On Humility and Confidence

 This last Sunday, I was the General Evaluator in our club's Toastmasters meeting. It is a role I love taking up. Usually, I begin my evaluation by sharing some insight on something that might help us excel at anything we do. This time, I shared my thoughts on the role of humility and confidence in our path to mastery. 

Regarding humility 

Be humble about what you know and what you have accomplished so far. 

This is important because of 2 reasons - 

a) Being humble reminds us that many people have contributed to our success , to how far we have come. If you are a good speaker, many people have played a role in you getting there. Somebody created toastmasters. Somebody mentored you. Many people evaluated your speeches and offered suggestions on where and how you could improve. Each one of those people have contributed to your growth.

b) Being humble reminds us that we have not arrived. yet. In fact, we will never arrive. Because no matter how good we are, there is always a next level. We are never going to run out of things to learn and explore. And that's wonderful. 

Now, coming to confidence. 

Be confident that you can learn and accomplish anything that you put your mind to. 

This is important. Because, if we did not have that confidence ,we would never try new things. We would never take risks. We would never get out of our comfort zone. We would keep doing the things that we know we are good at. And here is something that took me a while to learn - 

True confidence does not come from knowing everything we need to know in order to accomplish a goal. True confidence comes from knowing that we can figure things out along the way. That we don't need to know everything before we get started. Knowing that in fact, preparing too much is a sub-optimal strategy. 

Coming back to humility and confidence, there is another distinction. When you look at people who are overly confident or arrogant, they are often focused on their past laurels, their past glory. their past accomplishments. And because they are so obsessed with their past accomplishments, they've stopped growing. They have saturated. They are not spending their time exploring new frontiers. 

On the other hand, because humble people don't take their accomplishments too seriously, they quickly move on from an accomplishment, and try something new. They are more concerned with what they can do in the future, than what they have done in the past. 

The arrogant live in the mental world of past glory. The humble actively work on new things all the time in the real world. 

Be humble about what you know and what you have accomplished so far. Be confident that you can learn and accomplish anything that you put your mind to.