Thinking Aloud: Self-Confidence

There's a story about the Dalai Lama that I heard from my mother recently. It runs something like this:

In an interview, the Dalai Lama was asked about the self-hatred and self-loathing in Western culture. He was surprised by it, the very concept had never even crossed his mind. It's just not a problem in Eastern culture.

It sounds too clean and too pat for it to be true, or at least for it to be true the way it's phrased here. But it lead me down a certain line of thinking, and then I and a friend (thank you Lee!) happened, entirely by coincidence, to discourse a little bit on self-confidence. The following is derived from both.

There are multiple problems intersecting here. One is the excess focus on individuality and self-reliance, and, particularly on the Internet, on the "personal brand." Another is just how busy we all are—nobody has time for themselves, or the ability to seek medical care, of course people are going to be depressed, because more is being placed on the shoulders of people less and less equipped to handle it. The connection is that we are simultaneously being asked to present a coherent, complete self while that self is under more and more strain.

Eastern cultures—some of them, not all of them, not completely, there's so much nuance here that I can't fit and there's so much I don't know so this is by no means a definitive statement—de-emphasizes the individual.

So, confidence: what is it? Hard to say. Here's one good answer, via The Relentless Picnic episode 28 "The Swarm:"

ADAM: A high school basketball coach told me something very interesting about confidence once, where I was saying something to him after playing well or blahblahblah and was saying something like "it's all about confidence, it's all about confidence," because one of the discoveries of sports of course is when you're scared it doesn't go well, and when you're confident it goes well, and he says, very offhandedly, as all sports coaches, and not just in anecdotes but in real life, totally do, they throw out all this off - everything is secondhand and passed on, it never feels like they're telling you a new thing, he was like, "Yeah yeah yeah. Confidence is all that matters. But you can't fake confidence. The only thing you can do is just spend hours practicing. It's the only thing that changes your confidence, that's it." And I remember sitting there after he said it and he's walking off and just being like, "you know I actually think that's sort of deep, and I don't think I ever in my life could've said 'how do you get confident in anything,' " like really and he had the recipe just so simple, he's like, just hours. You put in the hours. Don't worry about how it's going. You put in the hours, that's how you get confidence. You can never fake it. And it really did feel like, oh, this is why, there's no Jedi mind trick like "oh I'll just be confident, and then it'll be great," like, no no, you actually have to spend all this time working on it and then the confidence shows up.

So one of the objectives of Buddhism, so far as my limited understanding reaches, which means this is probably incomplete or partially true or whatever, is enlightenment. This is achieved by the dissolution of the self through the awareness of its impermanence and of the impermanence of all things in one's life. Realizing that the material world is akin to a dream, and that through enlightenment, one escapes the dream for the thing that's actually real and true. (Something like that. I'm sure if I ever get famous that somebody will dig this up to nail me to the wall for odiousness, and that'll probably be fair when it happens.)

In Taoism, there is a concept called wu-wei. It is "doing without doing." One does this through a similar abandonment of ego, of returning to a state of being similar to uncut wood (one of Lao Tzu's favorite metaphors). The sharp delineations between things, the pursuit of this or that objective, selfishness—it creates strife, and pain, and leads one astray from the Way. Without the self, one doesn't have these problems. (Taoism, too, concludes that the self isn't worth the trouble and that one should transcend it.)

If confidence is a matter of putting in the hours, then maybe self-confidence is too. 

Those are both, to a certain degree, among other things, and with full knowledge that this is doing a great disservice to two rich spiritual and philosophical traditions that date back millennia, putting in the hours. So of course the Dalai Lama would be surprised, in the almost certainly either fictitious or wildly oversimplified story from earlier, because he's long since put the hours in, and he comes from a tradition which is devoted to putting the hours in. (There's not a contradiction with the idea of nullifying the self, either—hard to struggle with self-confidence if there isn't a self to lack confidence in.)

Right now, in this present society and culture I find myself in, there's very little (yes, there is self-help, but that genre is poisonous and evil) on putting the hours in except "fake it till you make it," which suffers from the usual problems aphorisms have, and there is an expectation, a collective delusion, that demands that one never let on (or, at least, never let on earnestly or sincerely) that there are hours to put in or even that hours should be put in, because one is supposed to present the façade of a unified, finished work.