I've been wanting to write about this topic for a couple of months, maybe more. Heck, I've been wanting to write PERIOD for a couple of months. This blog started four years ago last month and has been inconsistent at best. But that is life, isn't it? Some periods of time were more dedicated than others, and this past 18 months has been mixed with commitment to writing for the Burnside Writers Collective and the technical writing of my work. I find joy in both, but I've fallen behind in the former, too. But I have some column ideas ready to get back to work there.

And I'm already getting off track. It's been easy for my mind to wander the past few days, and one of the reasons is a creeping of doubt we all get when we are trying to become settled on important matters of business, life, or the heart. But I don't really want to call it doubt, but I think sometimes it's more deeper than that. I think it has more to do with confidence than a battle between doubt and faith. And this becomes tricky because the source of confidence, or lack thereof, is laid much earlier than when put into play in any particular situation.

I am really only thinking through my own levels of confidence, and I have a few particular examples that differ in the level of confidence I have and how I came to have that confidence. Maybe I am over analyzing, but I am also thinking about this now as a parent of a child who has a tendency to the timid, at least initially, in certain situations, so I am wondering how to instill confidence in her early on so that she can lean on them later in life.

As a young child, I was a really good soccer player. I have no problem admitting this, no ego in it whatsoever now. I even remember writing what was, then, an ego-laden essay as a 5th-grader about my soccer achievements on my entrance exams for a prep school. I got in, but the essay was graded as a D+. But I was a very good soccer player - always the best on my team. I always scored at least one goal a game. I know this because my mom upped the ante for the Dairy Queen reward for what I got after the game based on what I scored. But I also played on rather bad teams, except for one year. I never knew what it was it was like to play on a team, or even field, with even competition. I even remember going to a soccer camp one summer and being the only player able to go 9-for-9 hitting each of the tic-tac-toe squares of the goal.

But when I got into the prep school, I went out for the varsity soccer team, every one was pretty good and in shape, and in better shape than me. If I didn't have skills, and if it wasn't for that tic-tac-toe at will ability to shoot to make up for not being in the type of shape to run for 60 straight minutes as Mr. B wanted us to run, I don't think I would have made the team. But I made the team. I made the team and I lettered, but I was average. And I knew I was average, or at least I thought I was average, or at least no one told me any different. At that point, I was on my own, I had no one behind me giving me the verbal confidence that I still was as good as a player as I was the year before. I scored a couple goals, but mostly played as a role player, shrunk into the background, and became intimidated by all of the other great players around me, which was everyone. I didn't score a single goal in eighth grade, even though I started every game as a center mid-fielder. I remember specifically playing the team role once again because I clashed with another center mid-fielder, a seventh grader who refused to play the defensive role, so I would fall back and make up for his selfishness and taking one for the team.

By the time ninth grade came around, I decided I was burned out from soccer and switched fall sports to golf. But the truth was I didn't believe I was as good as the other players, and I didn't believe I could cut it anymore. And I had no one pushing me saying that I could do it. Note, I don't blame anyone for not pushing me, but I do believe it is part of the reason, just as I believe I will affect my daughter a son in that way, whether I know it consciously or not.

Just after college, I had stayed around to work with a new and unique worship ministry in a role that hadn't really been defined very well. After a snafu of communication between the leaders, I was told in a roundabout way that I should seek some counseling for the confidence issues I have that were evident through my performance. I had a shaky performance of a piano accompaniment which I had been given only days before. Piano was not my strongest instrument and I had really been brought on for arrangement and composition first, not piano. I had been doing instrumental performances since I was 8 years old, and honestly I hated them, but I could perform fine. From violin to viola, I really didn't like it very much. I wasn't very good. I knew it. But I had a good teacher and conductor who would encourage me to do the best I could. So my confidence was tempered. I learned piano on my own mostly by ear and for the purpose of composing. And then in college I started playing keyboards for the college worship team. My senior year I learned guitar because we needed another guitar and the Thursday it was my turn to lead, I would be sick to my stomach the entire afternoon. I couldn't eat a thing after noon. But if I wasn't leading, I would be fine. To the credit of one of the other leaders, he didn't buy it and instead came to me to get to know me personally and find out for himself exactly what my expectations were from my role here. He discovered for himself how to lead me through the transition of this fallout and into friendship and other opportunities and we have been friends, very very good friends, every since.

Where I have the most confidence is in public speaking, which blows me away. I just listened to an introduction I gave to a piece I made to a piece I arrange my junior year in high school, and I was terrible. I was clearly nervous. I took a public speaking class my senior year for an English elective because I knew it would be good for me. It was GREAT for me. I took another my senior year in college as a refresher. I probably should still take another, even though I gave 7 presentations last year alone. I rarely rehearse a presentation. I do much better speaking off-the-cuff. I spend much more time preparing my slides or images that the audience will see and then days, or even one day, before the presentation I'll do a brain dump of notes going through the slides as if I were speaking. Very similar to how I'm writing this blog write now. And then depending on how long the talk is or how comfortable I am with the talk (i.e. how many times I've done it before) I'll go through those paragraphs and pull out the major points of each paragraph and box them and use that as my notes for the talk itself. But it's important for me for my words to be natural and free flowing streams of thoughts when I'm at the podium. That allows me to be rhythmic and myself, conversational and relaxed. Otherwise I tensed up and get nervous and wonder what I need to say next. Now this area is where I can get the most feedback or verbal push of confidence. It's also obviously where you could get crushed the most, too, so it is risky. But if you are able to feed off of the praise and criticism appropriately, then you can gain confidence very well.

Where I struggle the most is the decision point of the not-so-obvious choice. You have choice A and choice B. Both can be good, both can have some negatives, neither are bad. What do you choose? These are also the decisions that aren't overtly spiritual, and especially if your not coming out of a particularly peak spiritual year, the typical "which path is God leading you" question doesn't really hold much water. How do you gain confidence with these types of dilemmas? These are the situations where you don't really know if you made the right decisions until years later, or if there really is a right answer because maybe there is no wrong one, maybe just a better one, depending on your theology. And really, it's 12:20am and I'm not going to get starting on that type of subject.

So as the title said, confidence is a tricky thing. A lot of times we talk about needing faith to see us through things, but what we really mean is that we need confidence, and that may bring up a lot more from our past than we really want to have to deal with or can deal with at a particular point in time. Maybe we need to deal with it and it's good. Maybe we should leave it in the past. Or learn from it and be better parents than we are now because of it.