No matter how brilliant an idea might be, for it to be truly ‘useful’, we must also understand how to put it into practice. To help, The School of Life will be bringing you a new exercise every week… giving you the means of turning wisdom into reality. Underconfident people are not born, they’re made – and the more we find out about how they are made, the better our chances of reshaping ourselves in the direction of greater freedom and strength. To generalise hugely but usefully, under confidence tends to have its origins in a deficit of love. Probably someone, somewhere in the past – most likely a primary parent, or caregiver – didn’t give us the support, attention and kindness we needed. And so we developed patterns of timidity and fear, and became much less than we could have been. Under confidence, therefore, is merely a symptom of a much more serious, underlying issue: a lack of self-esteem. The route to greater confidence begins by assessing our own level of self-esteem – and identifying the negative patterns of thought and behaviour that are holding us back. To help you, we’ve designed a short exercise – taken from our new book The Confidence Workbook – that we call A Self-Esteem Audit.
The difference between a successful and a disappointing life often comes down to a critical ingredient that we overlook at our peril: confidence. The Confidence Workbook is a book with an explicit and practical purpose: to take us through some exercises that will help us rediscover the confidence we all already have inside us but have neglected for too long out of habit, fear or misplaced modesty. This book demonstrates that confidence is not a gift of the gods but a faculty we are all endowed with and that can flourish with the right kind of practice and encouragement. Here are exercises – practical, entertaining and most of all useful – that flex our confident faculties and guide us to greater effectiveness in our relationships, in our working lives and in our approach to ourselves.
