Confidence - The courage to not know, yet
Confidence: The Courage to Not Know - Yet
Confidence: The Courage to Not Know - yet. What does this mean?
What if confidence isn't about being in control, but about discovering that you don't have to be?
What Is Confidence, Anyway?
We all want confidence.
We want to feel confident in our relationships, our work, our decisions, our abilities and, perhaps most importantly, in ourselves. But what exactly are we looking for? Is confidence the certainty that we will succeed? Is it knowing more than the next person? Is it the ability to remain calm when everything around us appears to be falling apart? Or is it something else entirely? At Counselling Confidence, I am interested in that something else. Because perhaps genuine confidence isn't about knowing what will happen. Perhaps it's about knowing that whatever happens, we have the capacity to meet it. And that doesn't necessarily mean meeting it without tears, mistakes, confusion, fear or the occasional spectacular failure! What if all those experiences were simply part of what makes us human?
Our Need for Control
One of our basic human emotional needs is the need for some sense of autonomy and control over our lives. And there's good reason for that. When we feel completely powerless, our stress responses can become activated. We naturally look for information, explanations, solutions and ways to restore some predictability. Knowledge can help us feel safer. Experience can help us feel more capable. Practice can help us improve. But does knowing more necessarily make us more confident? And when does our healthy desire to understand something become an exhausting attempt to control it?
This is where my own experiences with astrology have provided some rather wonderful lessons.
Astrology: An Extraordinary Lesson in Not Knowing
I've spent many years studying astrology. Like most serious astrologers, I have read, researched, experimented, questioned and learned. And the more I've learned, the more I've discovered how much I still don't know! Astrology is a tremendous leveller. You can approach it believing that, if you study long enough, you might eventually understand everything about the subject. And then you discover another technique, another correspondence, another historical tradition, another layer of meaning.
A door opens.
And behind it are another dozen doors.
What an adventure!
When I first began reading charts, much of my understanding came through what I experienced as psychic or intuitive insight. I wasn't initially approaching astrology as an intellectual exercise. I was drawn to its deeper meaning, its correspondences and its extraordinary potential to illuminate the relationships between ourselves and the world around us. My philosophy was deeply Venusian. So much so that I called my work Venusian Astrology and wrote a book incorporating that philosophy. Over time, my curiosity drew me further into the traditional and technical study of astrology. Mercury became a constant companion through books, writing, analysis and learning. But Uranus, Neptune, Venus and all the other planetary characters had their contributions to make.
And Uranus is especially interesting here.
Uranus: The Planet That Disturbs Our Certainty
Within astrological symbolism, Uranus has a fascinating relationship with confidence. Uranus disrupts. It challenges our assumptions. It brings surprises, unexpected developments and sometimes circumstances that make our carefully constructed arrangements seem rather inadequate.
Yet Uranus also symbolises insight, innovation, awakening and liberation. It can show us something we couldn't previously see. In that sense, Uranus looks in two directions: towards the structures and understandings that are being challenged, and towards the possibilities that may emerge from that challenge. And isn't this something we encounter throughout life?
We become comfortable with the way things are. Something happens. Our established way of understanding the world no longer seems adequate. And suddenly we're learning again! We may struggle. We may resist. We may feel very uncertain. But what if uncertainty isn't always the enemy of confidence?What if it is sometimes the very place where confidence grows?
Learning, Knowing and the Freedom Not to Know
This raises a question I've often considered.
Why do we want knowledge?
Is it because knowledge gives us control?
Sometimes, of course, it does. And practical knowledge is a wonderful resource.
An athlete trains to become more skilled. A musician practises to play beautifully. An astrologer studies to become more proficient in interpreting charts.
All these activities can improve our ability to influence outcomes. But none can guarantee those outcomes. Even an astrologer choosing an electional chart is working within circumstances, possibilities and limitations that cannot be completely controlled. There is always more to the story.
