How to develop self-confidence

[Talk at University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada]

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This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
like that. So, thank all of you for coming today evening. Am I audible to everyone behind? Can those of you behind me hear me? Behind hear me? Is it audible? Okay.
So, is it better audible now? Okay. Thank you. You will be pressing it? Yeah.
So, I’ll speak on this topic of how to develop self-confidence. And let me start with the experience about 20-25 years ago. I was a student like all of you.
I was studying my engineering in one of the primary colleges in India and I had come from a small town to a big city. That was the first time I was away from home. And the first time I was also in an environment.
Before that, I had always been in the environment where I was always among the toppers, among the top five in the class always. But here, I found that all the brilliant students across the country had come and I was a little overwhelmed. So the first time, I also, I was in college, I was also doing some extracurricular activities.
So as a part of an elocution club, I used to speak in public in my school, so I decided to continue that. And when I was speaking, when I came for the first time to speak in front of podium in the college, I had spoken many times before in school, when I came there, I suddenly felt as if I was walking up the podium, some voice said to me, you are going to make a fool of yourself. I looked around, nobody was there speaking like that, I just tried to neglect the voice, and I continued speaking.
But usually for me, whenever I speak, if I am nervous, then I tend to speak fast. And as my nervousness increases, my speed increases. So that day, I started off, and because I was nervous, I started off very fast.
It’s like somebody offers you a lift in a car, and even before you sat in the car, they zoomed the car. Then, for most of the audience, it was an experience like that. And then, as I saw that people were not paying attention, people were looking at the watch, looking here, looking there, so my nervousness increased, and my speed increased.
And people were not paying attention because they were not able to catch what I was speaking. And they were not able to catch what I was speaking because I was speaking so fast, I was speaking so fast because I was so nervous, and because I was so nervous, I was speaking so fast, that they were not able to understand anything, and still they were not able to pay any attention. So, it just went on at this speed.
And it just went on like a loop, and I was supposed to be a seven-minute talk, and I finished in three minutes. So, it was a total fiasco, but after that, when I was introspecting, I started thinking, what was that voice? What was that voice that told me that you’re going to make a mess of things? And that rattled my confidence. So, that was the time I started exploring my inner world.
I started reading some spiritual texts to understand what all goes on in the inner world, because I knew, because I was in a competitive environment, and self-confidence is always a challenge, because we often meet people who are better than us in many ways. But this incident, it struck me after that, that actually the real enemy of self-confidence is not someone out there, is not the competition. It is something in here, some voice in here, which sabotages us.
And when this voice sabotages us, what happens? So, the crisis of self-confidence that is present in today’s world is basically this question. It starts with the question, am I good enough? It’s a question which the world poses to us and we pose it back to ourselves. It may be in terms of, am I smart enough to get good marks in class? Am I good enough? Are my looks good enough? Is my personality good enough? Are my skills good enough? So, essentially, am I good enough? And when we get an answer in the negative to that, then, at the first level, it makes us start feeling inferior to others.
And then we get into inferiority complex. When this inferiority complex continues, it leads to depression. Depression can have many specific causes, but essentially, when we get depressed, there is a voice inside us which is constantly discouraging us.
You could you are not going to do anything in your life. And if we do not equip ourselves to resist this inner voice, this inner voice can beat us even to death. I come from India which is a very education conscious country, and because of that, there is enormous amount of competition.
So in Mumbai, where also I gave some of my exams, there is a prominent medical college. And in that medical college, there was a student who, in seven semesters of her medical studies, she had always been the first, not just in her college, but in her university, the entire university. And she was extremely good at her studies, and she was well on course to coming first in her final exam also.
But somehow, a few days, three, four days before her exam, suddenly, the thought started going on within her. What if I don’t come first? I have got such a reputation. Everybody knows me as the number one as the topper.
Do you use the word topper here in America? You will understand it, okay. There are some words from Indian English which you may not be familiar with, but you get the point. So, she said, what if I don’t come first? What if I don’t come first? And that voice just went on and on and on in her head.
