Embrace Vanity To Embrace Confidence
To me, confidence cannot be solely based on appearance. Because image can be taken from you. And if it is taken from you, what do you have left? It must come from within. It must be trained to be unyielding in the heat of the fire of trials and tribulations.
What I’ve learnt from studying the great’s is that their unshakable confidence is deeply ingrained into their being. It’s born in the chaos of failure, struggle and learning.
Unshakable confidence cannot be dependent on outward appearances. Unshakable confidence cannot stem from your car, cloths or any other tangible possessions.
Accepting The Vanity
Even with this awareness, my tendencies for superficiality and vanity can grow large at times…and to be honest, I kind of love being that way. I know some of you do too. Though many are quiet about it because of how love for one’s self and the superficial, can be stigmatized. It’s the fight between our conscious and our body. The world tries to quiet any overconfident left field idea’s or beliefs in an attempt to push the status quo. I am writing to fight against that. So you can fully embrace how you feel about you. That is first and foremost — you need to be self aware about YOUR perceptions of YOU. Only then will you give yourself the opportunity to reach ‘unshakable confidence’.
I truly believe you have to be 100% honest about who you are and how you feel about yourself before you can complete that solid foundation of confidence.
Forging Confidence
In my short life, I’ve forged my confidence through accomplishment, experience, and travel; through facing fears, pushing boundaries and acquiring knowledge. Not by comparing my day to day life to someone's highlights on Instagram. Not by comparing my own values to the social constructs of those that surround me. Though I have fallen victim to this dozens of times.
This written piece is going in a lot of directions but I believe it can be summed up in the phrase bellow:
Facing fears, pushing boundaries and acquiring knowledge.
You want to grow authentic confidence: Do those things. Look at my Instagram. What do you see? If I tried to perceive objectively outside of myself I would say I see someone intensely experiencing life.
“Anybody that travels knows that you’re not doing so to move around, you’re traveling in order to be moved. What you are seeing is not just the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall but some moods, intimations or places inside yourself that you never ordinarily see when your sleep walking through your daily life.” ~ Pico Iyer
We’re not just talking about traveling around the world. You don’t have to physically move your body anywhere to travel. If you can move your mind to the fire of a new, exciting and unique place it has never visited before than you can travel to higher levels of consciousness. That is exactly where your confidence will be forged.