And perhaps one of the greatest gifts of learning is the discovery that we can know a great deal without needing to know everything. We can enjoy the mystery. We can remain curious. We can participate intelligently in life without demanding guarantees from it. And we can discover a kind of confidence that makes uncertainty less threatening and sometimes even wonderfully inviting. So we pardoxically end up knowing more.
The Athlete Who Doesn't Have to Win
Let's leave astrology for a moment. Imagine that your partner is an outstanding athlete. You watch them train. You see the extraordinary commitment, the gruelling routines, the discipline, the sacrifices. You know how hard they work towards their goals. Perhaps they use hypnosis to mentally rehearse their performance, develop focus and prepare for competition. They train their bodies and minds to give themselves every possible advantage. But what do you really admire about them?
Is it simply the victories?
Would you suddenly admire them less because another athlete performed better on the day?
Or is there something else that draws you towards them?
Perhaps it's their willingness to keep showing up. Their ability to recognise excellence in others without losing their own sense of worth. Their courage in confronting challenges that might defeat them. And perhaps it's their capacity to be devastated by a loss, to cry, to question themselves, and then eventually discover that the experience hasn't diminished who they are. That is not the absence of vulnerability. It's the willingness to remain engaged with life while being vulnerable. And I wonder whether that's where some of our most meaningful confidence resides.
The Inner Sanctuary
Imagine possessing a peaceful place within yourself. Not a place where you always feel good. Not a place where you have all the answers. But a place where you can experience confusion, disappointment, embarrassment, uncertainty and even fear without immediately concluding that something is wrong with you. A place where you can say:
I don't know what happens next.
I don't have all the answers.
I may need help.
I may have to learn something completely new.
And that's all right.
Perhaps this is where confidence starts to become something very different from the image we are so often encouraged to present to the world. You don't have to be the best. You don't have to be fearless. You don't have to be right all the time. You can simply begin to trust your capacity to discover what comes next.
Some Rather Unusual Ways I've Built My Own Confidence
Over the years I've experimented with a few techniques of my own.
Some are rather unconventional!
1. Notice That Other People Make Mistakes Too
This may sound terribly uncharitable, but one of my early confidence-building techniques was to notice people who weren't particularly good at what they were doing! Yes, really. We spend an extraordinary amount of time noticing people who appear more accomplished, better informed, more attractive or more successful than ourselves. And sometimes we forget to notice the rest of humanity. The people who stumble over words. The people who get things wrong. The people who make an absolute mess of something. And somehow the world keeps turning! My technique was not particularly noble, perhaps, but it helped me realise that I wasn't uniquely inadequate some times. Of course, the more mature version of that discovery is even better. We are all learners. We are all capable of mistakes. And none of us needs to be perfect to participate.
2. Arrive Fresh on the Planet
Here's another favourite.
Imagine you've just arrived on Earth. You know nothing about how things are supposed to be done. You're a traveller, an explorer, observing everything with fresh eyes. Suddenly, ordinary situations become interesting. Instead of thinking, What will people think of me?, you might wonder:
Who are these people?
What are they doing?
How fascinating!
Curiosity begins to take the place of self-consciousness.
And there is a remarkable freedom in that change of perspective.
3. Take the Lift to Somewhere New
Another little adventure.
Get into a lift in a building you're unfamiliar with. Choose a publicly accessible floor you've never visited. Step out and look around. Who's there? What happens on this floor? What does this place reveal about the lives of the people who use it? You don't have to accomplish anything. You don't have to impress anybody. You are simply practising being comfortable with not knowing exactly what you will encounter. And perhaps discovering that unfamiliarity can be interesting rather than threatening.
Small experiences like these can help us practise a new relationship with uncertainty.
What Has Hypnosis Got to Do with Confidence?
This is where my work as a hypnotherapist becomes particularly interesting. Because our conscious understanding of a problem and our automatic responses to it are not always in agreement. You may know perfectly well that making a mistake isn't a catastrophe. Yet the moment you are asked to speak in front of a group, your heart races, your thoughts become confused and you want to escape. You may understand intellectually that you don't need everybody's approval. Yet your emotional responses may tell a very different story. Our minds learn patterns through experience, association, expectation and repetition.
