Self-Confidence Checklist | How’s Your Self-Confidence Doing Today?

The Ultimate Self-Confidence Checklist!

Whenever you feel as though you’re just stuck and you are making very little if any forward movement in life you should come back to this self-confidence checklist to see where you may have gone off track.

Self-confidence as defined in the dictionary-assurance: freedom from doubt; belief in yourself and your abilities.

Now let us see how this adheres to your personal life.

In the struggle to succeed at any difficult challenge, there is probably no psychological problem more common than a lack of self-confidence.

Out of the seven major conditions for success spelled out for you on the previous page I suspect there is not one more commonly violated then this one.

Self-confidence plays a critical role in one’s journey toward success and if you are weak in this one department it can and will hold you back from achieving your greatest dreams, desires or goals.

Do You Have A Personal Self-Confidence Checklist?

As you examine your life and the lives of those around you I tend to believe that you will agree with me.

Why is this, I mean what gives?

Why do people have such an extraordinarily hard time with issues of self-confidence?

To get a better handle on this problem let us take a look at some of the deep foundations of confidence in human life.

Whenever we have confidence in a person we believe that he will get the job done or that she will succeed.

When we believe in ourselves we believe that we have what it takes and that we will succeed in accomplishing the task at hand.

Anytime I have a belief that I will accomplish something, that belief is rooted in other more basic beliefs about what can be called my personal ability and my moral capability.

The Foundation For A Positive Self-Confidence.

Whenever I believe of anything that I will do I must also believe the following: One I have the power to do it, two I have the skill, three I have the opportunity and four I have the practical knowledge.

I also have to believe that I am morally capable of it and I am ethically open to the task. I also must have the heart, will and the determination to do it.

Here we have an almost complete analysis of the background beliefs for any instance of self-confidence.

This provides us with something like a checklist for accessing the likelihood of finding confidence in a person and diagnosing a lack of confidence when it’s not to be found or when it’s lagging.

Self-Confidence – You Do Not Only Believe You Can Do Something You Know You Can Do It!

Let me say something first about ability here and let’s start with power.

Power operates on many levels, there is for example physical strength, political power, organizational power deriving from institutional status and less formally instituted forms of interpersonal power.

Any one or more of these types of power might be relevant to a particular task or a goal.

Now lets talk about skill for a second.

Skill is something like a cultivated, habituated form of “know how”. An ability to use the power you have in an effective way, it is typically the result of relevant experience.

It is possible to be powerful without being skillful, we see it all the time in government and sometimes even in business life.

Although skill requires some degree of personal power for its cultivation it is possible to have a skill level far exceeding your organizational power to act, so power and skill are different things.

Skill To Do Comes of Doing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Next we have opportunity and opportunity of course is a matter of access. Is a person in the right place at the right time? Or at least can he be?

Does your schedule, with all of its other commitments allow for the task to be undertaken well and accomplished?

Can you position yourself in such a way as to plug into the assistance needed to complete a project?

These are all questions about opportunity.

A Man Must Make His Opportunity As Oft As Find It

Now we have practical knowledge.

Practical knowledge is a form of understanding, when we ask whether a person has the practical knowledge necessary for undertaking a particular assignment we want to know whether he or she knows how to use the power and skill they possess in the opportunities available for accomplishing the task at hand.

Practical knowledge ties all these other conditions together and makes them all realistically available for effective action.

Practical knowledge could even be said to be a form of wisdom.

Self-Confidence And Moral Capability

Now let us take a look at moral capability.

What is at stake here is a small group of what might be called, broadly speaking, moral attributes.

A person may be incapable of performing an action even if he has the power, skill, opportunity and practical knowledge required for it, as long as that action is contrary to his formed moral character.

A serious intention to act in this sort of way could not arise or at least could not be maintained among his habitual tendencies.

Some plants can’t grow in some soil and in the same way some people just cannot do some things and that is a very positive fact about the world.

Part of moral capability is what we might call moral openness. When we say of an evil person “he is capable of anything,” we mean that he has no stable moral character incompatible with an evil intent or action.

When we are wondering if some individual will be able to do some particular deed, one relevant consideration is whether he is morally open to it.

If this condition is not fulfilled we should not be confident that he will do it, rather we should have the opposite confidence, he will not do it!

In addition to openness another part of moral capability is having the heart. Sometimes a person is morally open to a task and even possesses every ability relevant to the task but just does not have the heart for it.

By this I mean that the individual just cannot muster the will or determination needed to see the task through to completion.

