Is anyone else out there starting to chafe a bit at the idea of self-isolation and maintaining social distance for several more weeks? Yes, me too. I think we all understand that its important, and also that there’s a lot we can do to occupy ourselves, even if it feels far away from your normal routine and place of comfort. Its understandable if that is easier said than done. I am living the fact that, even with a job and several hobbies I am maintaining during this time, there are more hours in the day that need to be filled with something other than binge-watching Netflix or shopping for shoes you can’t wear right now. Today, I want to call out the importance of supporting a very important entity while your life is so altered: yourself.

Self-confidence is a state of being that is both tenuous and arduous. We look up to those who have it. We aim to be one of them. Sometimes we achieve it, but when other people are your yardstick, its a given that a bad meeting with your boss, a fight with a friend, or a couple of added pounds do a lot of damage to any amount of confidence you may have built up. I can think of nothing more personally positive to do during a period of enforced isolation than learning to see yourself clearly and stabilizing your opinion of who you are.

The only thing you should use as a yardstick is yourself.

It can be very natural to feel your sense of self or self-confidence waiver when life gets a little crazy, so whether you are supremely confident or you struggle from time to time, now is a very appropriate time for you to practice some self-awareness and learn to truly love your imperfections.

You’ll never be perfect, no matter how hard you try or how hard you try to convince other people you are.

Its natural to focus on those around us as a comparison to who we are and where we should fall on the confidence scale. In fact, the only thing you should use as a yardstick when it comes to your own confidence is yourself. When you start to do the work of seeing yourself clearly, and working to become someone you are proud to be, you become a model for everyone around you, as well as yourself. Furthermore – not to put too fine a point on it – you’ll never be perfect, no matter how hard you try or how hard you work to convince other people you are. The only thing you can hope to do is enter a state of being that is accepting of your imperfections.

Confidence comes from understanding who you are, and accepting the whole package. You cannot look at yourself and think “I wish I had a different _______________ (insert body part, brain function, friends, spouse, job, etc here) and hope to have any real or lasting self-confidence. It doesn’t come from perfection either. Some of the least confident humans I have ever met have been some of the most beautiful, most financially lucrative, most popular people, and they constantly find things about themselves and their lives to pick at and tear themselves down over. The moral of this lesson, I believe, is that focusing only on achieving or acquiring more, of anything, is only a recipe for a toxic brew of less happiness combined with a constant need to acquire something else that will undoubtedly not fill your void or help you feel confident in your own skin.

The Theory Is Its Own Argument

To achieve confidence and start to build a persona that others look up to, you must first do the work to change your mindset. I’m not asking you to change to a place of complacency or lack of drive, I’m asking you to be honest and kind to yourself about who you are in your entirety. No one, not even you, not even me, is either as perfect or as terrible in their state of being as you tell yourself that you are.

The state of being is an interesting thing, which I think we should explore for a moment. Josh Kaufman of Personal MBA describes “A State of Being as a quality of your present experience. States of Being are qualities, not Goals. ‘Being happy’ is not an achievement, it’s a state.” If you’re struggling with the thought of doing any of this, go right now and read his article. Its a great tutorial on how to practice some of what I’m preaching.

State of mind is also important for developing true and lasting self confidence. State of mind is defined as “The psychological state of someone’s cognitive processes at a certain time; the condition or character of a person’s thoughts or feelings.”

So, to sum up, state of mind and state of being are both defined as a “quality” of being self-aware and self-accepting, and aligning the character of your thoughts with the character of your physical presence is a known method of achieving self-acceptance. If we accept both of those statements as facts, then we all need to work on accepting ourselves as we are in order to achieve an authentic state of happiness and self-confidence.

Here’s Where I Tell You About My Experience

I would posit that most of you look at me, in virtual-reality or reality-reality, and see a reasonably self-confident person. In most aspects of my life and my psyche, I actually am. But I am far from perfect, and far from having to work at being in that state. In truth, it is very hard for me to actually be self-confident because it is a pretty new experience. I’ve faked it well for 30 odd years, and only recently have I realized that stopping the fakery is what might give me my first chance in h*ll of actually achieving it.

I had the choice to either get to know myself or become invisible to everyone around me.

So, how did I do it? One could argue, I suppose, that self-acceptance is a known state of getting older, and giving fewer f*cks about what people think. I would argue on the other hand, that its a known state of getting older, and realizing that I had the choice to either get to know myself or become invisible to everyone around me. If you fake your way to anything, there is only one possible outcome: someone else who is better at faking it will come along and replace you in your audience’s viewfinder.

In the end, I dug down and did the work and paid close attention to the experience of getting to know myself (which you can read about here, here, and here, if you haven’t already). Through that learning, I realized that all the pieces and parts of me come together into a unique and not-altogether-awful whole. Those things I don’t like about myself don’t cancel out the good. And, when I cared to listen to others around me, it turned out that they liked many of those “flaws” of mine best. It was a pretty short leap from there to actually feeling confident in who I am, for real, for the very first time in my life.

Once you reach a state of understanding, and you will if you search for it, any reasonable person has exactly two choices:

1. Accept and learn to love the overall picture of who you are, knowing its actually much better than you’ve been telling yourself
2. Knowingly shut out any information that doesn’t support your personal bias toward yourself

I guess, if you really like living in a place of denial and low self-esteem, its easier to do the latter. But why not take a chance and choose to accept the whole picture, and build yourself up to a place where you can look at it and see it as an overall beautiful picture, made more real and more interesting in its imperfection?

XOXO,