And externally, she was going through the motions, but the night before her exam, she locked herself in her room and she committed suicide. For no reason. She would most likely have come first because she was so well-prepared.
But even if she had not come first, she would have come second, third, fourth. That’s not a disaster, but what had happened was the external reality was not bad, but the inner voice, some voice inside her made her feel that that would be a disaster. For most students, if they come second, third, fourth, that would be an occasion for celebration.
But for her, that inner voice made her see that it is a disaster. So here, the lack of self-confidence can even ultimately lead to self-destruction. And, can you go ahead? So, when we have an unsteady, unhealthy reference point, so for her, what had happened was, her reference point was, I need to be first.
And from that reference point, everything appeared to be terrible. So, there is a book written by American Ivy League professor, former professor, it’s called Excellent Sheep, and it describes how in many ways, the top education today ends up making students like sheep. So, he quotes in that, a student from Stanford, Stanford, one of the Ivy League universities, he quotes and he says that, the student says that 50% of the time, when I was in college, I would feel great because I felt I was better than others.
And 50% of the time, I would feel terrible because I felt everyone else was better than me. So, this is how our mood swings happen, where at one level, we may have illusions of grandeur, I am so great, and this comes when we can prove ourselves to be better than others. And if somehow, we find that others are better than us, then we go to self-loathing.
Why can’t you do this? Why can’t you do this? Why can’t you do this? If we, the kind of comments about ourselves, that our mind can pass, if somebody else spoke that to us, we would feel insulted. How dare you speak like this about me? But this inner voice speaks like that and we just accept it. So, what is actually going on in our inner world? To develop self-confidence, yes, we can develop skills, we can develop abilities, we can get better education, better degrees, but unless we find out what is this voice inside us that is sabotaging us, we will not be able to develop self-confidence.
So, I will talk about self-confidence in terms of an acronym. There is one below this. One more slide.
Go ahead. Okay. That slide did not get saved.
Just go behind. Behind. So, there is an acronym self, which I will be speaking on.
Probably the slide might have gone later. So, F is spirituality. E will be exploration.
L will be love. And F will be faith. So, what do I mean by spirituality? As I said earlier, there is this voice inside us, which seems to work against us at times.
So, what is this voice? If we consider that we have a mind, and we look at the reductionistic view of modern science and try to understand what is the mind, as a mainstream philosopher, who said that I refuse to study the mind, because the mind has no locus standae. We can’t locate the mind inside us. Now, yes, we can’t locate the mind, but the mind does have a lot of effect on us.
If you consider that the worldview which we have through science, it is very powerful in terms of helping us develop technology by which we can do a lot of things in the outer world, but this worldview misses out a lot of things in our inner world. Say, for example, a great fear that most of us have when we are trying to develop relationships with others is the fear of rejection. In fact, that is one of the top ten fears of people in the 21st century.
There are two fears which have been newly added to the list of top ten fears as compared to the 20th century or the 19th century. One is the fear of terrorists and the other is the fear of rejection. Now, if we are trying to form a relationship with someone and we want to know whether does this person really care for me? Does this person really love me? With all our technological advancement, can we develop some kind of, we have thermometers, we have barometers, can we develop a love-o-metre? Put the love-o-metre on the person’s heart.
Okay, full. Yeah, you love me. Zero.
Hey, you don’t care for me. We can’t do that. The point here is not to minimise or criticise science, the point is to contextualise it.
That if we want self- understanding, we can be open to alternative sources of knowledge which illumine the inner world. So, the yoga texts of ancient India offer us a model of the self that can, that includes the spiritual, the mental and the physical in one harmonious whole. So, they explain that our self is actually, it’s a three-level model.
The body, the mind and the soul. So, the body, if you compare it to a computer system, the body is like the hardware, the mind is like the software and the soul is the user as a consciousness. If our software gets corrupted by viruses, then even if we have a brand new hardware, we will not be able to function.
That’s how we see through technology, we are physically more comfortable than in the past. In fact, now even middle class people have comforts that royalty a few hundred years ago did not have. We have air conditioning, we have telecommunications, we have internet, we have mobiles.
