THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER WRITES:

 Self-Confidence, Something Everyone Deserves to Have!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© July 6, 2015

“When young, we trust ourselves too much, and we trust others too little when we are old.  Rashness is the error of youth; timid caution when old.  Manhood is the isthmus between the two extremes, the ripe and fertile seas of action when, only, we can hope to find the head to contrive, united with the hand to execute.”

Caleb Colton, Nineteenth Century English Clergyman

“Trust men and they will be true to you, treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nineteenth Century American poet and essayist

THE MOST IMPORTANT SALE YOU WILL EVER MAKE

This, I suggested, in the opening lines of my first book, Confident Selling (1971 1^st Edition, 2014 2^nd Edition), which was less about selling and more about confidence.  With confidence, you can do anything your mind envisions.

People flew in from California and drove down from Minnesota to discuss the book with me, intrigued with its departure from the conventional boilerplate of selling into a dissertation on confidence.

“Confidence,” I write, “is the antidote to fear; fear rooted in self-ignorance.  With self-understanding comes confidence followed by tolerance for our own false steps and failures.  As we face down our fears, we rise above obstacles we once thought were utterly beyond our control.”

Now, why would I say that?  Why would I write about confidence, fear and control in the same paragraph?

The simple reason is that I found a very average person such as myself, average in about every way, could do precisely whatever he set his heart and mind to do without protocol or substantiation from anyone else. 

If I thought it, the deed was already half done.

People, of course, took this as arrogance or self-centered narcissism to the extreme.  

People always have a litany of reasons to discourage us from what our hearts and minds tell us we can do if we but take the first step.  Confidence is required to do so.

But you see that is the problem.  

People don’t claim to have that  confidence and therefore do not take that first step.  They wait for approval.  They wait to assay the risks.  They wait for someone to push them over the line in the sand.  They wait until the line becomes a wall.

I've known people who are better writers than I am who have never published a word.  They failed to write because they took comfort in the idea that they could be great writers but were afraid to find out.

I've known people smarter than I am, and had all the attributes to successfully pursue a college education, but never took the first step to find out, taking comfort in the idea that they were smarter than people with the credential. 

I've known people who could have had a great international career, but didn't want to leave the safety and comfort of home and the familiar.

They hang out with people who say they are where they belong while envying those with the confidence to move on. 

They wait for confirmation that they are on the right track when they are not on any track at all. 

You know who these people are. They hang out together. 

They are waiting for the right time to make a move.  They are waiting until they have enough education, or money, or support, or love and affection to take the risk.  

They are waiting and then one day they run out of life.  

They are the gonna be’s and the gonna do’s, and always going to do these things tomorrow.

They never make it because they never made the most important sale in their lives, belief in themselves come hell or high water. 

THE BUSINESS OF CONFIDENCE – THE GROUND FLOOR

Now, I have a confession to make.  I come to confidence from a poor boy's background, but one who grew up in a home of two loving parents, especially my mother.  

From the get go I was a disappointment to my da, being put back in the first grade for "not being there."  In retrospect, I believe my teacher and her principle thought I was retarded.  That was the 1930s. 

Family was a new experience for me as I had been shuttled around from foster parents to relatives for the first five years of my life, when my mother was mainly in hospital, and my da had to get his Irish restlessness out of his soul (I write about this in my novel, “A Green Island in a Black Sea”).

Coming from a strong Irish Catholic American family, for some strange reason, I was put in the public school, instead of the Catholic school.  It was not a good fit.

Being big for my age, I was bullied from the first by older boys my size, and was terrified to speak.  That is what I remember of that experience now as an old man. 

Today they would most likely call it “autism,” but whatever it was it disappeared once I was with the Sister of St. Francis at St. Boniface and then St. Patrick School.

The nuns loved me, and I loved them.  As for my mother, she decided I would be a lifelong project to make me into a duplicate of her brother, who had two Ph.D.’s from the University of Iowa in Economics and Psychology. 

Mention is made of this because to gain confidence it helps to have a reference point, an object, symbol, or some source with which one can identify.  

