"Link your confidence to your good intentions"

Confidence is never absolute. Growing up, I struggled with confidence issues which I understand now to be a lack of practice in being confident. Again, confidence is never absolute. It shifts and changes depending on your perception and your actions.

Anyway, enough with this poor introduction.

Ed Mylett's podcast on confidence helped me understand a more sustainable approach to confidence. "Never LINK confidence to your ability or achievements. Link confidence to your good intentions." I found this incredibly powerful. Going back to the issue of having finite solutions for an infinite problem, linking confidence to good intentions (can be infinite) is far more sustainable than linking confidence to the amount of achievements you have made.

I keep thinking about life being a marathon. How long can we keep lasting? Having a 78 year old father helps me understand this at my age. Even someone who dedicated his whole life to martial arts, travelling and helping others has a finite life. Age catches up, even if you do all those things that slow down ageing: exercise, having responsibility, keeping the mind active, living a healthy lifestyle, love.

You are also a product of your environment. If you are the largest contributor in your social group, you may be confident. What if you were the lowest contributor? It doesn't matter what you are contributing so much. It scales and is relevant to the context. Confidence is never absolute. But a baseline level of confidence is important.

Mark Manson says "to become confident, you must be comfortable (at peace) with what you lack." This is of course, powerful and true too. I believe (like anything if you give it the time and open mind) Manson's statement goes hand in hand with Mylett's. Both say, don't link confidence with what you have or had. However, one says to link it with good intentions and the other adds on top of that, to be at peace with what you don't necessarily have or even will have.

P.S. Good intention demands a requisite of following through with disciplined action. Of course, good intention does not necessarily equate to good action. "Good" is inherently subjective and one person's 'good' can be another person's 'bad'. Nothing happens by accident, it just may pass one's consciousness.