So, we are physically more comfortable than in the past, but we are mentally more distressed, more miserable than in the past. So, we could say we are comfortably miserable. We are comfortably miserable.
So, what has happened, this inner voice which speaks against us, this is actually a corruption of the software of the mind. Just like software is meant to help us use the hardware better and work productively, but the virus starts working against our cause. Similarly, inside our mind, there can be voices which speak against us.
So, the lack of self confidence happens because the software of the mind gets corrupted by negative voices. Now, we will try to get an understanding through a thought experiment of this three-level model of the self. So, wherever you are, you can now sit comfortably, relax, and then you can close your eyes.
With your eyes closed, you can take three deep breaths. One, breathe in as much as you can and breathe out as much as you can. Two, three.
Now, let the deep breathing go on without much effort, but gently, but deeply you can keep breathing. And, try to notice your body. Which part of your body seems to be very tense? It may be your feet, it may be your hand, it may be your forehead.
Just notice whichever part of the body is tense. And now, we will try to relax the body. So, you can focus your attention on your right hand and clench that right hand into a fist.
Clench it as tightly as you can and then with the fist clenched, take a deep breath and as you release the breath, release the fist also. As you clench and unclench your fist, you will feel your whole body relaxing. Do this once again.
Clench your fist, breathe in deep, release the breath and unclench your fist. Do this one more time. Clench your fist, breathe in deep, release the breath, unclench your fist.
Now, as you can feel your whole body relaxing, now, try to visualise the fist which you have been clenching and unclenching on your mind’s eye. You can see something like an inner screen inside you on which various images may come and go. As you are observing that, try to visualise your fist on that inner screen, on that mind’s eye.
And then, repeat the same experiment. This time, instead of focussing directly on the fist, focus on the image of the fist that you see in your mind’s eye. And, as you take in a breath, tighten the fist, release the breath, release the fist, focus your eyes on this inner screen.
You can see your muscles relaxing. Breathe in, tighten the fist, loosen the fist, release the breath. Keep your eyes, inner eyes fixed on the screen and do this once again.
Relax. Do this for one last time. Visualise the fist on your inner screen, tighten the fist, take in a deep breath, release the breath, and the fist simultaneously.
As you let the breath go out of your body, you can sense all the tension that is there in your body going out. Feel your body once, take a deep breath and then you can open your eyes. Thank you.
So in this thought experiment which you did, are any of you feeling a little more relaxed? How many of you? Thank you. So in this thought experiment, the purpose was not just relaxation, the purpose was something more. It was introspection.
Can you go ahead? Yeah, a thought experiment. You already depicted this? Just now. Okay, thank you.
So if you see, in the first case when you were just relaxing the breath and tightening the fist and relaxing the fist, you were conscious of the fist. So there is a three-level reality you could say. There is the physical scene, there is the inner screen and there is the inner seer.
So right now when you are looking at me, I am looking at you, we are part of the outer scene and this outer scene gets projected on the inner screen and that inner screen is seen by the inner seer. If right now you remember, hey, where did I keep my phone? You touch your hand on your pocket, your phone is not there, oh what happened? Where did I keep my phone? I used it that time, used it there, used it there. So as soon as one thought comes up in your mind like this and suddenly thoughts go in various directions.
If the thoughts are going in various directions then although you are here in the class, you won’t hear what is going on in the class because for perception to take place the inner screen has to be in place. If the inner screen starts showing something else then whatever is happening in the outer scene we can’t perceive it. So this inner screen is basically the mind.
You, the seer of the inner screen are the self, the soul and the physical reality is the outer world. When we suffer a crisis of self-confidence essentially this inner screen is giving out a negative image. Actually the inner screen is like a TV, it not only depicts but it also speaks, also gives out sound.
So we might even visualise we making a fool out of ourselves, we meeting a disaster or we might have a voice telling you are good for nothing, you are worthless, you are going to make a fool of yourself. So this inner screen can be the source of our confidence or it can be the source of our lack of confidence. The important thing to understand however is that you are not in the scene nor are you in the screen.