Confidence often identifies with one's hero or some simpatico person.  

For me, it was my mother’s older brother.  That was part of it; the other part was she emphasized my assets: my athleticism, memory, my unimaginable focus and attention to deal, and my natural inclination to listen with discernment.  

These aspects of my disposition became as natural to me as breathing, plus I had an equally natural inclination to work hard on my interests.  

My da had little education, dropping out of school after the seventh grade at St. Patrick’s.  My mother graduated from high school at St. Mary’s and was a reader of nearly a book a day for most of her life.  She encouraged me to be a reader.

Reading is not only a gauge to explore the unknown but a window to knowing the self.

THE BUSINESS OF CONFIDENCE – 

IDENTITY

Athletics came to define me.  I was recruited to the public high school where I was already more than six, two and 180 pounds, and would grow two more inches.  

When you play football, basketball, baseball and run track competitively in high school, studies can become less a priority.  My mother had a different view.

One day she asked me, “Who are you, Jimmy?”

The question stunned me.  Who am I?  Then before I could answer she added, “What are you?”

My head was spinning.  I stutter when excited, and I stuttered incomprehensibly. 

“Your father thinks it is time you quit school go to work on the railroad and help support the family.”

I waited.  I was finishing my freshman year in high school.

“I told him," she continued, "You’re going to college, and he nearly swallowed his cigarette.”  

She chuckled.  “He asked how the hell are we going to afford that when it is hard for me to put food on the table.”  

There were six of us, including my parents, and he was on the extra board of the railroad, never would have a regular job.   

She chuckled again, “Do you know what I told him?”

I waited again.

“I told him everyone is going to want you; everyone will be wanting to give you a scholarship.”

The varsity basketball coach had moved me up to the varsity at the end of basketball season my freshman year, so I took her to mean an athletic scholarship.  

It soon was clear that was not the case.  She was thinking of an academic scholarship.

“You're going to become a scholar like your Uncle Leonard.  

"You’re going to pay more attention to your studies from now on, and athletics are going to be a distant second.  Is that clear?”

If it wasn’t clear, it proved to be the case as I won a merit scholarship for tuition at the University of Iowa.  I kept it for my five years there.

Looking back, that little episode would define me.  When my mother was not there, she was in my head.  I have found myself throughout my life when I hit a bump in the road, asking myself:

Who are you, Jimmy?

What are you, Jimmy?

People have tried to define me, to get a handle on me, often seeing me different if not the most difficult person they have ever met.  

It is not that I am so different.  It is that I’ve never been seduced by trends, fads, popular lingo, or notions of the day.

Things that gave others a sense of belonging proved to have little purchase with me. 

My passion was found in ideas, ideas often in conflict with my cultural programming.   

When at a crossroads, and there have been several in my life, I’ve taken the road less traveled without apology.

THE BUSINESS OF CONFIDENCE: 

WHAT IS CONFIDENCE?

Confidence is not having a sense of superiority, or inferiority as you can see from this brief biography.  Confidence is being engaged.

Confidence is the ability to act to completion on something of value to you.

In other words, it is not about half measures, not about looking for approval, or reasons to succeed.  Likewise, it is not about finding excuses to abort the chase or back down from the target.

Confidence is about commitment, commitment involves involvement, and involvement means you are already half way there; so stay the course!  

It doesn’t mean going to the “right schools” or working for the “right companies,” or having the "right" pedigrees,  or hanging out with the “right crowd."  It can be all or none of these.  They are incidental to the process.

Nor is it about pursuing the favorite career-of-day because everyone says that is what you should do.  

You know in your heart what you love to do, so do it with a vengeance!

Confidence is being well acquainted with your own history, with your failures, successes, your false steps, your disappointments, your surprises, your embarrassments, as well as your triumphs. 

Confidence, which may surprise you, is not mechanistic but a process of growth and that never peaks, but may have several valleys.  

Yes, one's confidences dips and vacillates, but that only strengthens your resolve. 

Confidence has a lot in common with moral rather physical courage.  

