“If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life”
- Marcus Garvey
Sometimes confidence never looks like the way we want it to, it is always the other way around. Maybe it’s the slightest realization that we may never be perfect. They say a counselor is always confident in the way they get across what they want to say to the client, who is waiting for a response to their problem. The question running in one’s mind might be ‘How can a counselor not be confident when that is their job?’ Well, what is it, which stops the mouth to say words that automatically come to the mind. It is confidence! Confidence is something that a counselor needs both, to be the professional and the person within. Self-doubt is a worm that eats the person within. It allows no room for growth, so we think, and we let it win and take over us. I remember the first counseling role play that we had in class and there I was playing the role of the counselor. There were a lot of moments when there was no confidence in my eyes that could reflect back to the client. There were thoughts in my head such as ‘Oh what if I stumble?’, ‘What if it’s not right’, all leading up to the thought of ‘What if I fail’.
Doubt has always led to over thinking, and the mind is suddenly filled with a thousand thoughts that question my choice to study psychology. The important point to note very indefinitely is the fact that the entire build of becoming a psychologist is lost with one small smirk of self-doubt. Then! It was in that moment, the pupil dilated and I found myself stiff and cold within. The words being framed were out of track and it felt like falling off a cliff. From the periphery of my eye, I could see the supervisor scrutinizing me with keen observation as to what could be the reason for the out-of-track questions and maybe even going away from the point of importance. The hit in my head came in quite later but, stronger that, the reason of being that way was maybe because there was not even a hint of self confidence but rather heaps of self-doubt. If I had only stayed calm and not doubted in whatever little knowledge there was of being a counselor, there would have been smoother sailing. The fact however was, that I had doubts, whether the client in the role play would take me seriously, even if this was just my classmate playing the role, what if a client really would never take me seriously? What if there was a split second, wherein the client would get up and go claiming that I was not the best help? Scary right? Well, that’s what it feels like being on nerves; in fact that is what self-doubt feels like. It was always somewhere inside of me, hidden under within. Maybe it was the culmination of the years spent in harboring these thoughts of not being good enough that added up to that self-doubt that kept creeping in at every moment, when it should have been broken and dealt with. Like sand near the beach, the mark made never stays, so were my effort to change this self-doubt into a positive stroke.
Slowly but steadily, I see a light that shines through my soul, saying that maybe, just maybe if you try to give yourself one more chance of being confident, it might transform into ways we never know.
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