You are the seer, you exist safe above your situations and above your emotions. In fact the yoga text of ancient India, they describe that actually the self, you as a self are indestructible. It is only when you, your consciousness gets caught in the situation or the emotion that is when we feel threatened, that is when we get overwhelmed.
This does not mean to say that the outer problems are not real but like I talked about this girl who committed suicide, there is no big outer problem but so the physical reality was she might come first, she might not come first but the inner screen started distorting the reality and thereby she ended up committing suicide. So by understanding that we are different from this inner voice, we can start catching that voice whenever it starts discouraging us, whenever we start feeling that I am not good enough. Then whenever we hear something like this or voice, some voice inside us saying it, we can just preface it with the mind is saying I am not good enough.
It’s not that I am not good enough, the mind is saying I am not good enough, my memory is very poor, the mind is saying my memory is very poor. Whatever it is, as soon as you can preface it, the mind is saying, what happens by that? You distance yourself from it and then you can evaluate it. If say your friend came and said to you, my memory is no good, how would you respond? You would not flatter that friend and say that oh your memory is great.
No, but you would not just give in and let the friend get discouraged. You would encourage that friend. But memory is not the only thing, that is one thing, important, but there are other skills also.
What are you good at? So just by prefacing this discouraging voice with the mind is saying, we can distance ourselves from it. A vital key for developing self-confidence is to identify the mind, not identify with the mind. So now we may say that okay, even if I do this, it’s not sometimes our mind may worsen, aggravate, exaggerate the problem, but sometimes there may be a real problem.
What if everybody is better than me in academics, in their performance, in their fluency in speaking, in their conduct, in their behaviour, in their personality? What if the reality itself is discouraging? There is one thing which is the voice, we identify the voice and we ensure that this voice, this mind doesn’t make things worse than what they are. So that’s one level. It’s important to deal with that level, but the mind may say, but no, even if you don’t exaggerate, the reality is bad.
Then how do we deal with that? Go ahead. So this is, I’ll take an acronym, SELF. So E was exploration.
Exploration means that we often form an appraisal of ourselves based on what the world thinks of us or especially in terms of the qualities that the world glamorises and based on that the result is that if in the social mirror certain qualities are glamorised and if we don’t have those qualities then we start feeling we are not good enough. We all may have certain qualities. See, our self-worth, we can’t see it in the social mirror.
We have different gifts. Each one of us has been given gifts, but some gifts will be immediately evident. They will be recognised by people around us.
Some gifts may not be recognised, but sometimes when we give too much emphasis to other people’s opinion about us then we cannot look at ourselves objectively. We look at ourselves subjectively from the filter of their vision. Like I said earlier, this girl had a faulty reference point.
Her reference point was if I don’t come first, that’s a disaster in my life. Well, yeah, if you can come first, it’s wonderful to come first, but not coming first is not a disaster. So, just as a faulty reference point blinded her to the good within her, to the good, the talent that she had, the success that she could achieve.
Similarly, if our reference point is the world’s evaluation of us, then that is a faulty reference point, which will prevent us from discovering the gifts that we do have. When we recognise that, okay, I don’t have this, I don’t have this, I don’t have this, but instead of, okay, what do I really have? We put aside the social mirror and look at ourselves. This is where, if we look at ourselves from an objective perspective, exploring ourselves, you can even look at ourselves from the eyes of a social scientist.
Okay, who is this person? Okay, I know the name of this person, I know this person, but look at yourselves from a social perspective out of yourself, and when we look at ourselves we may discover lot of abilities that we do have. Often our situation is such that if we go to a programme where there is a feast after the programme, so are we having some snacks here after the programme? Okay, so sometimes we have a programme after that we have a feast, so now suppose this is a special kind of feast, and in this feast everybody gets a separate desert, so the desert on my plate will be different from the desert in your plate, different from the desert in your plate, different from the desert in someone else’s plate. So would any of you like to tell what is your favourite desert? Anyone? Sorry? Rasmalai, okay, thank you.
