Richard Lloyd Jones: Some see it as a belief in your abilities and talents, or that it's the result of what you've been told and taught. We've heard that "we have to earn it, but that we deserve it at the same time. That we can build it. That we need affirmations, hypnosis, to unleash our power within." But if you still question your self-confidence, and who doesn't, strap yourself in.
Today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, we'll look at what's really going on with our self-confidence. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. Just want to remind you of my email address again, rich at richjonesvoice.com. And I'd like to encourage you to drop me a line and let me know what you think about this podcast. It's always great to hear from you. By the way, I still have some copies of Dr.
Keppe's excellent book, Liberation of the People, The Pathology of Power, that I'm giving away.
Let me know if you'd like one of those. Again, rich at richjonesvoice.com. Now, self-confidence. My gosh, how we have struggled with that one. We've meditated, we've diaried, we've seven-stepped ourselves to death trying to grasp the damn thing, and it always hovers there, tantalizingly out of reach. Others we perceive as having it are constant reminders of our failure as they dangle the keys to the kingdom of riches and success and realize dreams just out of reach.
But today, a chance to see how far away we've been from even understanding self-confidence. I'm taking some segments today from a very good interview done by my good friend Susan Berkley on a series she did called Magnetic Self-Confidence. You can get more information on that at her website, www.greatvoice.com. The interview today is with Leo Lima, a psychologist and psychoanalyst at Dr.
Norberto Keppe's International Society of Analytical Trilogy here in São Paulo. Set the scene for us, Leo, if you would. How do we normally try to treat self-confidence in the world?
Leo Lima: Usually, the psychological orientations, they try to train a person to be self-confident, as if the person was not confident naturally. So, when you train a person to become self-confident, what you actually do, you create a mask.
You create false behavior, an artificial behavior, and this will increase even his insecurity. So we believe that energy, the energy of life we get in our being, in our personality, in our person, comes from nature. And if we are connected to this energy, we are self-confident. And when we cut off from this basic energy of life, then we become to be more and more insecure.
And lose our self-confidence.
Richard: This is something that runs all through Dr. Keppe's work, actually, which we've explored specifically in the podcast on the nature of good and evil, that sickness is the absence or destruction of health, not its natural opposite. You're saying the same thing, Leo, that lack of self-confidence is the destruction or negation of the real self-confidence, that self-confidence is something we have naturally, but that we destroy it.
This is great, but it doesn't help us so much in practice when we have to present ourselves in a public situation, for example, and we feel uncomfortable, very far from confident. What's going on in this situation? This
Leo: fear of talking to people and to be in society, it's because in this situation, we perceive a lot of things about ourselves. When we isolate ourselves, we believe in our own ideas.
When I'm shut up in my bedroom, I can believe in whatever I think about myself. Nothing will challenge my ideas, my opinions. Whereas when I am among people, I see myself reflected into other people. And it's this kind of awareness, this kind of perception we have about ourselves. If we are reluctant to feel all this awareness we have, then we try to isolate ourselves.
So this fear of living in society has nothing to do with society and people, in fact. It has to do with our accepting or rejecting this contact with these perceptions we have in our inner selves. Although we are in society, this experience is psychological. The outer world reflects ourselves. You
Richard: know, I see the same thing a lot in workshops about public speaking that I do both here in Brazil and in the United States.
People are terrified of this type of situation.
Not because they're not good at it or they don't have the potential to be good at it, as much as they're very uncomfortable seeing their difficulties. That they're not as good as they imagine and they're going to have to work very hard and deal with this initial discomfort if they want to progress. Self-confidence means moving forward in spite of the discomfort. What are some other earmarks of self-confidence or self-esteem, Leo?
Leo: You really have self-esteem when you are interested in other people, other projects, doing useful things, whatever they are. Then this love, shall we say, that you have for an activity, for a profession, for a project, for someone, this interest for someone who is not yourself, is the same love you have for yourself. Now, if you do the opposite, it doesn't work. Sometimes people say, before you love someone, you have to love yourself.
There is a mistake there, because this love for yourself, it's selfishness. If you think about yourself, you never look at the outer world. But when you are interested in the good of others, in the good of society, of a profession or something useful, you will have this self-esteem. You have to love others first, and then, consequently, you love yourself. So this self-esteem comes exactly when you're not concentrated in yourself.
Richard: Thinking about others as a way to be more self-confident seems like a paradox, but this contains some real wisdom, I think. But what about failure, Leo? Classic example might be failure in the bedroom. I mean, judging by all the spam I get every day for Viagra and its cousins, either they know something I don't know or this failure is one big nightmare.
Could we see this as linked to lack of self-confidence or self-esteem?
Leo: Perhaps when the person cannot perform in that sense, they feel humiliated, so they associate with lack of self-esteem. But this inability to perform involves other things, because when you have this kind of contact, it involves love. You have to give yourself, you have to be interested in another person. And if you have this attitude of envy in general, you may not want to make the person happy.
And even yourself, sometimes people try to deny their own happiness. They don't see this clearly. This is not in the conscious level. But analysis always shows what's behind what you see. These hidden forces driving our behavior.
Richard: Great answer, Leo. You know, normal thinking about all these problems in the bedrooms or that they're caused by stress or age or something physical. This new thinking is a big step forward.
Now, no show on self-confidence would be complete without some perspective on shyness. Look at this through your trilogical eyes, if you would, Leo.
Leo: Usually, you think about a shy person that he's feeling inferior. This is the general idea. And CAP shows that it's the opposite. It. When we are shy, we are feeling too high. We think that we are so superior, then in a social situation, we cannot face the slightest mistake.
So, if you know that you're not the best, you're not superior, you're just a person in a meeting, talking and giving your opinion and listening to other people's opinions. So, if you see yourself like that, as a normal person, you won't mind much not having the best idea, mistakes, and then you say, oh, I'm sorry, I made this mistake, or I was wrong.
That's okay. You accept that because you know you make mistakes.
Now, "if you think that you are so superior, so knowledgeable, the best, that you cannot make the slightest mistake, then you feel terrified with the idea, and then you feel shy." Well, I said
Richard: at the beginning that we would be looking at what's really going on in the area of self-confidence, because there are a lot of misunderstandings about what it is, and especially about how to build it.
When it doesn't need to be built at all, but accepted. We need to stop impeding it from coming forth. Some final
Leo: thoughts, Leo. We don't allow ourselves to feel our feelings. Ideas we have, we censor, we prohibit. If I have an intuition that I've been behaving in some kind of way wrong or destructive or harmful, I may not be willing to accept that idea and say, "no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's not like this, not like this."
So I will push it aside and won't face it. And this is censorship. So, actually, the biggest, the most harmful censorship comes from our own attitude, not from other people. People are not censored because they have censored parents or because they have censored environment, but because they are censored. We censor good feelings if you are too envious. We censor bad feelings. When we don't want to correct ourselves, the more you are able to relax and admit good and the perception of your mistakes, the more confident you feel because you connect yourself back to the energy of life.
All
Richard: of these remarkable perspectives on human pathology are available through the extraordinary work developed by Norberto Keppe and his International Society of Analytical Trilogy. He's written many, many books on these themes and more.
Drop me a line if you'd like more info. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.
