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Foundations of Real Confidence

Demolition and Construction

The taller the building, the deeper the foundation.

As a kid I heard this once from my father, now a 45-year veteran and entrepreneur in the construction and engineering field. I remember visiting his construction site and noticing large rectangular shaped ditches in the ground where a building structure would be built. I used to wonder what was so complicated about digging ditches? To my novice eye a hole in the ground was a hole in the ground.

The foundations of a building have to have tremendous respect for nature — winds above and earth movement below the foundations can rip any man-made structure apart if it is not engineered properly.

Another lesson etched in my brain forever.

30 years later, I still tap into these lessons in my own way, fusing them with my personal journey and lessons harvested from experiences of others. When someone asks me how I coped with all the ups and downs in my life, the embarrassing slips, the unexpected gut kicks, the violent knock-outs, the life-draining marathons and ultra-marathons mixed in with successes big and small, being exposed to life’s real blessings in the most abundant of ways, I attribute being able to make it through with sanity and a smile because I kept strengthening my foundations all along. I learnt and applied the life lesson that similar to a building’s foundation, life’s foundations have to be treated with intelligence and mindfulness keeping in account the impact from inner-self and external factors.

Specifically, I continually invested in my confidence, the foundation to all my progress despite bumps in the road. I am not a 21-year old billionaire who bought Bitcoin at $0.01, I am a 41- year old regular person who endured severe lack of direction in his late teens, faced the dark side of introversion, depression, business failures, marriage failure, legal battles, raising a child as a single father, health issues, rebuilding life and business from scratch, and lived to tell about it, thanks in large part to self-belief, so 1) I don’t go down without a fight-to-remember and 2) others may benefit. Though I am writing this article from my perspective, I have also never met a self-made person who didn’t posses a high degree of self-belief.

What is your biggest fear? I have asked this question thousands of times of students, workshop participants, focus group discussion participants, friends, family members and mentees. 6 out of 10 say it’s unfulfilled potential. Then I ask a follow up.

What is holding you back from fulfilling your potential? 9 out of 10 say it’s lack of confidence.

A few days back an MBA student in the Personal Development class I teach, reached out to discuss an urgent matter. I thought it was about his work-class schedule conflict, which is quite common. It turned it was only about his life!

“It’s embarrassing, it’s a disease, it keeps getting worse” he said, referring to his perpetual state of being fearful and nervous.

He started working in a full-time job two years back and had just recently gotten married. He felt exposed and vulnerable like never before. The deeper he was venturing into ‘real life’ the more his low-confidence, low self-esteem handicap was becoming visible to everyone around him and even more painfully obvious to himself.

His boss was calling him out at work for being too ‘shelled up’ risking career-stall and his wife had started to drop hints about him needing to be more assertive in public and private. He was no longer 15 and could no longer just go back to his room and put on his headphones to successfully ignore his social demons.

He told me he read a few self-help books and his interpretation was distilled into ‘don’t care about what anyone thinks.’ He said he watched a ton of YouTube videos with intense motivational speeches and epic orchestra music in the backdrop. His main takeaway from those videos was to be ‘fearless!’ He also continued to receive unsolicited long lectures from his father on ‘how to be a real man!’

Not that the above didn’t move the needle, it did, but ever so slightly, never allowing this young man’s confidence to reach the much needed escape velocity. He needed some radical change. Real change. Visible change. Sustainable change.

First off, not caring what others think, being fearless and being a real man, collectively are punchy phrases lacking much transformative ability. At least in my case and with thousands of people I have come across, this nonsense doesn’t carry weight and instead creates more anxiety in the long run and tears up the social fabric. You have to care what others think. You have to be sensitive to a healthy amount of fear to live a normal life. We are all not training to be Spartan warriors taking on Xerxes at Battle of Thermopylae.

This is not Sparta, this is insanity!

You are a normal person in general and a unique human being with a complex background in specific. Pretending to be someone else is futile and underestimating the task at-hand is being plain immature — an oversimplified phrase is no different than a spoonful of sugar, where the sugar rush wears off in 20 minutes and then you are back to ground zero. You want to become confident the right way? Ditch the hype for starters.

I told him to actively commit to forgetting whatever he knew about confidence up till that point. Any related mild perceptions and hard convictions, both, out of the window. You demolish the un-impactful, the rusty and the rotten.

Confidence is not worn, it’s carried. It is not a cool gait, a casual lean, a deep voice, a calculated smirk, a flirty wink, a half nod, a slow-talking executive, a fast-talking salesman, an animated preacher, a stylish actress, you get it!

Real confidence is as unique as your fingerprints and it is your inner self projecting outwards, not a hologram of someone else’s projection, life battles, wins and scars.

For me to build confidence, I had to fight my unique fear demon or care-too-much demon with my unique sword in my own unique time under my own unique circumstance. Only then I knew it was my confidence, owned and not rented.

When I was around 14, I took a drama class in school for a total of one time! I was both looking to build some confidence being tired of getting called a hermit, a loaner all my life and also to avoid the only other option of the athletics class where they made us run track and field.

The drama class teacher asked everyone who should play what part in a story where a prince fights an evil monster and slays him and his minions, thereby restoring his father’s kingdom and bringing peace and joy to his people. This class had a dozen girls and only two boys. This fairly tall and handsome guy and then it was me, the fairly round and chubby kid who liked sketching superheroes with six-pack abs.

