The Mathematics of Confidence
It is not ‘just another’ graph
Take a blank paper. Let’s plot some points.
A Journey of Understanding Confidence
My Journey of understanding confidence is made of a lot of comfortable and uncomfortable experiences. Most of the time I was absent about the fact that I am on the journey. More than an active one, It has been of the kind in which I often switched settings, from the normal “Negligence” mode to suddenly “All Conscious” Mode. The former one was the default setting, an effect of years of practising distraction and ignorance, the latter one is what I have learnt over some years and even after knowing that it is the setting one should always remain in, I struggle to sustain.
Maybe because knowing is not enough, because we won’t do something unless it makes us feel better. You may know better, but to be able to sustain it in the longer run, you have to make it feel better. We all are biased when it comes to emotion. Regardless of how much we try to fight it, we are fundamentally driven by emotions.
Well, I am not saying I have completed the journey. To be honest, sometimes it feels like I have just started. I am still a traveller, very much a naive one, who is constantly trying to apply whatever he is learning. I haven’t reached the destination yet (I doubt I ever will, or anyone ever will)
The journey had some memorable steps which came with the understanding of that point’s mindset. Here are the Steps I reached when I was discovering the true meaning of Confidence.
- Initially, as a toddler, confidence was alien. Hell, we were struggling to learn the alphabets that Confidence was made of. It was not a word we were surrounded by.
- Next, it was just a difficult word to pronounce, because in India as we were learning English, not understanding it and that too by ignoring the essence of our mother tongue(Because English is going to give us Jobs) and in doing so, we have come to an understanding that the bigger the word, more difficult it is to pronounce. English, in general, was a subject for us rather than a language. The focus was always on learning to get rid of failing and repeating it all over again.
- Then came the third stage, when confidence was something we were filled with, not knowing what it truly means, maybe not even knowing it is called confidence that we are feeling inside us, but only knowing we have it, enough to do anything that we want. This is the Highly Enthusiastic stage which was fuelled by Consistent Curiosity, something that is curbed by the society in the disguise of regulation and etiquette.
Here we were the aliens, landed in a world we are trying to understand. - Next is the phase when this confidence has encountered some scars along the way. It (The Consciousness) has witnessed what happens when it goes high without much experience backing it, just like smoking weed. I was now starting to realise that confidence isn’t what I used to think it is.
- In the next step, after learning a few lessons about it, the Confidence was high again, this time even more stubborn than before. Because it got some experience to back, it is surviving with the wrong belief that ‘It is enough’. Here is a funny truth, ‘It’s never Enough’.
- As a consequence of the previous action, the confidence again got hit by the tight slap of reality. This time it scared him a bit. It has entered the phase when it has enough scars and now everything seems to be going southward. There is a dilemma and the confidence is struggling to increase. It has once experienced that imaginary shooting up, that delusional peak and consequentially, THE FALL. It concluded that it isn’t going to help. In other words, he is afraid, that increasing it will haunt him with the same experience.
When in distress, just like a toddler, confidence is alien.
- Then finally, after experiencing that the lack of it is only the gameplay of the mind and in reality, just like every other thing, there is a dire need to find the balance.
You have seen the two extremes of it, the black and the white, the -1 and the 1. Now you have to find the grey zone, your zero line.
- Eventually, I realised I was again struggling to understand what confidence truly is. It is a familiar feeling, as I was struggling to learn the alphabets that Confidence was made of, only this time, alphabets represent much more than just the letters in ‘C O N F I D E N C E’
As you would have guessed already, I thought confidence follows a trajectory of an exponential graph, that with age this confidence will nurture, build itself up and give the compound effect in the end. I was wrong. If that were to be the case, Old people should be the most confident. Are they?
The Sine Wave Curve of Confidence.
Turns out it is actually following the path of a sine wave, in the trigonometry of our mind. It goes right from zero to its peak, instantly, just like we became confident so easily. After reaching the peak, it started falling as time proceeds, it comes to the mean position. But since we are poor handlers of our mental health, we let it penetrate the bottom strata, it goes in the negative zone.
Now point to be noted is that there is a slight difference in the time factor here. The time it takes to go from peak to the absolute negative is very very short. It’s because here we let the emotional gravity factor multiply. Also factor in the Pulling Force from inside, constituting our self-image and that of others about us.
The beautiful part about this motion is that, just like a sine wave, you eventually come to the mean position after seeing the worst position, you gain the confidence to face further challenges. The Dawn begins after the Darkest Night. You Rise.
One more difference of this sine wave motion is that this doesn’t have to be unlike the mathematical sine wave, which is periodical. You don’t need to follow the same path over and over again. There is no rigidity in this. You can change the course at any time. You can be constant anytime.
One great observation from the interpretation is, the self-confidence should be like the neutral balanced line, The Zero Line, between the negative and positive. It seems like this line is unaffected. But that’s the point, that how your faith in self should be, unaffected, regardless of all that you faced and go through, regardless of external circumstances.
Confidence, as I understood till now, is a backend mechanism of doing any task, the fuel behind the energy. It is something you need to actively expose, to show the light to. It will rot like packed food if you didn’t eat it at the right time. Keeping it in the refrigerator will only help for some time. If it gets used to the darkness, it will be an ally to the other things living there, Ego and Ignorance, and they are damn good manipulators.
Just like everything, it is a process, an organic process by which it grows. Tweaking with the natural process will have a cost.
Confidence without Competence is Delusion.
more articles at https://medium.com/change-your-mind
