"Confidence is knowledge of yourself."
Here's my definition of confidence, which leads to how you can build your confidence: "Confidence is knowledge of yourself". When you have done something well a hundred times you have built knowledge in your ability and therefore you won't think twice about doing it again. This lack of contemplating how to perform a skill is because you know your ability and are confident. Building confidence, then, is to have knowledge of doing something well.
Building confidence can be done in a number of ways. The traditional way is to try, fail, try, learn, try, succeed... in other words, keep trying until you perfect it. Most confidence is built by doing something repetitiously. Another way is to borrow confidence from the future. Try this exercise to see what I mean.
1. Choose something you're not confident in doing today (e.g. public speaking, a new sport, etc)
2. Project ahead in your mind to a future point in time when you've mastered this task (e.g. a month, a year, etc)
3. In your projection think about the knowledge you'd have about that skill and try to sense the confidence you'll feel in the future when performing it.
4. Now borrow that future sense of confidence and approach learning this new skill with the knowledge of having mastered the skill in the future.
If you practice this projection technique you'll find that you can borrow some or all of your future confidence and accelerate your growth and mastery of your new skill today. Of course there is no substitute for actual practice but a little extra confidence will greatly boost your acquisition of confidence and knowledge of yourself.
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