Matthew Hussey argues that confidence doesn't come from external wins like jobs or partners. Real confidence starts inside, from how you relate to yourself. Build that first, and you'll take bigger risks, find genuine happiness, and actually make an impact.
I want to talk about where real confidence comes from and why it's so important in creating a happy life. Most people in life don't start very confident and then they work through their early years trying to acquire things and make something of themselves and achieve things so that they can feel confident. They go for a job that makes them feel accomplished. They try and get a partner who looks a certain way or makes them feel a certain way. Someone that they can, you know, go out with and say, Look who I'm with. Look what I have in the way of a relationship. And of course, someone just to feed their confidence. They try to buy stuff in order to feel confident so that they can say, Look at my house. Look at my car. They acquire contacts, friendships, make themselves part of certain clubs in life, live in a certain destination. So, these things are there to feed confidence. The problem is all of this stuff makes people inherently vulnerable. What I think is really interesting about life is how many people that we think are really confident just have all of these things working for them right now. But if one of these things went down, especially one of the important ones, all of a sudden their whole ego would crumble because it's based on these external factors. What we want is to to graduate our confidence to hopefully mature enough to a point where we realize my confidence has to be derived from something deeper. This isn't, you know, part one and this is part two. We actually have to flip that. So this is part one and this then becomes part two. And that is what everyone has wrong. they believe that their life mission is to acquire enough stuff, enough importance through their relationships, enough importance through their calling or their job, that they can feel confident about themselves. This is completely upside down. This is where we start. And the reason that's so important, not that it's important on two levels. One, it makes us safe. Our whole identity, our whole confidence and self-worth isn't vulnerable to these things changing all the time because we start from that place. So what that allows us to do is be happier in these things because we can enjoy them for what they are instead of constantly being afraid that they're going to go away and therefore living from a place of anxiety. So emotional stability and happiness is one big result we get from building that relationship within ourselves first. The second big benefit is a very practical one, which is these things, it's not that they're not important, it's not that having a great relationship isn't important or having a great work life, you know, creating purpose in your life isn't important. It's not that having things can't be fun for its own sake or any of these things, friendships, belonging to certain communities, all of these things can be important. But I believe we need to start with core confidence, start with a really strong relationship with ourselves where we feel enough so that we can truly go and make an impact in these areas. Because as long as we're living, as long as our confidence is living off of these areas, we actually go to these areas with an anxious energy that stops us from taking risk, stops us from, let's say, in a relationship setting standards with the person we love. stops us from having difficult conversations with people that would actually improve those relationships, but in the short term risk creating friction. We would, you know, if you take the example of me making a video, if I'm worried about what everyone thinks, then I make a video that panders to what people want me to say instead of making a video that's for impact. And the result, the difference in the result is huge. One is playing it safe, and is very much reliant on whether I'm liked by the end of it. And the other one is just based on is this gonna make an impact? If I already love myself, if I have a great internal confidence right now that says I'm enough on my own, I have intrinsic value, I know who I am, I know why I love myself, I know what my relationship with myself is, then I come to a video to provide value. Then I say this isn't about me, this is, I'm not coming to get something out of this, I'm coming to bring my self-love to this, I'm coming to bring my stability to this and to make a case for whatever it is I want to say, I'm here to make an impact. So when we have core confidence, we can go to all these areas to make a true impact instead of going to them to try to get something. You can go to your relationship to make an impact in your relationship, i.e. act out of love instead of acting out of fear. If you want to be truly happy in your life by enjoying the things that you're creating in your life, enjoying the things you have instead of living with the anxious vulnerability of if they go away, I'm nobody, I'm nothing, I have no value. And if you want to make a genuine impact in your life, in the world, in your relationships, in your career, then we have to start with core confidence and then bring that core confidence to all of these areas of our lives. If you want to see, by the way, I wanted to show you something this week as a kind of direct representation of what it looks like when someone goes from a place of fear to a place of confidently making an impact. I have a video for you, a training that is taken from my at-home retreat program. Many of you know twice a year I do a live retreat, but a couple of years ago I turned that into an at-home version for people at home. I've taken a piece of that training where I bring a woman onto the stage and take her from part one here to making this part one so that she could go and make a genuine impact. Check it out. It's at this link. Click the link now and you can be watching that free training right now. I think this is important to everybody because this isn't a video for, you know, the downtrodden who have no confidence whatsoever. This is a video to anyone whose confidence right now is inherently based on something that is leaving them highly vulnerable to life changes and is minimizing their impact in life because that's where they're living emotionally. If you want to change that, come with me now to this video. Check it out at this link. I will see you there.