So rasmalai, many of you may not know about rasmalai, but it’s extremely delicious. Now when I first came out of India about several years ago I had gone to Australia, and there one of my friends gave me, asked me, would you like to have baklava? I had never heard of a baklava, and if you think of it, baklava is not a pleasant sounding name. So I said, maybe later, I didn’t take it, and then one of my friends was also there, so we were all eating, and then he took a baklava and started eating it, and he was savouring it, enjoying it, and then I look at him and said, give me one.
So the point I’m making here is that sometimes we may think, okay, this desert is very good, but there might be some other desert which is also good, but we don’t taste it. So imagine that there’s a feast in which everybody in their plate has a separate desert, and you seem to have a desert which you never tasted, which you don’t know how it sounds like, you never heard about it also, and you’re seeing familiar deserts, maybe somebody’s got a cupcake, somebody’s got a very attractive cookie, somebody’s got ice cream, somebody’s got various other delicious deserts that you know about, and you’re looking at, oh, this person’s got this, this person’s got this, this person’s got this, and the more you see everybody else’s plates, the more you start feeling dissatisfied. Now actually if you look at your own plate, you taste the desert over there, that is also good, but as long as we’re looking at everyone else’s plate, we cannot taste and relish what is in our plate.
So this exploration means rather than thinking, oh, this person has this quality, this person has this quality, this person has this quality, and then minimising what we have. We objectively look at it, look at ourselves. If you objectively look at ourselves, we’ll find that if we explore, we can discover abilities that we also have.
Satisfaction, is not just an emotion that we feel. Satisfaction is also a decision that we can make. Sometimes I don’t feel satisfied.
It’s possible a feeling can come, but if I’m looking at what is there in everyone else’s plate, then naturally I’ll feel dissatisfied, but if I make satisfaction a decision that I make, that means I look at what is in my plate, and I’m satisfied with that. And then once I start tasting it, I’ll find that it’s good. And sometimes you may have some delicacies, which you mix one or two items, sometimes you get a dessert, you can add some more honey in it, or some maple syrup in it, or something like that, and it becomes more delicious.
So you can work on what is in your plate, and you can make it more delicious. So instead of looking at ourselves through the social mirror, we look at ourselves in a mode of exploration. Who is this person? Who is this person, and what are the strengths, what are the weaknesses? We don’t have to deny the weaknesses, but we don’t have to obsess over them, just objectively observe ourselves.
And this objective observation becomes easier when we have the security of our spirituality, when we understand that I am a spiritual being, I am secure, I am safe, then we can observe ourselves carefully, observe ourselves objectively. So this self-exploration is actually a journey of self-discovery. Suppose you have some distant grandparent or great-grandparents and you come to know that they have in some distant village left an inheritance for you, their house with a courtyard, and you think okay, I just want to go there and have a look at it, it doesn’t seem to be a very expensive gift, and you may think I may use it, I may not use it, but then if you come to know that actually in the backyard of that house which you have inherited, a treasure is hidden over there, then your whole perspective changes and then you start digging.
Instead of just thinking I should go here and earn some money, I should go here and do this, I should do this, you start digging in the backyard. So then when you dig, you find there is a treasure that you didn’t know existed. Similarly for us, when we start exploring ourselves, at a surface level we may say I know this person, but we need to go below the surface.
Below the surface means sometimes there may be certain things which we are good at, but because others around us have trivialised those things, they never valued those things. So because of that we have never noticed those gifts, we have never valued those gifts. We are all often pressured by the society around us.
India as I said is a very education conscious country. So once there was a court case between a husband and a wife and they came in for the judge and the husband said that I want my child to become an engineer and the wife said no I want my child to become a doctor. So the judge said why do you have to come to me for this? Just ask your child.
He said no we can’t ask your child. Both of them said together. Why not? Our child is not yet born.
So sometimes it’s not just parents, it can be our social circle, it can be our friends, it can be whichever source it may be, the social pressure on us becomes so much that we no longer can see ourselves objectively. So self-exploration can help us to discover the gifts that we had. Now it’s create a better life for ourselves, others can help us.