Now, I’m not sure how you may have learned your keyboard skills, but coming from the era where women were abundantly secretarial before climbing management ladders, learning to type very very fast was essential. Repetition of automatically hitting the key with your fingers without looking was vital. Then there always came a threshold between those who could reach about 60 words per minute and those who leaped upward. A technique I learned was with music. I did a concentrated course many years ago where classical music was played in our ears and it got faster and faster. After spending eight hours a day over the course of about three weeks I think it was, my speeds climbed over a hundred words per minute on those keyboards! So the pattern there was classical music, (which we know has many supportive mechanisms itself for helping us reach spaces in our minds where we can learn quickie), speed increase, something to actually type, usually reading from typed words on pages you could quickly flip over to the next pages, a comfortable chair with your hands on the keyboard in a position where your nerves were comfortable. That sounds like the comprehensive ‘pattern matching’ that culminated in super fast keyboarding! After that, perhaps you do this, my thoughts were like those pieces of paper and I wrote long essays and stories so that my mind’s ideas just informed my fingers. I still have nothing to do with what my fingers are doing when I use the keyboard. If I think about it errors happen.
And this provides a great insight into the use of hypnosis also. We can ‘automate’ just about anything so we never really think about what we have automated! Are there any limits to this? I haven’t really found any.
Many of these ‘patterns’ are super useful! You wouldn’t want your surgeon still following an SOP on how to perform. You can read plenty of studies much more complex than me learning to keyboard automatically! What is the difference between knowing something and becoming an expert at it? (Uranus territory again for sure.)
So let’s come back to Confidence.
We learn.
We make pattern matches. Paper, harmony, fingers, words on the page, done! Phone call, computer, access information, critique and discern, help your customer, done! Listen, retrieve what you know, notice gaps, learn more, critique, consolidate, incubate, intuit, teach, done.
Some of these patterns are useful. Some fulfill many of our basic needs!
Others may have served a purpose at one time but no longer help us live the lives we want.
Confidence might be like driving a robust vehicle on difficult terrain, where we get a sense that we are ready for whatever the road ahead meets us with. We have the steadiness and the power in our vehicle that allows us to notice and enjoy the terrain instead of worrying about whether the vehicle will be good enough to get through. We learned enough about the terrain, but we know we can’t know a lot until we actually get in that vehicle and drive! And that’s where the fun begins and where we maintain our dynamic equilibrium! Wow! I didn’t know that that location with all those fascinating experiences even existed! Wow! I didn’t know that there were so many stars in the sky until I came out west! Wow! I didn’t know other people decided to do what I’m doing now! How come I never met these people before? What was I focusing on?
Hypnosis offers one way of working with those learned responses, using focused attention, imagination, suggestion and mental rehearsal to explore different possibilities.
The aim isn't to make us invincible, and it certainly isn't to guarantee that everything will go our way.
It is to help develop responses that give us more flexibility, more options and a greater capacity to meet life's challenges.
And sometimes, instead of needing to become somebody different, we discover that we can become much more comfortable being ourselves.
So What Is Confidence?
Perhaps confidence is not certainty.
Perhaps it is not superiority, fearlessness or control over other people.
Perhaps it isn't even the conviction that we will succeed.
Perhaps confidence is the freedom to participate wholeheartedly in life without needing to know exactly how the story ends.
To learn without insisting on mastery. As that saying goes, seek excellence not perfection, because perfection is an illusion that can block opportunities for excellence. Or something like that.
To admire others without diminishing ourselves.
To experience mistakes without making them our identity.
To welcome insight, including the kind that disrupts everything we thought we knew.
To recognise that sometimes life is difficult, sometimes beautiful, sometimes completely bewildering.
And still be willing to take the next step.
Because perhaps the most reassuring thing we can know is that we don't have to know everything in order to live confidently.
Counselling Confidence – Hypnosis & Astrology
Helping you explore new ways of understanding yourself, your responses and your possibilities. To BE or not to be.