Self-Confidence Jar
The following is an excerpt from one of the daily lessons in the 15-Day Creative Consistency Challenge. Want to jump in on the next one? Join the waitlist here.
An indie blogger and creator I like a lot, Matt Hickman, wrote a blog post a little while ago that I think about all the time.
In his post, he developed an idea he calls the “self-confidence jar.”
Hickman says that we have all kinds of relationships in our lives: family, friends, coworkers, baristas, and plenty of others. With each relationship comes a set of expectations. You don’t expect your barista to care about your problems. But you do expect your close friends to care about them.
If these expectations consistently aren’t met, we begin to lose confidence in the relationship. If your barista messes up your coffee order ten times in a row, you’d be a fool to keep ordering from them. If your friend keeps blowing you off when ask to hang out, you’d lose confidence in that friendship.
But for some reason, we don’t view the relationship with ourselves the same way.
“If your friend said, ‘Hey wanna go to the gym tomorrow at 7:00 AM?’…and then you show up tomorrow and they don’t come…you’d be pretty upset.” Hickman says.
He goes on to say, “But, on the flip side, if you thought to yourself, ‘Yeah, I’m definitely going to [workout] in the morning. I’ll set my alarm for 6:30 AM and I’ll be in the gym by 7:00 AM” and then you wake up, hit snooze, and don’t go, there isn’t any big blow up. Nobody seems to care.”
At first, this seems like no harm, no foul. Because no one sends you an angry text and you don’t lose your job. But there is a silent adverse effect: a slow, seeping drain of your self-confidence.
Hickman says to imagine self-confidence like a glass jar with balls in it.
“The Self-Confidence Jar (SCJ) concept is simple,” Hickman says. “Every time you make a promise to yourself and keep it, you are adding a ball to the SCJ. Every time you make a promise to yourself and break it, you are taking out a ball from the SCJ.”
The more promises we keep to ourselves, the more self-confidence we gain. But the more promises we break, the more our self confidence dwindles.
This is precisely the reason why it may have been difficult for you to join this creative challenge. Because you know how many times you’ve told yourself you were going to do something, and then immediately after, you failed to do that. Your inner voice was telling you “what’s the point? You don’t follow through on anything! Why waste the time and money?”
Make no mistake—for every one of you here taking on this challenge, there are three other people couldn’t muster up enough self-confidence to do something like this.
With each creation you share in this challenge, you’re keeping a promise with yourself. You’re adding a ball to your own self-confidence jar. You’re proving that your goals are worth it and you are worthy of repost, even from the nastiest parts of yourself.
Keep going.
Want to jump in on the next 15-Day Creative Consistency Challenge? Join the waitlist here.
