Self-Assurance

Posted on by Senia

A good conscience is a continual Christmas.
~ Benjamin Franklin

Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.
~ Golda Meir

Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy…. Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop the picture … Do not build obstacles in your imagination … Do not be awestruck by other people and try to copy them. Nobody can be you as efficiently as you can.
~ Norman Vincent Peale

Proverbs:
* Self-confidence is the memory of success.
* Self-assurance is two-thirds of success.

Your chances of success in any undertaking can always be measured by your belief in yourself.
~ Robert Collier

Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.
~ Samuel Johnson

Self-trust is the first secret of success.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation.
~ Arthur Ashe

I think self-awareness is probably the most important thing towards being a champion.
~ Billie Jean King

Self-assurance. Being aligned with yourself. Some people describe this as authenticity. You see this when you see a performer on stage who appears casual, who appears to have a very easy rapport with the audience – whether a pop performer or a folk musician or a comedian. It’s a lightness. And I so believe in life being light and being easy.

8 thoughts on “Self-Assurance”

  1. These are great. Really great. Love the Norman Vincent Peale one.

    But isn’t one of them different from the others? Billie-Jean King talks of self awareness, not self assurance. Self awareness can mean knowing about your weaknesses, too, no?

  2. Actually, when I was putting these in, I got into a bit of a lexicon debate with myself! In a way, all of these are so different: self-assurance, self-confidence, self-trust, self-awareness, belief in yourself, trusting yourself, good conscience! For example, even self-trust is not the same as a good conscience. And then, I argued to myself, in a way, they’re all related. They describe different parts of this argument: if you a) know yourself and know the good and the bad and the in-between (Meir, Peale, King), then you can b) choose the good parts of yourself (Franklin, Peale, Ashe), and then you can c) be very sure about those parts, and this certitude will lead to success (the proverbs, Collier, Johnson, Emerson).

    So, you’re right, Lila! There are definitely a few different concepts in here, not just self-assurance. Lila, tell me what you think of this (I may be going by Gallup’s StrengthsFinder definition of self-assurance): part of self-assurance is knowing about yourself, not just being assured or confident, but also knowing yourself well, almost like being able to read yourself well and having good self-knowledge (and I realize that I’m making a leap between the specific word and what I expect it to also emcompass).

    For some reason, of all of these, I love the Emerson quote: Self-trust is the first secret of success. It’s so simple. It’s similar to a Churchill quote about courage being the greatest of all the virtues because it makes all the other ones possible.

    And I started all this off because the Ben Franklin quote just sounds so good, like that’s the way that life should be. Aristotle says that life is about reaching for happiness, and the best way to be happy is to do those things that are good (correct me if you guys have more insight into Aristotle’s viewpoint!). Ben Franklin’s quote implies the celebratory nature of having a good conscience. And there’s something that feels really good about celebrating good conscience.

  4. You wrote:
    part of self-assurance is knowing about yourself, not just being assured or confident, but also knowing yourself well, almost like being able to read yourself well and having good self-knowledge

    I think that’s probably true in the ideal form. But some of the people I know who are self-assured are, I believe, *overly* confident. Like they are not aware of their weaknesses.

    Does that make sense?

  5. Interesting debate! I looked back at them and thought that they key things I’d get out of them were a deliberate awareness of the self (maybe this is mindfulness) combined with knowledge of the self (which perhaps is trust that you can predict yourself) is the foundation of belief in the self, which is a renewing process. I’m reading between the lines a LOT, though, in each of these quotations and proverbs; I’m probably projecting myself into them a bit.

  7. Lila, yes, I know what you’re talking about. :) Let me check if this rings true for you: Aristotle said that the golden mean between honor and disgrace is “high-mindedness”, and that “the excess might be called vanity, and the deficiency might be called humility or small-mindedness,” as it says on this site. I think you may be talking about the vanity combined with confidence aspect. Mmm, it’s hard sometimes to be aware of weaknesses.

    This reminds me of something I discussed with Springtime about how you sometimes just don’t know what you don’t know (this used to be, and may still be, a favorite saying of John Roberts).

    Dave, yes, all of your delineations seem relevant, and it’s great that you’re projecting – I expect usefully! – yourself into them.

    Preparation, preparation, preparation. Good saying, Nick. Nice.

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