Insight #1: About confidence

Welcome to Insight #1. CONFIDENCE

The following insights were derived from various HealthyGamer YouTube videos. Go check him out!

Main Insights

• Confidence is the default state of being of humans and animals.

• Confidence therefore "can’t be gained" by looking for it out there.

• Instead confidence is lost, and what is needed is to REGAIN it.

• Confidence is lost when an emotional event happens, in it a core belief about yourself (usually negative) (black ball in your brain, sumskaar) is created.

• To regain confidence what is needed is, under this lens, to let go of the baggage (beliefs) that we have of ourselves concerning X subject, or in general.

Action plan

• To do that, the method explained is to go back to the root of the belief, trying to remember when the belief started to take hold and finding the emotional event, then processing it by asking if what you believe is actually true or if its just an unfair assumption about the event, that most likely was not even your fault.

• Another useful tip is when in the moment you feel the fear or the belief come up, try to stop your thought process and see the thought for what it is, an echo of the belief coming from that event,

  even if you cant find the event it is still useful to ask if it is a fair belief or if it is simply untrue.

Personal takes

• I think confidence CAN be gained, for example by improving one's skill and understanding about something.

• still, the default IS a high level of baseline confidence, that gets lowered by the negative beliefs.

• Therefore to have the highest possible confidence in any area we should begin by addressing and healing negative beliefs until we return to a healthy baseline and then to expose ourselves to massive experience and theory regarding the subject to have a better understanding in and of it, thereby reducing doubt.

This methodology can be applied to any negative aspect of ourselves really, take laziness;

• We can start by asking when laziness started and trying to find a moment when we perhaps felt lazy and believed it, or were called lazy by someone else.

• This approach can help us both in dropping the "lazy" handle from ourselves by realizing it probably isn't or at least wasn't true.

• Finally finding possible factors that contributed to the problem, i.e we stopped exercising or started smoking weed, etc.

The method can be put into other words by saying that changing something about ourselves has two areas,

• An active, creative, experiencing, actionable, physical way

• and a destructive, unlearning, healing, mental way

The first is the most known, most obvious, say for laziness it is trying to change our environment to discourage it, changing our diets, taking some supplement, etc.

The second is mostly unknown, it involves letting go of the ideas and beliefs that hold us back, it is about allowing the active change to happen and creating the space necessary for it,

It is about consciously choosing a different thing.

Both are needed for actual change to begin taking place.

Adjacent Insight

• Conscious choice seems like something that can improve my happiness. Asking "why" before most actions or choices helps to put the day to day into perspective and analysis,

  and may improve confidence in the actions taken. To "become more conscious" might just be a matter of literally being more conscious of the things we do and why we do them.

Thank you for reading this insight. As always, I suggest you take some time off to think about it and to try and place it in your life and past experiences. Remember that integration is the most important part.

‘Til next time, have a good one.