But we are our only resource. I suppose you got a car and it’s a refurbished car and somehow it doesn’t move very fast and it doesn’t function very smoothly, it doesn’t look very good also and you may be overall annoyed with the car. But if that is the only car you have and then you are not in the position to buy any other car, then if you get angry with that car and you take a big iron bar and smash it, break it apart, the only result of that such aggression will be you will be left without a car.
So if something is the only resource that we have, then whether it is good or bad, we will take great care of it. So similarly we are our only resource even when others can help us, others can encourage us, others can guide us. But it is we who have to take that encouragement, take that guidance, take that help.
So if we keep beating ourselves up with negativity, then we are damaging the only resource that we have and we will not be able to function well. Now certainly this doesn’t mean that we become complacent or we become lethargic thinking that oh I don’t care what the world thinks about me, I love myself. It’s not like that.
If we could improve our car, we will improve our car. See loving ourselves does not mean that we have to paint ourselves white. It just means that we stop painting ourselves black.
Hating ourselves, loathing ourselves means we, there are things which are white within us, things which are black within us and there are shades of grey. But when we loathe ourselves, when we hate ourselves, at that time we just obsess over the black and overlook everything else. In fact we paint everything black.
Nowadays we see there is a lot of escapist entertainment. Escapist entertainment means that people want to go away from the world. Get out of the world and escape into some other reality.
In fact entertainment has been a part of human society throughout. Thousands and thousands of years ago whatever artefacts we have, people have been having some sports, some recreation. It’s always been there.
But what is unprecedented about today is the obsession with the entertainment. If you consider who are the professionals who are paid the most. It’s not doctors.
It’s not lawyers. It’s entertainers. It’s entertainers.
You know a medical surgeon who can fix up a broken leg doesn’t even earn one tenth of what a person can earn if they can kick a ball with a leg. So, now why is it that entertainers are paid so much? It is, if you consider the economics, the law of demand and supply, it is because entertainment is felt as such a great need that people are ready to pay anything for it. And why is entertainment felt as such a great need? Because entertainment is something people can’t live with themselves.
When you want to escape, it is not just we are trying to escape from the world. We are also trying to escape from ourselves. We want to escape from ourselves.
So, entertainment is not bad. As a break from our life, we can have some entertainment, but when entertainment becomes a way to escape from life, when we seek entertainment because we find that we can’t live with ourselves, then that is a dangerous psychological state to be in. So, loving ourselves means that not that we don’t let ourselves be painted black.
Yes, there are defects in me, there are limitations in me, but this is the only resource I have. So, self-love can become, painting ourselves white means not admitting any fault in ourselves. Just becoming so self-obsessed, so self-centred that we just don’t care for anyone else.
There are some people who are egotists. Whatever you start talking about, they start talking about themselves. That’s a kind of hearing which is called autobiographical hearing.
You tell them, I went to this country and I saw this site, it was so beautiful, and they will interrupt you, oh, I went there and I saw that, and they will go on for one hour talking Actually, the process by which food is converted into energy, it’s a whole complicated process. Researchers are trying to make machines which can take up functions of the body, if the bodily parts are damaged. Say, somebody’s arm is damaged, you can have a prosthetic limb, if somebody’s heart is not working properly, you can have a pacemaker, if the kidneys are not working, you can have a dialysis unit.
So, when people have digestive problems, can we make an artificial digestive machine to digest food for us? Now, there are attempts to do that, but what researchers have found is, it will require not a digestive machine, it will require a factory for digestion, and not just a factory, a chain of factories. It’s an extremely complex process. If we consider work is equal to force into displacement, then the sheer amount of work that is required to convert one morsel of food into working energy for us, that whole food goes down to the alimentary canal, and all that goes into digestion, the work that is required in that, it’s actually more than the amount of physical work that the average human being performs throughout the day.
So, actually, we are hardly involved in it. The digestion is a whole complex mechanism that happens without even our awareness. The only time we think of our digestion is when it doesn’t work.
