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Today's
Meditation:
It amazes me
and frustrates me to no end to hear so many people talk
themselves down, to hear them say that they're incapable
of doing things that I know very well they can not only
do, but do well. This is especially frustrating to a
teacher who's trying to help young people uncover their
talents and abilities, to help them to become really good
at something that will be of great benefit to them in
their lives, be it writing, math, communication, music, or
so many other things that people tend to be good at.
How
often do you hear someone say something like "It's
not as good as hers" when they've made something, or
"I'm not very good at this" before they even
start doing something? We apologize for almost
everything, rather than just doing it, and that's a
shame. Our apologies don't help anything; rather,
they simply expose our insecurities and our fears.
When I hear people say things like that, I want to say,
"Don't apologize-- there's no reason for it,"
but I usually just let it slide because such a statement
would have little real effect in most cases.
It
would be nice if we didn't feel a need to apologize.
It would be nice to simply do what we do with the
confidence that the best we can do will be okay, or even
better than okay. It would be nice to simply say
what we want to say without being apologetic, even if our
view contradicts that of someone else. When our
self-expression is hindered by our own inhibitions and
fears, everyone loses.
This
isn't to say that anyone can say anything they want at any
time. Nor does it mean that we should feel free to
be mean to others whenever we feel like it, or to do
shoddy work or to damage something of someone else's
without apologizing. But in our normal, everyday
lives, confidence is a part of ourselves that can go a
long way towards helping us to achieve those things we
hope to achieve, and to move forward and upward in our
lives.
You are what you are, and you are deserving of your own
confidence. Of course, a large part of confidence
has to do with expertise-- I couldn't confidently explain
how a bridge is built, but I could explain how languages
work with quite a lot of confidence. One of the most
important elements of our own confidence is to build our
own expertise-- and that's completely up to us as
individuals.
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