Developing confidence is an area that I naturally find myself gravitating towards. I find the whole topic fascinating and ironic because I feel confident in some areas in my life while feeling insecure in others.

What’s up with that?

Confidence: A non transferable skill and domain specific

I recently finished a book titled “Mastery: The first rule of mastery: Stop worrying about what other people think” and currently working through (a library rented copy of) “How Confidence Works” by Ian Robertson. In “How Confidence Works”, Ian Robertson states that confidence is domain specific and that confidence itself is NOT transferable.

In other words, just because you are confident in area A (e.g. dance) does not mean you are inherently confident in area B (e.g. public speaking). While it can be a trait, self-confidence has more to do with competence within a specific domain.

For instance, you can be the most confident dancer, able to effortless dance in front of a large audience, and then feel absolutely unsure and insecure and terrified when it comes to dating! It follows that building confidence is a skill that is transferable across domains (more on this below — see Gold Nuggets below)

All all that brings me to “paradox of rising expectations.”

In a nutshell, when it comes to setting goals, an individual’s goal post continues to move. That is, what often happen is that once we reach out goal(s), here’s a natural tendency to set another (typically more ambitious) goal. It’s a recursive, infinite loop: set goal, achieve goal, set goal, achieve goal.

Gold nuggets extracted from conversation with Jo-L

I followed up with Jo-L over Instagram, sending him a few voice messages, asking him a few follow up questions. Here are some pearls of wisdom I extracted from the conversation:

• “Confidence is a product of the effort ….”
• “I’m not talking about the outcome…the outcome is a completely different story … I am putting myself in this position and I am trying. And that means no matter the outcome, I can try again. And I can go again. I am gaining confidence in the fact that I am putting myself in this position. And this is something that is transferable.”
• “If I’m capable of putting myself here — of trying this out — I am capable of trying something new out. If I am capable of mastering this … then I have the capacity to master something else.”
• “You’re not mastering the craft. You’re mastering yourself WITHIN the craft”
• “Every single time you master yourself within the craft, you’re also learning a lot about yourself that’s going to be useful in the pursuit of mastering yourself within another craft.”