Are we born with confidence or can it be nurtured?

New Delhi: Contrary to what many industry experts, courses, programmes, workshops, and training sessions would have you believe, I firmly believe that everyone is born with the level of confidence they require to live out their life, their purpose, and their journey.

Let me ask you - Have you ever really noticed a child? When a baby is born he's free and full of confidence. The baby is confident, when he/she cries for milk, it appears, when he poops, someone appears to clean it up. Have you noticed a toddler, how confident a child is about what he wants, and how he clearly communicates without prejudice or hesitation? Almost till the age of 6-10 years, there is an abundance of self-confidence and effectiveness in communication.

Post that age, we start gathering the baggage of life - every time someone says - "Are you sure?", "Work hard so you don't fail", "You should not fail!", "A lot depends upon you!". We feel the fear of failing and slowly start to resist taking on big challenges so as not to face that fear. Over time (years) even though people outside may stop saying it, our mind remembers all the times we failed in something & slowly the self-doubt starts to add layers over and over. Now a confident, outspoken and fully self-expressed child slowly starts to doubt & second guess himself.

We are filled with experiences of failures, rejections and belief in our incompetency. And as there is a need for confidence in the market, and different industries, we are always looking to collect news, and education, we put up a facade of false self-confidence & project it to the world, hoping no one would find out.

However, inside there is a huge conflict between what we are really feeling and what we are pretending to be so that we may be accepted, acknowledged & appreciated. Over time this gap continues to eat us inside, like a termite, and increase the experience of something lacking.

Time and again it has been proved that potential is never an issue with human beings, we can achieve whatever we believe - but most of us carry a lot of unconscious beliefs in our failures, our rejections & our lack of success. We are settled in our lack but not in our ability to create, to be bigger, to be tougher, more powerful, or beautiful. The more pressure we apply to be confident and self-assured, the more the absence of it shows up. What we resist, persists. We resist failure, un-surety, and lack of confidence and that is what we continuously and ongoingly attract in our life.

Over time the amount of pressure and fear that we carry increases to a tremendous amount - the pressure that no one should find out about the lack of self-confidence and that slowly starts to effects our communication our performance and overall self-esteem. When someone says you are confident, you feel validated. It is like what you are trying to prove has been accepted. You've won! But that confidence is very short-lived and we need to put a lot of pressure on ourselves to perform every time.

To access that inherent and inborn self-confidence, instead of adding anything new, acquiring any new knowledge or training, or attending a workshop, we need to work on removing the years of conditioning. We need to work on removing those old limiting beliefs that are not serving us - beliefs that limit us and hold us back from living our truest potential. We need to break through the years of layering of self-doubt, judgment, and fear of failure and reconnect back to that confidence that is already there inside us all.

(Neeraj Malik is an Emotional Wellness Coach and Mind Healer)