Accessing your confidence store, finding your confidence glitter

Are you a Superman or Wonder Woman version of a human being?  If so, good on you. I'm not super or wonder anyone.  There are times when all my little glittery sparkles of super or wonderfulness disappear, devoured by the confidence gobbler.  I fear I will never see the glitter again. The confidence gobbler is a nasty foe. Something as simple and inconsequential as a disappointing restaurant reservation fuels the gobbler to rise up, swamping my hope and smothering my confidence glitter.    

Disappointing was the best rating I could give to an Edmonton restaurant recently featured as one of the top 10 in Canada in Enroute magazine.  We were celebrating friendship, workplace survival, and a birthday.  If you were going to rate the importance of the components of the evening, the restaurant's performance was a distant second to the gift of being together.  I selected the restaurant and felt some responsibility for the marginal service and the simply okay food.  Weird how we take on junk isn't it?

Day to day, we encounter all kinds of junk that dampens our confidence glitter.  Others who live in a confidence void themselves, try to squish your glitter out of you.  Some may go so far as to call you names, like fat or stupid.  Ugly words have the power to stick to you in a bad way, reducing your sparkle.  There's no need to document the myriad of confidence thieves.  I'm certain you know your confidence thieves intimately.  They tend to travel through life with us.  It's our job to make them unwelcome, to toss them out on their pointy little heads, so there is room for the glitter.

One sliver of confidence glitter brightens things up, and the wonder of it is that once you invite one piece of glitter to hang about it attracts more confidence. In the middle of dinner in the disappointing restaurant, one of our party announced that it would sure be nice if there was a confidence store.  Suddenly, I had the song Sixteen Tons, going through my head and began wondering how to rework the lyrics to "confidence store" instead of "company store".  That's how my mind works - I listen to the conversation then have about three other tracks going in my head at the same time.  I'm not recommending selling one's soul to the confidence store.  That's not where the thought thread was heading.  I thought a confidence store was a fine idea.

We all have access to a confidence store selling confidence glitter, and it doesn't cost any money.  We are born with a confidence store right inside us. The little people in our lives visit a wonderful confidence store everyday, over and over.  They are surrounded by others who love, encourage, comfort, tease, and teach them.  They aren't worried about not being able to talk in sentences when the book says they should, they put their focus and efforts on the pleasure of making sounds and trying out words.  When they are learning to walk, they fall over a lot, sometimes resulting in bumps and bruises.  But they don't sit down on the ground and tell themselves they will never walk.  The confidence gobbler is remarkably absent from their lives.  When they fall over those little people look for someone to hug and reassure them, then they set about trying that walking thing again.

If it feels like your confidence store has closed forever, don't despair.  It's still there.  Don't try to open a department confidence store, just start with a pop up stand.  Find one shard of confidence glitter in your life.  Dig around it's there. Invite others to your confidence pop up stand and share your tiny bit of glitter, it will multiply in the presence of those who love, encourage, and challenge you.  

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