The Myth of Confidence - 1

The four most common words heard in Geniekids when parents walk in are, “My child lacks confidence.” “Oh really?” a voice inside me says, “Maybe he is not interested in this but more interested in something else or maybe whatever you are asking is not his strength, or maybe he is right now thinking about something else or maybe just like me he likes to be with himself or maybe he doesn’t like being pushed (who does?) or maybe ……..

Or maybe we do not really understand confidence. If I do not want to go on a stage in a fancy dress and say some dialogues, do I lack confidence? If I do not want to go to a group of children and say to them, “I too want to play” do I lack confidence?

There is this one thing that we all as parents need to understand and this would do mighty good to our children (as well as to our parenting anxiety) and that is:
SELF confidence is one thing and SOCIAL confidence is another. Just because I do not have social confidence does not mean I do not have self confidence.

Social confidence is an ability to interact, assert and confront others. Self confidence is the belief that I have the ability to do something well. Which means social confidence is a subset of self confidence. So mere lack of social confidence does not mean I lack self confidence too. Many a great scientist, doctors, engineers, sport persons etc had high self confidence while having a not-too-high social confidence. Look around and you will find many examples of people who do not have high social confidence but are extremely successful in their life, in their profession or field. Count me as one such example J

When Howard Gardner in his Theory of Multiple Intelligence talked about Interpersonal as one of the many intelligences that “some” of us naturally have (and some do not) – he made this distinction between self and social confidence even clearer. He postulated that one could be musically confident, or visually confident, or analytically confident or verbally confident or intrapersonally confident and so on.

In fact he went ahead and concluded – and did a great service to humanity by doing so – that
*~ if I am confident in any “one way”, that is more than enough for me to be successful in life.
*~ Or to extend this further, high self confidence through my strong and innate intelligence will lead me to be confident in other intelligences too.
*~ What goes into building a strong foundation of self confidence are honing of my natural abilities, my innate potential, my strong intelligences.

so what do you think - pl leave your comments

Ratnesh Mathur.