Cold Shower 5: Confident Thinking In A Crazy Age

Cold Shower Confident Thinking in a Crazy Age Vol. I, Article V

This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive for Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd. For the past thirty years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. He is the author of five books and more than 200 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relationships to power – for a changing work force in a changing workplace. He started out as a laborer, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. These columns will answer questions troubling modern workers everywhere.

Question:

Dr. Fisher, you write there is a crisis in confidence, but that confident thinking is possible in these crazy times. Confidence is a persistent theme in your writing. What do you mean by it, and how can I make it apply to me?

Dr. Fisher replies:

Confidence is a state of mind. It is not the absence of doubt, insecurity or apprehension, but the recognition of the wisdom of these attributes. It is important to believe in oneself, to be self-reliant, and self-determined. Yet confidence is not blind certainty or blind conviction. What makes a person truly confident is the recognition that confidence, at best, is a fragile characteristic of one’s psyche, and can be quickly destroyed. Put directly, confidence is derived from what one observes, experiences, and learns first hand about oneself and others within the dynamics of the situation.

Confidence thus derived makes us human. It fuels trust in relationships, and relationships make society. Conversely, distrust kindles conflict, competition, confusion, character assassination, and dissipates energy. Mental fatigue throws one off stride, and in frustration, one loses attention to what matters, and often the will to prevail. Scapegoats are sought to expiate one’s guilt at not being in charge.

Confidence is based on confident thinking, which in turn is based on how we see ourselves versus how others see us. If desire and fear play a tennis game with our psyches, chances are we will attempt to project how we should be (ideal self) at the expense of how we actually are (real self). In this scenario confidence is the loser. If one cannot be authentic to oneself, one will not be authentic to others. A life of dread, misery and disappointment are likely to follow.

The hard rule of life, which is now taken for granted, is that life is essentially a selling game – selling on being a value-added entity to an acquisitive society. We have become a commodity, which must be packaged, presented, promoted and sold in terms of quid pro quo – something gained for something given.

We are assessment contractors of thoughts, ideas, skills, beliefs, interests, dreams, and good will. Those most successful in this selling game are confident thinkers who subscribe to these Ten Commandments:

(1) Complete belief in oneself.
(2) Total belief in the value of what one is doing.
(3) One sees oneself as successful with the hubris to define that success in terms relevant only to oneself.
(4) One expects good things to happen because good things are deserved.
(5) One recognizes the importance of others and esteems them individually.
(6) One likes oneself, which means one accepts oneself as he is, not as he ought to be, and it follows from this quite naturally that one accepts others as he finds them.
(7) One desires to create something good to the benefit of others.
(8) One looks on problems as door openers to new opportunities.
(9) One plans one’s work and works one’s plan to completion.
(10) One takes life seriously, but not oneself.

Confident thinkers understand that before they are one they are many. The one does not come into being until the many cease to exist. Permit me to explain. Each of us picks up habits like candy at a candy store. It takes six weeks to acquire a habit such as smoking, drinking, gambling, or lying, to name only a few, but literally a lifetime to disengage oneself from such behaviors.

Habits are forms of attachment, forms of dependency. We come into the world dependent. Our parents not only feed, cloth and shelter us, but imbue us with their hopes and fears, loves and hates, stereotypes and biases, in a word, their bent values. Teachers and preachers, politicians and pundits, relatives and friends, peers and acquaintances hone or distort these values until they become our own.

It is not until we rebel, until we sort out these biases and shred those that do not match our growing consciousness and empirical evidence that we become an authentic person and confident thinker. Alas, most of us tire of this demanding quest and seek refuge in self-help books, which are no help at all. Confident thinking is not about self-image psychology, not about self-esteem, not about safety, security, not even about social acceptance. Confident thinking is about finding the key to self-worth by being, doing, and contributing real things to society-at-large.

Confident thinking is not about second hand knowledge, not about repeating what others think and calling it one’s own, not about comparing and competing, not about being “somebody,” not even about achievement as measured by others. Confident thinking is about self-discovery, self-creation, self-realization, and self-fulfillment. Answers to one’s unique gifts can only be found by stumbling and bumbling forward in an effort to make contact with the real world so that those one touches are better for the touching.

Copyright (1996) See the author’s book Confident Selling for the 90s (1992), nonfiction nominee for a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Book is available on http://www.amazon.com/ or by e-mail: TheDeltaGrpFL@cs.com