Confidence Is The Game
The game you want to play is within, not without.
It was a moment of hesitation, but a deadly one. The position was complex, the material equal. Any wrong move could spell disaster.
I glanced at my pieces on the chessboard, then my opponent’s. I couldn’t decide what to do. But time forgives no one. My confidence faltered, I played the wrong move, and my opponent seized the upper hand in a drawn endgame.
In the end, it didn’t matter how hard I tried or how bad I felt — losing is losing. But as I reflected on that loss, I realized that the game that matters is not around you. It’s inside you.
Confidence is the game. And when you play the right game, you gain confidence.
Confidence is not about finding the right move on the chess board, so to speak. It’s about moving in alignment. Of course it hurts to work hard with nothing to show for it. I can relate. Every time I lost, I felt like I wasted time, effort, energy. It was painful.
As a business owner and instructor of music and chess, I often find myself wondering how I can help my students improve their confidence. And I have seen firsthand how my own confidence affects the energy of others.
When I am confident, I am at peace with myself and who I am. Students can feel it. It removes doubt and uncertainty from their minds. I don’t need others to do anything to make me secure because I love myself.
Confidence leads to better results because there’s a certainty that can’t be faked, and that removes doubt.
In my work, I have seen three ways people develop confidence in their abilities.
Experience: The more you engage with different situations, the better your intuition becomes at recognizing what is right for you. Experience builds certainty because it helps you learn what you are and are not familiar with.
Practice: The more you do something, the better you get at it. This is the musician practicing a shift a thousand times, internalizing the feeling until it becomes second nature. It’s the shift from hesitation to knowing, the moment a skill becomes part of you and not something outside of you.
Self-Awareness: This is the certainty that comes from knowing yourself and what goes on inside of you. In moments of self-awareness, you become one with yourself. This center of calm creates a safety that leads to better choices.
Key Question: Where in your life do you feel hesitation and uncertainty? How can you align yourself from within to decide from a place of certainty instead of fear?