What's Stopping You Being More Confident?

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MINDSET

If self-esteem is a direction of travel rather than a destination, confidence is no more than one of the tools we use for the journey. Yet there’s something inadequate about the ‘never-ending journey’ – something off-putting for under-confident people who’ll want to strive towards a more tangible objective than overcoming a seemingly-incurable condition. And it’s here where the concept of self-actualization can help.

Self-actualization is ‘the desire for self-fulfilment’, writes Abraham Maslow, one of the more famous psychologists propa­gating self-actualization as a key human endeavour, ‘namely the tendency for [the individual] to become actualized in what he is potentially … to become everything that one is capable of becoming’.