The article about building confidence and self-esteem was only trying to help. It started out with a success story. A journalist, mother of two, lacking confidence her whole life, sat for 20 minutes in her car one wintery Nebraska evening trying to summon enough courage to walk into a comedy improv class. Suppressing her self-doubt, she ultimately entered the classroom and made a few people laugh. Missioned accomplished. She conquered her fears and is rewarded with a heavy dose of confidence and self-esteem, which I suppose was the takeaway from the article.
I once chased after confidence and self-esteem. They were just out of reach on top of the high diving board at the community swimming pool. A bothersome fear of heights kept me from that board, and if I could conquer that fear, my confidence and self-esteem would mushroom into a superpower. Never mind that this fear never kept me from skiing, flying or standing on the top observation deck of the Tokyo Tower—but, for some irrational reason, those accomplishments didn’t count in my rule book. To face my fear of heights, I followed the lead of the journalist and mother of two, and I took a class.
Diving 101.
I was in college, and I was relieved that the instructor was female. I foolishly assumed her gender automatically made her a sensitive person. As I stood 10 feet above the water, too scared to jump, explaining my predicament, my compassionate instructor said, in front of the whole class, “Jump, you big baby.” Two weeks later I was throwing a one-and-a-half somersault into every flying leap.
Here’s the rub. I got no pleasure from my accomplishment. I never enjoyed the drop from on high, no matter how much whirl I put into it. My only achievement was jumping despite the fear. And the bit about building my confidence by confronting my fears…a lot of hooey that didn’t extend much beyond the swimming pool.
I wish my college advisor had been the Wizard of Oz. He would have saved me a lot of time and energy by presenting me with a Certificate of High Self-Esteem. “There! That’s all the proof you need that you have it.” When I ask for a Certificate of Confidence, he tells me that confidence is meaningless. “What you need is practice!” His advice: find something you like to do, and practice it a lot. Expertise is confidence on steroids. “But that sounds like work,” I tell him. “Can’t I just hang out at the pool and hope to get a brain, a heart and the noive?”
I suppose my diving class was nothing more than a distraction. Had I pursued expertise instead of confidence, I would have skipped diving altogether and spent that time studying my assignments in that advanced grammar course. No surprise, really, that the pool won out.
If I got to be the Wizard for one day, I would tell that journalist that she doesn’t need to look for confidence; she already has it. Maybe not for improv, but certainly for journalism. She also possessed enough confidence to raise two children. Why not spend more time improving in those two activities or simply writing about improv and leave the comedy to the experts who aren’t afraid of it? After all, while sitting in her car, she must have sensed the futility of ever becoming good at improvisational comedy. I mean, a class to learn how to improvise…now that’s a joke!
Into the Comfort Zone 