.

Lex

A Moodscope member