Turn Pain Into Power

Chapter 4 - No Self-Confidence

Imagine digging a tree stump out of your backyard. First, you have to remove all the soil holding onto the roots. It takes a lot of sweat to uncover the whole root system. If the tree is old then the roots go deep. To do it right, you have to dig out the whole structure. Once removed, you're left with a giant hole. A void that must be refilled. You must fill the hole you created with healthy material and plant something fresh to grow in its place.

While refining my process by working through Past Problems, I discovered I had no real self-confidence. It took about a year before I came to this realization (I told you this is the slow and steady path).

As I looked back on my life, I saw a whole host of events where lack of self-confidence affected my decisions for the worse.

I started to think about why this happened. Was it possible to have come so far in life without any self-confidence? I started digging.

When I was a child and I tried to share my ideas with others or tried to make those ideas happen, other people would shoot me down. Constantly. They would tell me 'No' or make me doubt that I could succeed. I listened to the 'You can't do that' crowd. This turned out to be a huge mistake. Self-confidence is self-trust. It is having faith and trust in your own abilities (i.e. your self). How can you develop trust in yourself if you never try your ideas? I let other people stop me from trying my best ideas, so I never learned to trust myself. Some ideas would have failed. Sure. But not all of them. I would have been guaranteed a few successes. Through trial and error I could have learned which ideas to go after and which to avoid. For those I did go after, I would have learned how to make them succeed.

It started with my parents. Whenever I came up with an idea I wanted to try they would always bring up all the reasons and doubts why it can't be done instead of asking how it can be done. I was initially angry at them for this but, the more I thought about it, the more I realized they had a tough time growing up, too. Children of new immigrant families whose parents (my grandparents) employed harsh parenting techniques that caused my mother to run away from home and my father to develop addictions.

My father used to speak about how my grandfather didn't let him go to a top school on a full athletic scholarship. I mean he brought it up decades after the decision was done and his life went in a different direction. Think about that - my father had in his hands the chance to pursue his dream of playing a sport he loved but, because of his parent's decision, that chance was lost. Forever.

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Sad to think about, isn't it? How many dreams lay discarded on the road of life because of well-meaning carelessness?

That my father continued to bring it up decades later indicated the pain it was still causing him. My father's dream was shot down by his father's. Sure enough, my father instinctively shot down my dreams. As I reflected on these events, it is no wonder that the people my parents became acted the way they did. They had poor models of parenting that produced poor parents.

I always wonder what my father's life would have been like if he had had the chance to go for his dream. I wonder what my life would have been like if my father had been able to change his pain into power?

When I was growing up and I had a good idea – I mean an idea that I just knew was great – someone shot it down. I later realized that, if you have ideas, there will always be someone ready to shoot them down. The "You can't do that" crowd is always ready. Sometimes you get the more insidious rejection – "Why don't you just do [fill in other thing] instead?" It sounds sensible but it's still a rejection.

What would my life have been like if I had the courage to follow my ideas? If you did the same, would your life be different?

When you don't have real faith in yourself, you start ignoring your own instincts in favour of other people's ideas. But, in life, you must be your own guiding force. No one can do it for you. If you don't figure out the path you want to take, someone else will drag you along theirs.

I got tired of being dragged along by other people. I decided to change my life and follow my ideas. This book is one of them. Sitting here at 4:30 am, I have no idea how many people will read this. That's scary to think about because I'm spending a lot of time on it and it will feel pretty awful if no one cares. But you know what? That's okay. The act of creating it is the victory. Sometimes you just need to begin. Start trying things. The only way to build real self-confidence is to bring your ideas to life. Trust yourself. You've gotten to this point in your life, right? You've had successful ideas before. So why can't your other ideas be successful too? Stop locking your creations away out of fear. Instead, carve them into reality, so others may benefit from them.

Ultimately, the life you have is defined by the success of the ideas that worked and how much you learned from the ideas that did not work.

But how do you find those valuable lessons in the failures? How do you find Treasure in those Past Problems? Is there a systematic way to discover those elements in hardship that will make you stronger? 

Yes, there is.