{"content":[{"text":"All of the most frequently suggested means of gaining conﬁdence involve input \n from outside. The successes against which we measure ourselves, the \n appearance of conﬁdence with which we cloak ourselves, or the opinions of \n others with which we buttress ourselves are off-the-shelf items. We have to \n shop others’ opinions and ideas to get them. Then we have to make them ﬁt the \n opinions and ideas we already have about ourselves. The difﬁculty with any \n external input into what we call conﬁdence is that it only connects with the ego. \n That ego, the personal thinking we have about who and what we are or should \n be, is like a castle in the sand. It is a loose structure created from imagination, \n easily damaged, and impossible to sustain in the face of ordinary natural events \n without constant effort and attention.","bbox":{"left":0.176471,"top":0.128788,"width":0.6256269999999999,"height":0.19191999999999998}},{"text":"When we are focused on creating and maintaining conﬁdence from the outside- \n in, we are forced to make an effort to think about ourselves a lot. How am I \n doing? How do I look? Who’s noticing? What do they think? What should I do \n now? Conﬁdence appears to be a special, personal state that requires us to \n calibrate our individual performance continually. For those who take this \n deﬁnition to heart, conﬁdence is a form of self-absorption. When we’re feeling \n conﬁdent, we think well of ourselves and feel proud; when we’re not, we think \n ill of ourselves and feel distressed. But we’re always thinking about ourselves.","bbox":{"left":0.176471,"top":0.340909,"width":0.623388,"height":0.13888899999999998}},{"text":"This is normally unnoticed, however, because it becomes just part of the \n background noise of our everyday thinking. It always surprises people to ﬁnd \n out how much thinking we all do about ourselves in this world that is so geared \n to self-monitoring and trying harder. Thinking about ourselves is the certain \n route to insecurity, however, which is why people’s “conﬁdence” can be \n “shaken” or people “lose their conﬁdence” or people have to “bolster their \n conﬁdence” in the face of doubt. When we are thinking only about our own, \n individual, special personal world, life in general is a mystery to us and we see \n only the limits and boundaries we have created, rather than seeing ourselves as \n part of the larger whole of humanity.","bbox":{"left":0.176471,"top":0.5,"width":0.622439,"height":0.17424300000000004}},{"text":"For a signiﬁcant portion of my adult life, I lived in the world of “conﬁdence” as \n we normally know it. To remain conﬁdent was to be in the question: “What \n have I done for myself lately?” Each success had to be followed by a greater \n success. Each challenge called for intense preparation and whatever rituals of \n self-esteem had been working best recently. If something I thought went well \n was not followed by praise or accolades, I was discouraged and crestfallen. I \n was driven to win. I had a paperweight on my desk that said, “Winning isn’t \n something; winning is everything.” People thought of me as conﬁdent and \n outgoing, but I was hounded, within my own mind, by images of possible \n failure and potential embarrassment. I was never, ever off-duty in my job of \n keeping myself going.","bbox":{"left":0.176471,"top":0.694444,"width":0.625105,"height":0.1919200000000001}},{"text":"2","bbox":{"left":0.492402,"top":0.932268,"width":0.009804000000000035,"height":0.01677899999999999}}],"images_bbox":[],"images_bbox_not_text_overlap":[]}