What 99% of people get wrong about confidence

It’s June of 2020 and I’m in a car with my girlfriend at the time driving towards a food market.

It’s a warm sunny day in Krakow Poland and the covid restrictions have just loosened up a bit so it’s time to test all the Polish I’ve been learning alone in my room for the last 2 months.

We moved to Poland at the beginning of 2020 and I made a promise to myself I’d try and learn Polish. And discovering that it takes on average 16 years for non-slavic speakers to learn it fluently, on my first walking tour, wasn’t enough to sway me against learning it.

So I’m silent for the whole 20 minute car journey because I’m too busy repeating the Polish phrases I’ve been learning in my head.

“Dzien dobry, czy mogę proszic piec jabłko”

My girlfriend is happy we’re spending time together as we drive to the market, but I feel nervous.

I can feel the social anxiety creep in the closer we get to the market, which we’d been to before but I’d let my girlfriend order everything because she’s Polish and it’s just easier.

But this time I want to reclaim my manhood and assert my independence.

“If I can order 1 thing I know my girlfriend will be proud of me and the confidence I’ll feel will be incredible” I think as I begin to mediate on the approaching victory.

So we pass the market in the car and drive around the corner to park.

As my girlfriend pulls the handbrake up I feel my hands sweat and my throat dry up as I turn to my right and see the market.

It’s as busy as it could possibly be and because the market is around 20 minutes outside of the city, there’s no way in hell the people speak English here, So I’m going to stick out like a sore thumb as the only foreigner. But I’m not going to be a foreigner today, because I’m going to try and order in Polish.

So we get out of the car and walk around the market, lost in the sea of people and vibrant fruit and vegetables of all different colours. There’s old women selling flowers, young people selling gherkins and sauerkraut out of huge barrels. Everyone seems to know each other and there’s a real hustle and bustle about the place.

But I look at all of this food from a distance. I’d love to buy some of the food but the thought of trying to order something in my broken Polish now I’m face to face with these people, sends shivers down my spine and makes my knees go weak. So I continue doing laps of the market pretending to look interested until my girlfriend asks “ok do we actually want to buy anything or have we come here for nothing?”

“Ok” I respond. Now there’s no hiding.

So we walk to the entrance of the market where there was a middle aged woman selling huge crates of blueberries.

She’s my target, I think. And there’s no one queuing, go go go!

Mission inbound, I set my eyes on this woman and assess the scene. I linger around the blueberries with my girlfriend next to me, and I tell her, I’ll order them as she goes to pick them up.

“Ok” she says and I can see the surprise in her eyes.

So I pick up the blueberries, walk up to the counter and greet the woman in Polish, my hands are sweaty and I can already feel the nervousness in my walk.

I pull my mask down and hand her the blueberries as she asks me a question in Polish.

“What?” I think, “I have no idea what she just said” so I pull the oldest trick in the book and say “tak” which means yes as she puts the blueberries in a bag.

Thank god! I think. I got that one right.

So after this confidence boost, and as she’s packing the blueberries I decide to test myself.

I spot some radishes behind her and attempt to ask her if I can have five of them. But after I mutter whatever I said she looks at me and says “Nie rozumiem” which means “I don’t understand.”

And instantly I’m in fight or flight mode. I’ve never wanted the world to swallow me up so quickly as I notice people are starting to queue behind me and my girlfriend is nowhere to be seen.

So my primal brain kicks in and I point at the radishes and try to ask for 5 but I completely forget how to say the number 5 in Polish. My mind is blank and all I can see is these bloody radishes and this stern faced Polish woman staring at me completely confused.

So I give up, and just signal the number five with my fingers and say it in English, to which she understands. I then stand there in silence as she packs everything, I give her the money and walk off.

I feel defeated and angry as we walk back to the car.

All I wanted was to order 1 thing and my mind went blank.

My girlfriend asks if I’m ok to which I sigh an exhale of annoyance, and it was in that moment I decided to stop learning Polish forever.

Distillation:

Outside the context of language learning, perhaps you’ve experienced a similar situation.

Maybe you wanted to approach a stranger, go to a gym for the first time or have an interview for a dream company you want to work at.

But what stopped you from doing that thing was a lack of confidence.

You didn’t feel comfortable with the thought of doing it and the thought of failure talked you out of doing it before you even tried.

In that moment, perhaps you convinced yourself you “weren’t ready yet” and you needed to wait until you felt more confidence.

But this is precisely what 99% of people get wrong about confidence.

You see, I’d never learned a language before I moved to Poland and my mindset throughout attempting to learn the language set me up for failure from the get go.

I hated making a mistake in Polish because I wanted to speak it fluently so badly to impress my ex-girlfriend and her family. So at any opportunity I got to speak to strangers in Polish I shied away from it which made my day to day life incredibly difficult.

I found an English speaking barber instead of Polish, I went to the self-service checkout at supermarkets to avoid speaking to people and I became reliant on my ex-girlfriend to do basic social things for me.

But all I needed to realise was that in order to be confident we must first be vulnerable.

Or in other words, embarrassment is the cost of entry.

Vulnerability is your gateway to confidence because if we only do the things we already feel confident to do, we won’t grow.

Similarly, if we do things which feel completely outside of our comfort zone, and in our panic zone, we might surprise ourselves and succeed at them or traumatise ourselves and never want to do that thing again.

So we must operate in the sweet spot of confidence which is our stretch zone. Where things are just slightly above our ability.

To keep this in the context of socialising, let’s say you don’t feel confident speaking to strangers and you’d rank it as a 9 out of 10 in terms of discomfort and anxiety. 10 being the most uncomfortable and anxiety provoking.

But you’d rank speaking to your family members as a 1 out of ten.

And despite this you’d like to increase your confidence in social settings with strangers.

So instead of convincing yourself you have to cold approach strangers, which would be in your panic zone, find an activity which is around a 6/7 out of ten.

Maybe that’s sparking up a conversation with the person serving you at a restaurant or supermarket.

Then master that environment until you build your confidence in it and can then increase the level of your discomfort.

And repeat and repeat and repeat.

The psychologist Dr. Julie Smith likens confidence to a house we build. And each time we step into a new area which requires fresh confidence, we step outside of that house but when we do, we carry with us the evidence and self-belief that we’ve built a house before.

Lastly, to help cultivate that confident feeling with stillness you can use the technique of the perfect nurturer.

This is an image of a person that you can return to in order to feel safe and nurtured when that is what you need. I you prefer the idea of a coach you can use that instead.

• Create an image in your mind of the perfect nurturer or coach (this could be a real or imagined person)
• Imagine you are sharing with them what you are currently facing, how you feel about it and what you want to work on
• Take some time to imagine in detail how that coach might respond, and write it down
• This sets the tone for the words you can start using to respond to yourself as you work on building your own confidence and inevitably face vulnerability along the way

"A professional coach would not bully you with words, or chant affirmations that you couldn’t believe in. They bring honesty, accountability, unconditional encouragement and support. They are in your corner, whatever the score, with you best interests at heart. Doing that for yourself is not always easy, but is a life skill that we can improve on with practice.”

- Dr. Julie Smith

So remember, in order to build confidence, don’t order fruit from a Polish fruit market, naa just kidding, in order to build confidence we must go where we have none.