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08/10/08 |
    
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A Ramble About Confidence: A CCBA list member expressed fear that she
would not succeed. This is a post I sent in reply, not only to her, but to
all the budding vendors. In short, believe in yourself.
From: "AuntyAlias (aka
NJ)
Deb:
Would you believe DebbieG was shy, to begin with? Jen/boozykitty, who now is going out of state for Etsy shows used to be the quiet wall flower sitting in the corner, afraid that someone might speak to her? Would you believe that when I was younger I used to hide behind my mother's skirt and hide my face if people greeted me? Now I'm a HAM. I don't think that public speaking is something that anyone is born to do. Politicians and professors suffer from stage fright. I read somewhere that JFK's hands would shake when he gave speeches but he hid them behind the podium. A lot of our stage fright comes from something being a new experience. Once we barrel through that first experience our confidence level is raised. The more we do a thing that used to make us fearful, finding that we didn't die from the experience, we weren't even bruised from the experience, our confidence grows. That's why Doctors have to go through residency, trades people go through apprenticeship training, everyone needs a time to practice what they do in a safe environment. It is our hope that this will be the safe environment where you can practice strutting your stuff. Where you can practice writing promotional blurbs for your website. There's no failure here, only exploration and discovery. It's important to massage our brains with thoughts of "I can do this". There's a reason for my saying this. Yesterday I was half listening to a college TV broadcast of a Psychology class. There was an experiment that I thought was relevant to what we're doing here and it made me stop working to pay attention. They took two men and told one that his performance results reflected his intelligence, and he was to rate his level of confidence. They told the other man that his performance showed him where he needed to learn more, like it was an opportunity to learn, they didn't tell him that it reflected his intelligence, and then he was to rate his level of confidence. Can you guess what happened? The guy who thought that his performance, meaning his mistakes, reflected his intelligence, rated his own confidence level lower and lower. The guy who got the other message just went forward with the tasks, each mistake he made he looked at it as an opportunity to learn, therefore his confidence level went higher over time. Their tasks were the same. It's the message they received that effected their confidence. So I'm telling all y'all here that "You can do it." This is not rocket science. The learning curve is only as steep as you view it and I say it's not so much of a learning curve as stair steps towards a goal. Each step is one move closer to that goal. If we choose to run up the stairs, taking two at a time, we get to our goal winded. We may fall with a missed step. Take small steps and believe in yourself. We are all afraid of an uncertain future, but we need to realize that if we are frozen in fear we'll never go forward to reach our goal. With the good fellowship here we hope that the little steps we all need to take is done with the warm bond of friendship and that way we can all be a little braver than we are when we're alone. Big hugs to you Deb. You can do it. If public speaking or self promotion isn't your thing, then delegate that to your outgoing sister. Successful people don't do all the work themselves. The most successful people surround themselves with people who do things BETTER than they can, and let them alone to go do those things. Since I've been making moves to becoming a vendor my sons and their girlfriends are lining up to help, should I need it. They realize that I've been slowly moving towards this goal for a long time. They believe in my determination, see my product, watch me study and learn, and they never hear me say "I'm afraid I won't do well." They hear me say, "This is just going to be great and it'll be fun too." I say that to make my brain believe it and they believe it along with me. Is that self hypnosis? I guess it is, some would say it's Neuro-linguistic programming. What we tell ourselves has more impact for good or ill than anything anyone else says to us. I can ignore someone who calls me a jerk. I can't ignore myself calling me a jerk. Therefore, I don't tell myself negative things about myself. I give myself time to learn a thing and don't beat myself up if I make "miscalculations". Just as COC has a "Quarter Jar" to break the habit of negative statements we tell ourselves about our creative efforts, this list needs a "Quarter Jar" for every time we tell ourselves we're not going to succeed. For those who don't know about the concept of the "Quarter Jar" here's a link. http://www.norajean.com/Rambles/QuarterJar.htm Believe in yourself, break down the tasks to small steps, take one step at a time. You can do it. I believe in you and you got to believe in you too. xoxo NJ
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This site was last updated 02/08/08