As the evil monster role required fight scenes and jumping and screaming, I naturally assumed a guy would get that part and I was the only other guy in the class — so, yeah, I was mentally preparing myself to be the evil monster. To my shock, the girls suggested to the teacher to make the handsome guy the prince (yep, makes sense) and make one of the girls the evil monster since she had more confidence to carry a strong role (wait, what?! what about me?). The icing on the cake was the suggestion to make me the prince’s trusty sidekick who was goofy, sluggish, shy and an introvert as it would ‘suit Saud.’

I don’t recall what happened the remaining twenty minutes in that drama class, but I never returned to it, that’s for sure. This class I had joined to overcome my confidence issues. Here I was getting destroyed with every mental recall of the situation that transpired — over and over and over again. I was swimming in shame unable to drown and get it over with!

My demolition had just happened. I was outed! There was no armor protecting me, no parent to hide behind, no fake-it-till-you-make-it routine, I felt naked and exposed as I had known for years. Frankly, the ease and consensus with which everyone discussed and accepted my personal weakness and social inability was the real pain point.

You know you have demolished your lies and denials when you reach this moment of truth with red ears and teary eyes.

Out of he rubble of my ego, I began rebuilding myself, starting with the foundation. One ‘shameful,’ one ‘scared,’ one ‘anxious’ brick at a time. Looking back, I really did two things that helped me transform from a socially awkward kid to someone who is now a public speaker and a communication skills coach.

The first thing I did and I highly recommend you do to is to acknowledge hat confidence does not reside outside of you but 100% inside of you. Don’t bother hunting it externally. You have to be brave enough to venture internally, though. Why brave? Because you will need to have an honest baseline conversation with yourself. Why do you lack confidence? Is it fear of getting snubbed or embarrassed? Are you petrified of being exposed as a phony? Is it that you think you don’t possess a clear mind and your thoughts are unimpressive at best and ridiculous at worst? Are you ashamed of how you talk or how you look? Are you ashamed of eating alone or watching a movie alone because people will think you are a loser? In answering these self-discovery questions, I have sometimes witnessed people breaking down and understandably so. We don’t like to dig into ourselves because we are afraid of what we may find.

Did you have these confidence fears as a 5 year old? Highly unlikely. As you grew so did the fears, one embarrassing moment at a time till the accumulated pile of fears buried your confidence. You went through life with one sandstorm of confidence-breakers after another till your confidence became a lost treasure, waiting to be discovered one day. This treasure needs to be unearthed step-by-step. You have to pick every single grain of fear-sand out to get your confidence back, that is why most find confidence building so daunting and for many much harder than losing weight. I have seen too many people having lost weight with improved looks and still remaining just as sad and anxious as before their fat loss transformation. It was never the fat that was the issue, it was the inner discovery that never took place!

So if the treasure is inside then what is outside? Your fears are born outside of you. Life, random and structured, the people, known and strangers, the attention, negative and indifferent, the expectations, unrealistically high and shockingly low but accurate and the comparisons, unfair and relentless, all mate together to birth your fears into your soul’s womb.

Understand that nothing is wrong with you or deficient in you. As Rumi said:

“You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.”

You simply are dealing with a pile up of layers of negativity gliding into your life from the outside. So, do I mean, shut yourself from the world ensuring no ‘filth’ ever comes into our ‘holy’ existence? Absolutely not.

Live and dance in the world but with a laser focus on quality, which brings me to the second point in the construction of real confidence.

A coal miner accidentally stuck in a collapsed cave unable to see anything around him may give up digging any further because he may not know how far he is from escaping the tragedy befallen him. Panic sets in, which only accelerates the crisis. He maybe only two feet from freedom but he doesn’t know which rock he needs to move to break free and all this time oxygen is depleting.

But if in his panic as he throws himself against the walls, maybe even gets hurt, and he notices even one tiny ray of light coming from some part of the collapsed cave, he will fight for his life with all his might and concentrated effort. Why? Because the tiny result he sees builds disproportionately high hope, leading him to have much higher confidence in his effort that then plays out as further concentrated action and in turn more results. A few cycles of results-hope-confidence-action later he stands a high chance of being rescued.

Look for small wins and small results to build momentum. Build the early rhythm by consistently controlling the seemingly mundane. Life’s inertia is one of the biggest challenges one faces and it can last decades and even a lifetime. How do you start the constructive loop above? How to create results? Remember, the benefit from results is disproportionately larger than the result itself. If you simply walk 30 minutes daily while keeping your eating and sleeping habits unchanged, you will be surprised to see the impact on how surprisingly energetic you feel and later, how you fit in your clothes and a bit later, as the scale reflects a lower weight, your confidence and motivation levels go through the roof. You will carry yourself differently, talk with more energy, project strength and purpose.

However, you can’t accrue these exponential benefits if you don’t focus on quality of effort. Walking 30 minutes on a Monday only, won’t do anything really, but even 4 out of 7 days a week, may generate the initial push to overcome inertia. So here the quality of effort means a) do what you set out to do (30 minutes walk, not 15 minuets) and b) do it again at least 4 times a week. You multiply 1 week’s effort by 2 and you start fitting in your clothes a bit better, you multiply that 2 week effort by 2, you start looking better, you multiply the 1 month effort by 2 and you move the weighing scale in your favor. All along you are strengthening your life’s core and boosting your confidence. This is what your entire life and presence is built upon from having fulfilling relationships to running successful businesses.

In today’s age of quick fixes, OPUD (over-promising and under-delivering) and magical transformation hacks, we often lose sight of deep commitment. The deeper we devote ourselves to building our confidence, the stronger we become mentally and emotionally and that investment still carries us through in times when desired results are stubborn to come by.

Start your journey of building real confidence by holding yourself accountable to the following:

Let the work begin!

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