Have the Confidence to Achieve

"Self-confidence is the memory of success." 

-David Storey 

Do you believe in yourself? The truth is a lot of people don't. Why don't most people raise their hands in class when it's obvious everyone knows the answer? Why do some children insist on having training wheels on their bikes a year or two after they could probably ride their bikes without them? It all comes down to self-confidence. Unfortunately this isn't something you just acquire as you age. Confidence has to be built. The danger of not having confidence in yourself is if you don't have confidence in yourself, most people will not have confidence in you. When I was in high school, I didn't have a lot of self-confidence, especially Sophomore and Junior year. I was not particularly insecure or anything, I just never thought much of myself. I was pretty average in my opinion. I wasn't noticed much by others, in fact I found out during my Junior year that a lot of the guys I knew and two that I talked to regularly thought I was an 8th grader or Freshman. This would be understandable considering that I look very young for my age except for the fact that I sang on stage at youth group nearly every week since 7th grade and all of the guys went to that same youth group and 2 were also on the worship team. I was pretty quiet and unremarkable except for later finding out that most of the kids regarded me as being exceptionally nice. I was the person who tried desperately to keep my head down and go unnoticed yet desperately hoped to be noticed. Confusing, I know. I didn't want to try anything because I was terrified of being wrong or failing. Thankfully, I met a guy right before Sophomore year of high school. He basically became my best friend throughout Sophomore and Junior year. I have some health issues that I won't get into in this post but they started  during my Sophomore year of high school. On top of already not being a very confident person my confidence really took a blow. There was suddenly a lot of things I couldn't do and performing mundane tasks became difficult. For some reason though this friend of mine always believed in me. Always. I never knew why. Whenever I wanted to do something he strongly encouraged me to do it and 100% believed I could. I honestly thought about telling him not to bother believing in me so much because he would just be disappointed. Then I was trying to make a team. I tried so hard and gave it all I had but I didn't make the team. I was devastated. He was not. More than that it never shook his confidence in me and he fully supported me in all of my other endeavors. It was bizarre. But why am I even telling you this? Because if you are courageous enough to dare to dream then you must have the confidence to achieve. Many people dream of all the wonderful things they could do and have marvelous ideas. However, they never do anything with them. This always flabbergasted me. Why do all of these brilliant people never do anything with their brilliant ideas? Of course there are the usual excuses; time, money, energy, etc. Then one day it hit me. These people don't have the confidence to achieve. They don't think they can do it. The funny thing I have realized about confidence is the only way to gain more confidence is to do more hard things. In order to do hard things, you have to have confidence. What I realized was when I started doing more things, it was like the whole world opened up to me. I had been selling myself very short for a very long time. There will always be people that don't believe you, the key is to believe in yourself. If you are going to dare to dream then you must also have the confidence to achieve but if you do, you will most likely find that there are many more opportunities than you ever could have imagined. 

LOVE,

KENZIE