Are You Missing Confidence in Yourself? Or Did You Let Someone Take It From You?

Why do the negative things people say about us stick so hard that we lose the ability to name even one good thing about ourselves? We rehearse our shortcomings until the groove runs so deep we can no longer see over the edge of it, let alone climb out. Somewhere in there we stop being the knight or lady in shining armor and settle for being a sad sack instead.

Do you remember the old song "I Ain't Down Yet" from the Debbie Reynolds years? The spirit of it is the opposite of what most of us do. We dig ourselves further into self-pity and doubt instead of pushing up toward the place we actually want to be. Goals fade, and the whole effort shrinks down to staying above water. We worry more about sinking than about rising. And here is the part that stings: a lot of the time, other people are the ones pressing us under so they can lift themselves. They act as if there is one spot at the top and it belongs to them. Think of King of the Hill, the game kids play on a dirt mound.

It sounds grim. But what if the premise is simply wrong? What if the top has far more room than the people in your past led you to believe? What if those who put you down carry their own low self-esteem and can't stand the thought of being at the bottom alone, so they drag you along for company? It is almost funny, because the way back to your own confidence is usually closer than you've been told. You got fooled into thinking otherwise.

Climbing out of that swamp starts with believing the truth about yourself. You hold more potential than you give yourself credit for, and some of the people who have pulled ahead of you may actually have less. I'll use my own history. I earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology back in the 1970s, which put me out front for a woman at that time. There were far fewer women than men in my program, and a larger share of the women who started went on to finish their doctorates than the men did.

What came later taught me more than the degree did. Women and men I worked with tended to land on one of two conclusions. Some decided that if I managed a Ph.D., it couldn't have been all that hard, and they could have knocked one out in a couple of years right after their master's if they'd bothered. Others cast me as a potential Ph.D. snob and made a point of it: having the degree didn't mean I got to tell them anything, and if they held some power or title without a diploma from a big university, then I had it coming to be taken down a peg. Envy running the show. Not cooperation.

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