I attended a Toastmasters meeting the other day as a guest. If you’ll ask me 10 years ago to go to these kinds of social events, I will give you a BIG NO. But now, it’s different. I even gave an impromptu speech about one of the table topics they have. I felt nervous like hell but it felt good after doing it.

I am a self-proclaimed introverted extrovert (some call it ambivert) meaning in a big social gathering, I am ok being at the farthest corner of the back seat but I can be the life of the party if needed and If choose to be. I guess this is the reason why sometimes I feel extremely confident in myself and sometimes the confidence is just not there.

Some of you might know that I play the drums. You know why? Because I don’t want to be the center of attention. Drummers are always at the back but they hold the group together in terms of timing and beat. I think I’m a decent drummer and again, if you ask me 10 years ago, I’ll tell you I suck.

I was terrible at speaking the English language. First, because it’s my second language. Second, it takes a lot of practice and real-world conversation. Third, they don’t teach you in school how to be good at speaking unless you take speech communication as a subject. I took computer science by the way which doesn’t require you to speak to create computer programs. I’m getting better at it. There are still some minor glitches sometimes but at least, I can say I’m a pretty good English speaker now.

So where am I getting my confidence you ask? I can say from constant practice, but my best answer will be, I get confidence by just simply believing that I can do it.

What’s my point? It’s not that we don’t have confidence, we all have it. What we usually do is we bury it really deep that when we need it, we can’t find it. One good way of uncovering it is if you really want to do something, BELIEVE that you can do it and the confidence will be there. Now, there’s a fine thin line between confidence and over-confidence and what differentiates the two is humility.

The next time you need confidence, know that it’s there within, you just have to believe.

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