Welcome to another edition of Unshakable, Unbreakable, Unstoppable Stories with Bonnie Jean.
Ever compare yourself to other people?
How’s that working out for building your self-confidence?
If you feel better about yourself when you compare yourself to someone else, you’re building false confidence. If you feel worse about yourself when you compare yourself to a person, you’re destroying your confidence.
I was always good at the second one: destroying my confidence. For instance, I was good at destroying confidence in my intelligence.
Now I’m an athlete and I love competition, but competing for the best grades in the class was not a good strategy for me. When I got a test or a paper or a homework assignment back, I wanted to know what everyone else got because I wanted to beat their grades. I wanted to be the smartest one in my class.
I certainly wasn’t the most popular, and since I couldn’t be the best ‘cool’ kid, I wanted to be the best smart kid. Only I wasn’t. A handful of kids always seemed to do just a little better than me.
My grades were never quite good enough to compete and win. If I got a 97, the smarter kids got a 98, 99 or 100. If I got a 100, the smarter kids got a 101, 102 or 105.
It frustrated me so much. I wanted to be the smartest, but I just wasn’t. I would beat myself up for making A’s because my A’s weren’t as high as my classmates.
I reached a breaking point in the tenth grade. In order to save my own sanity, I decided not to share my grades or ask my classmates what their grades were. I decided that the way to improve my grades was to compare myself with one person: me.
I would try to beat myself. I became my greatest rival. I wanted to do better than me. After all, what Jane or Jack made on their tests didn’t go on my transcripts.
Their grades didn’t reflect how much I knew about the subject; mine did. Their grades didn’t show how much effort I put into studying and learning and paying attention in class; mine did.
I became a much more confident student once I strove to improve myself. I learned to accept that others were smarter than me. And that was okay. If they were smarter, they were responsible for using their knowledge to get better grades than me.
That didn’t mean I was stupid. It just meant I needed to do the best with the intelligence I had. So from the tenth grade on, I kept my grades to myself, even through college. I made A’s and B’s throughout my school career because that was the best I could do.
YOUR job is to do YOUR best in school. Whether you make A’s or C’s, you need to know you got that grade because that is the best YOU could do, not because it’s better or worse than anyone else.
In school, do YOUR best; don’t try to gain false confidence by belittling others or destroy your confidence by comparing yourself to people smarter than you.
Learn to believe in who you are, and that starts by discovering your strengths.
That’s where unshakable confidence comes from.
To Your Dreams,
Bonnie Jean
P.S. Please don’t wait as long as I did to find your unshakable confidence! Life is really much more fun when you set goals and take action to make them happen. No matter how old you are, you can be an unshakable, unbreakable, unstoppable Dream Doer today! To help, I want to give you three FREE gifts, which includes the entire audio book of The Dream Doers and the Summer of Secrets. To claim your FREE gifts, visit TheDreamDoers.com now.
