Monika's weekly inner voice drawings:
Q: What is confidence?
A: "Confidence, like art, never comes from having all the answers, it comes from being open to all the questions."
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
"In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer."
- Albert Camus
Posts
I love confidence and understand it quite well. I also understand the causes of the lack of trust in oneself and they are painful. What I love about this drawing is how it so gracefully, playfully, accurately, and eloquently visually captures confidence. This brightly colored figure boldly opens herself to the world and it is the openness that reflects the inner solidity that engenders confidence. In confidence there is not only risk, but great generosity and sense of abundance. And there’s a good reason: the negativity, fearfulness, and anger of the individual lacking confidence is absent. One way to discern between true confidence and arrogance, for example, is this very generosity, this, not only willingness to give, but joy in giving. The reason the figure is so well-balanced is because she’s not weighed down by ego. She’s free from herself and the fear that comes from competitiveness. True confidence is about mastery, not competitiveness. The joy that is spawned from experimenting and experiencing is free from self-consciousness. It’s not coincidental that the figure is dancing, for dancing is the body bursting forth in celebration, whirling away in prayer, e-moting one’s interiority through the body. In confidence, the body is motioning upward like eros-- the smile, the eyes, the hands, the feet, the heart-- reaching beyond through mind’s creative imagination. One other thing I’d like to say about confidence is that it is always positive, energized, and even a bit obsessive in the way it passionately immerses in its activities. In confidence, there is attention, focus, concentration, skillful means, and paradox. I say paradox because, with all these mental factors elevated and cultivated over time, ultimately, confidence is spontaneous: at any moment, it breaks into dance.
ReplyDeleteWhat a lovely comment and great interpretation of the drawing. I will integrate your description of confidence in our workshop "Living With Confidence". And I will keep asking questions and draw with even more confidence :), Thank you.
ReplyDeleteWhat a great drawing to use in your Oct 2nd workshop on confidence!!
ReplyDeleteLet's talk more about confidence. I have a 7 month old son, Teo, and not a day goes by when I do not think deeply about cultivating in him a real and true confidence. But, why confidence? Why is this mental factor perhaps the most important in his development? In confidence he is with trust, first and foremost, in himself. Trust reflects the primary need of feeling safe and secure in the world. Before we can meet our other primary needs, such as, respect, recognition, and understanding, we must feel secure and safe. I want Teo to feel safe and secure within himself, to the point of one day challenging the very self that trusts. I want Teo to sufficiently trust that he is creating his reality, moment to moment, and that the only true reality is one of compassion and wisdom. Only confidence can achieve these goals, with trust in one’s being human in the world. I want Teo to be confident in his unique approach to being in the world. That means tolerating difference to the point of absorbing, discerning, and finally celebrating difference. Confidence is the mode of living with trust in one’s capacity to carve spaces of meaning in whatever form those meanings take. This is the most creative aspect of confidence.
ReplyDeleteBut, confidence doesn’t just happen; it is learned through stages of development, the most important of which is that stage when the toddler begins to individuate and language emerges. Language essentially means `I,’ that is, I am conscious of my self. A parent’s main task is to foster confidence and be careful not to convey disappointment. Disappointment is the confidence-killer. Unwittingly shaming a child to the point of squashing her voice is the best way to inhibit confidence. This is why I say that self-awareness is the single most important factor in parenting. Be aware of your feelings towards and unconscious projections onto your child, and your difficulties with your child separating from you. You’d be surprised how many parents have difficulty with separation. Most psychological disorders occur at this stage of development. And confidence is one of the main casualties. The good news is that, if we are one of those casualties, we can repair those ruptures and regain our sense of confidence. Inner Voice Drawings is a creative way, for example, of tapping into those deeper afflictive emotions, such as, shame, guilt, and fear, and resuscitating that vital inner voice residing there under the rubble. It’s time to rise up and reclaim your voice and find your step. Dance dance dance!
