Environmental Confidence?

Environmental Confidence?? What the heck does that mean?

It means that we, as humans, are strongly affected by our environment, the context and situation we are in at the time can have a giant impact on our level of confidence.

In some sense, that idea should be obvious - our feelings are going to be different when we're lying on a beach on vacation than when we're stuck in terrible traffic and in a hurry, right?

Now, I'm a big proponent of "being in the driver's seat" as a metaphor for taking control of our own feelings, rather than being like a leaf at the mercy of the wind and letting our state of being be controlled by what's happening around us. I say, DECIDE to have more good days, and you will. If you let having a good or bad day be decided by everyone and everything else around you, then you are in the passenger seat, right?

At the same time, let's not rule out the power of situation and context - the environment we are in. Let's see how we can use context as leverage, to our advantage. Pay attention to which situations and contexts you feel more or less confident. What's different about those contexts? How specifically does one situation "make you" feel more confident than another?

Pay close attention to that and discover what exactly makes the difference in each situation and context. Try this game: transfer that feeling of confidence over to a situation where you usually feel less confident. Imagine that you can take all the confidence you feel in one situation, and bring it over to the other context. It may not work 100% right away on the first try - play with it a bit and see what kind of difference you notice.