NEWSPOT DAILY TONIC: Most times we lack confidence – and we often lack belief in ourselves when we need it most. By Bishop Akamisoko

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“Confidence sells – people believe in those who believe in themselves. No one wants to be stuck in a room with other people who feel like they don’t deserve to be there. Stop wondering if you’re good enough. Know you are and start acting like it.”

Fortunately, self-confidence is a quality you can develop. Anyone can be more confident. When you’re different, sometimes you don’t see the millions of people who accept you for what you are. All you notice is the person who doesn’t. As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live. You cannot be lonely if you like the person you’re alone with. Just pick a goal, a goal you truly want to achieve, and take a clear-eyed look at your weaknesses – not so you’ll feel less confident, but so you can determine exactly what you need to work on. Then get to work. Celebrate small successes. Analyze your weaknesses. Keep going. As you gain skill, you’ll also gain a feeling of genuine confidence, one that can never be taken away – because you’ve earned it. Don’t waste your energy trying to change opinions … do your thing, and don’t care if they like it.Pride is holding your head up when everyone around you has theirs bowed. Courage is what makes you do it. The way to develop self-confidence is to do the thing you fear and get a record of successful experiences behind you. If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced. Always be yourself and have faith in yourself. Do not go out and look for a successful personality and try to duplicate it. Don’t wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles, and less than perfect conditions. So what? Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident, and more and more successful. You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do. Low self-confidence isn’t a life sentence. Self-confidence can be learned, practiced, and mastered – just like any other skill. Once you master it, everything in your life will change for the better. Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit. Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement. One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation. It is confidence in our bodies, minds, and spirits that allows us to keep looking for new adventures. To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. But failure has to be an option in art and in exploration–because it’s a leap of faith. And no important endeavor that required innovation was done without risk. You have to be willing to take those risks. People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is light from within. Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong. Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they’re yours.The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself, in spite of being unacceptable. If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves. Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people. Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be?Talk to yourself like you would to someone you love. Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.
Bishop Duke Akamisoko