Confidence is such a vital life force and mental factor that I can discuss it, it seems, interminably. Intricately woven into confidence are many qualities and mental factors, the culmination of which I would argue is what Chogyam Trungpa called “authentic presence.” Authentic presence is that psychological space where one has achieved an unconditional confidence (an interior, as opposed to merely an external, confidence) and, as such, is relaxed and unencumbered by aggression and fear. Chogyam describes authentic presence as much like “a flower unfolding— it is a natural process of expansion.” Thus, the confidence engendered in authentic presence is expansive because the heart is open, open to accumulate positive emotions and a deeper perspective of reality. Though the child cannot yet develop such sophisticated cognitive processes, she can and does internalize her parents’ authentic presence and it is evident in the child’s energy, goodness, and disposition. Joy and expansive play can be witnessed. Even the crying and frustrations feel energized and, at times, willful. The child’s capacity to recover quickly is a sign of an emerging confidence, as is her inchoate independence, extended relaxed periods of quiet time, and comfort with strangers. We can still see these qualities in ourselves as adults as a kind of equanimity, relaxed disposition, capacity to regulate emotions, expansive thought process, and ease with others. The sense is, “I am free to be myself. I am open, positive, playful, and transparent.” As the tee-shirt says, “Life is good.”
ReplyDeleteThis is a little far out but I saw something completely different than what you guys are describing (though it’s all good, of course). I don’t so much see dancing… I see a creature trying to balance itself out. It got a little off balance and now it’s balancing itself out. And it’s doing it in two ways.
ReplyDeleteI realize the lines on the right are a universal cartoon symbol of movement. But I also see grid lines, indicating, perhaps, a style of thinking, perhaps a scientific approach – the left brain. On the left I see wiggly feet. Wiggly feet, of course, are the universal symbol of artistic thinking, loosy-goosy – the right brain. So this creature is trying to find balance between both sides of its brain. And in finding that balance, it finds confidence.
Paul, enjoyed your thoughts on Teo developing confidence. One thing I would add…I think confidence also stems from being unconditionally loved as a child. If you know there’s at least one place you can go back to, even if the world beats you up, yells at you, grinds you down with passive/aggressive modalities, one place that the people there (one’s parents) love you no matter what….that’s GOTTA help confidence.
I love all your comments, Paul, Barbara, Clifford. It's quite exciting to make a little drawing and then have all that feedback, input and thinking "spin-off". That's exactly what I like to evoke with my drawings: a trigger for reflection, discussion, and joyful appreciation.
ReplyDeleteClifford, that's a neat interpretation about the balance between the right and left brain. After I did the drawing, I definitely felt that balance was a theme here. The grid of lines is interesting: the vertical lines reflect movement while the horizontal lines felt like a pushy, negative energy coming from outside, trying to outbalance the figure. However, he stays strong in his Chi energy (his inner strength), letting the aggressive energy bounce off his stomach, not in a rigid way, but with the elegant flexibility of a dancer.
As Paul points out, "confidence doesn't just happen", while Clifford points out, "
"confidence also stems from being unconditionally loved as a child", I agree with both of these assessment. The figure in this drawing is an adult, maybe not in years but in experience, has reached a stage of comfort and ease with himself, that makes it easy to ward off any kind of attack, to be flexible and
dance with the situation and still keep a smile on his face. I am confident that we can all reach such a state of ease :)
The notion of "unconditional," as in "unconditional love," is an interesting one, with lots of slippery slopes. Not from a child's perspective because a high level of emotional attunement is vital for growth to occur. The truth of the matter is that confidence may develop whether love from parents is unconditional or not, if what we mean by unconditional is a love without conditions. Confidence emerges, I believe, with a love that is good enough. For example, parents may-- and likely do-- love there children in ways that they will never love an other. The identification is so powerful-- it seems as deep as consciousness can go. And yet, parents often behave in ways that reflect the child having to meet many conditions before she the child can feel secure enough in the relationship. How do we reconcile such disparate and indeed contradictory notions, that is, my love is unconditional but I can only love you conditionally? This is the lodestar of psychological development. Though the idea of unconditional love is, well, ideal :) it too easily distorts the reality and complexity of love, and this is because parents are just so imperfect and often unable to sufficiently love themselves. We can say that it is the underlying unconditionality of love that allows even the least capable of parents to raise children who become compassionate adults. However, this is more a metaphysical than psychological premise and lets too many parents off the hook. And so, my point here is that, even though we may take the position of unconditional love as the primary metaphysical factor in developing confident children, it is the psychological conditions and causes of parenting actions relative to a parent's self-awareness that determine a child's true confidence.
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