I see young people today building up their muscles and flashing tattoos all over their bodies as signs of personal identity when it is just the opposite.  It is playing to the crowd identifying with the herd. 

Confidence is quiet.  It is engaged.  It has no need for show, or need for kudos.

That does not mean that confidence does not have a goal.  Indeed, the confident person wants to make the sale:

·      The completion of his work to a satisfying degree;

·      The completion of his dissertation to a Ph.D.;

·      The winning of the love of his life;

·      The finding of the job that he seeks;

·      The seeing that his children are launched successfully into life;

·      The advancement to the position sought;

·      The feeling of love and fulfillment in life.

There are many obstacles to these desires and they are primarily self-imposed because of the lack of confidence or the will to work to their full realization.  

What detours people from these goals are often bullies, clear and simple, bullies from the outside or bullies from the inside; bullies disguised as friends or advisers.

THE BUSINESS OF CONFIDENCE: 

BULLIES FROM THE INSIDE AND OUTSIDE

“To have a friend you must be a friend starting with yourself”

This first line was penned in an article in The Reader’s Digest (June 1993).  Subsequently, a book called The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend (1995, 1st edition, Meet Your New Best Friend, 2014, 2nd edition) was written with this theme in mind.

The focus was on the inclination to trust secondary sources, including the views of friends and family more than one’s own counsel.  

Never being so inclined from an early age, I have come to regard bullies as the quintessential ugliest face of humanity.

We think of bullies as the neighborhood tough in which everyone cowers.  We outgrow that tough during our early years.  But we face bullies in the system every step of the way throughout life.

You meet them in teachers and preachers at school and church, in employers and colleagues at work, in pundits and politicians on the tube,  in newspapers, magazines and television news, in psychiatrists, psychologists, family physicians and friends who claim to be in the know on what is best for you, and if any of this takes, you are owned by them, and a stranger to yourself.

When confidence is compromised, there is no chance for the authentic self. 

Many of these secondary sources may mean well, but they are not you, and they are not privy to the length and breadth of your experience.

We are also bullied in the military as anyone knows who has gone through basic or boot training in the army or the navy, the marines or the coastguard.  

Strangely, the military, I have found is a kind of bullying that puts us in touch with ourselves, quite the opposite of the others alluded to here. 

To my surprise, I loved the navy, every moment of it, and had no problem being kicked into shape as I felt I was being treated fairly and consistently in the protocol of what it meant to be a fighting man. 

There are no bullies that equal academic bullies, as they have little power and even less prestige, but they have the grade or the withholding of the degree or the credential at their discretion.  

Mean spirited academics want to break your will, and make you grovel at their feet, as I can attest, which nearly cost me the letters after my name. 

I persevered, and was too good a writer and researcher to be denied my Ph.D.  

If you think this an exaggeration, fully 50 percent of those who complete the course work to a Ph.D., fail as an ABD (all but the dissertation).  

As I’ve repeatedly mentioned in Corporate Sin (1^st edition, 2000, 2nd edition, 2014) and other books in this genre, academics and corporate executives have much in common. 

They have the power over us that we have willingly given them.  Once we surrender our power, the expectation is that they will treat us with kindness and caring; that they will be supportive and appreciative of our interests; that they will be fair and considerate.  Unfortunately, power corrupts and absolutely power corrupts absolutely.  

Consequently, we find too frequently they exploit this advantage with reckless abandon.  For the attention, we have the world we have today.

A factory mentality of academia and industry has no place in the 21st Century.

Our only hope is to have the courage to take charge and map out an agenda consistent with our intuitive strength and the natural guidance system of our internal moral compass.  Should we do that, not only will we be more engaged and happy, but everyone else around us will be engaged with the same synchrony

Confident Thinking (1^st edition 2014) concludes with this suggestion:

“It is a time when we can no longer depend on others in decipher the road maps of our mind.  Our mind has become homeless.  That mind, Milton reminds us, is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, or a hell of heaven.  The choice is ours to make. May you make that connection and soar to grace, greatness and fulfillment.”

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