This seems to be a separate matter impinging on whether a person both can and will manage to do something.

“We have more ability than will power and it is often an excuse to ourselves that we imagine that things are impossible.“

An announcement like “It can’t be done” is frequently a mask for “I don’t feel like doing it” or “I can’t be bothered to help.”

Often people who don’t have the heart for a job and don’t want to admit that fact even to themselves will resist a new idea with a claim “It’s impossible” or “It just won’t work.”

We always have to be on guard for this little bit of misdirection in our own minds or in the reaction of those around us.

This Then Is The Self-Confidence Checklist, Ability And Capability.

On the ability side you have power, skill, opportunity and practical knowledge.

On the capability side there is moral openness and heart.

Whether we want to access our confidence in another person or confidence in our self or our own confidence in our self these are the touch stones we need to ask about.

Does the person assigned to do a job have the personal ability and the moral capability and does she believe she has?

This determines the basis of the self-confidence that person holds within them self.

“To Be A Champ You Have To Believe In Yourself When Nobody Else Will.”

Sugar Ray Robinson

One of the most important things about the self-confidence checklist is that we can use it to diagnose any problem of confidence.

Is a person at work struggling with worry and self-doubt? Ask yourself; “Am I experiencing some strong hesitation about a direction that I am taking?”

We always need to apply the self-confidence checklist to see exactly where the trouble is.

Whenever we have a high level of confidence that a particular outcome we are shooting for will happen, we must already believe three things.

• Number one, it’s possible, we can make it happen.

• Number two, it’s permissible or rather it is not wrong for us to make it happen.

• Number three, it’s preferable to any alternative.

These three belief’s are just positive responses to the three simple questions; Can it happen? Is it OK for it to happen? Is it right for it to happen?

We do not work confidently toward what we believe is impossible, this is widely understood.

What is not so commonly realized is that we also don’t act very confidently to bring about something we strongly believe would be wrong or even less preferable than some other alternative.

A strong self-confidence in what we are doing requires a conviction that our goal is attainable that it’s permissible and that it is a preferred result, from a prudential point of view.

Now this maps out some interesting territory that seems to be not well enough understood by executives and managers in the business world, at least it is not widely acted on at all.

If we give people who work with us new goals and want them to work confidently toward the achievement of those goals we need to engage in a multiple level confidence building exercise.

We need to help them arrive at positive answers to all these questions.

We need to do everything that we can to convince them that the goal is possible that it is permissible and that it is preferable.

We need to explain the big picture behind the setting of the new target or targets.

We need to build their self-confidence into believing that they have the power, skill, opportunity and practical knowledge it will take to make the target.

What are the values behind the target that they can share and believe in and let them know why this particular strategy or goal was chosen rather than some alternative.

Simply involving co-workers or associates in the process of arriving at new goals and targets and not just delivering them ready-made and unalterable, we make it easier for everyone to buy into those goals.

When their values have been consulted along with their sense of what they can accomplish you will not face a hard sell from ground zero.

Building The Self-Confidence Of Others Is All The While Building Your Very Own Self-Confidence.

People are creatures of habit and any new challenge will be a stretch and any such stretch produces the conditions under which doubts can arise and grow.

But if we excite our colleagues imagination in the right way we can stretch their conceptions of what they can do.

We can help them satisfy the second condition for success, a strong self-confidence, thereby raising the objective probability or their attaining success in the new venture.

They can because they think they can.

The power of belief is great and needs to be tapped more deliberately as well as more regularly in our efforts together, but first of course, we need to deal with our own personal problems with self-confidence.

“What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree.”

Logan Pearsall Smith

As You Construct Your Personal Self-Confidence Checklist Consider The Following:

• Number one-Think of one instance where you or someone around you have seemed to lack a measure of self-confidence that would have been good to have.

Can you use the self-confidence checklist to identify what the source of the problem might have been? What was in doubt? Really try to think this through.

• Number two-Think of some goal you are pursuing now. How would you explain to someone else why you would think it is; one, possible, two, morally permissible and three, preferable to the most obvious alternative that might be identified?

You must always believe in yourself and maintain a strong, positive self-confidence.

If you ever begin to doubt yourself or your abilities you can always come back and refer to this self-confidence checklist.

Never Allow The Daily Trials We All Face From Time To Time To Derail You From Your Self-Confidence Checklist.

How to Build Self Confidence Articles about gaining self-confidence and improving self-esteem. As you work towards building your Self-Confidence Checklist you should take every opportunity to explore new resources.

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