So, actually, our very existence depends on something beyond us. A couple of years ago, I was invited to Cambridge University to speak on science and spirituality. So, while I was going there, we passed by the tree, under which Newton is said to have seen the fruit fall.
Some people say it fell in front of him, some people say it fell on him. So, wherever it fell, it is considered to be the place where science began, modern science began. How brilliant was Newton that just by seeing a fruit fall, he came up with the theory of gravity.
Now, it’s certainly his brilliance, but at the same time, if we look at the whole picture, when he saw the fruit falling, he asked a question, what made this fruit fall? And he came up with the mechanism of gravity as an explanation for that. But the question itself has an assumption in it. What made this fruit fall? The assumption in that question is, fruits don’t fall by chance.
There is some order in nature. And science essentially is an exploration for discovering the order of the nature. Now, for Newton himself, it was clear, what was the source of that order? He said that, oh father, I think thy thoughts after thee.
So, we may call that divine by that higher agency by whatever name it might be. But, even science for all its scientific discoveries and all its mind boggling technological advancement functions based on the faith that there is order in nature. If there were no order in nature, there would be no science.
And sometimes, if our scientific exploration makes us find, makes it difficult to find the order in nature, then we don’t say there is no order. We look deeper to find an order. When Newtonian physics, it’s called classical physics, its foundations were shaken by the study of microscopic fundamental particles or the study of cosmic bodies, then science came up with quantum physics to explain the subatomic world and came up with relativity to explain the behaviour of cosmic objects.
But the faith underlying it remained that there is some order in nature. So the point here is that faith is vital in all walks of life. When we eat food, even if we don’t consciously think about it, we have faith that there is something within us which will convert the food into energy.
When we study in our laboratories, we have faith that there is some order. So this same understanding, the yoga texts take it further and they explain that we are all parts of a whole bigger than ourselves. We are all parts of something much bigger than ourselves.
What does this mean? When we think that my self confidence has to come by becoming the whole, that means I have to become good in this quality and this quality and this field and this field and this field, that’s when I’ll be successful. No, we are parts and we simply have to play the part of the part. And there is a whole that will take care of the whole.
When we go to board a plane, we are concerned whether we reach on time, whether we have our boarding pass, whether we have our ID proof, but how many of us worry whether the plane has enough fuel or not? How many of us worry what if the pilot is drunk too much? We know there is a system that will take care of those things. So just as we understand that the system will take care of those things, similarly we understand that we are parts of a whole. And the moment we understand that I don’t have to become the whole, we will find a huge burden getting lifted from our head.
We, life is like an orchestra. We don’t have to do everything that everybody is doing in the band. We don’t have to become like somebody else in the band also.
We have to play our part. And it’s not that we have to, we have to push somebody aside to get a part. There is a space for all of us.
If we have a spiritual understanding of life, then we will approach life with an abundance mentality, not a scarcity mentality. Scarcity mentality is that, you know, oh, there is only so much of the pie and I have to get the biggest piece. Otherwise, I’ll get nothing.
Now, abundance mentality is at the same hole which is providing me oxygen to breathe right now, which is actually digesting the food within my body. The same hole which has sustained my life for so long, that hole will also provide me direction about the role I’m going to play. So when we approach life with this faith that I don’t have to become the hole, I just have to play the part of the part, then we will find that by that faith, our confidence will rise upwards.
Because we will give up the burden of needing to become the hole. We’ll be able to get the relief that comes from self-acceptance and that self-acceptance is extraordinarily empowering. Once we accept ourselves for who we are and we accept that I have to play a part, then we can focus on playing the part and we’ll find that we will discover levels of talents and levels of energy within us that we did not even know we had and we’ll move forward to making our individual contributions and we will not only find satisfaction internally but we’ll also be able to make contributions externally.
So life may often put us in a situation where there is a lot of competition lot of negativity around us but we don’t know that our self-conception doesn’t have to be determined by the world. If we give the world the authority to determine our self-conception we’ll always be lacking in self-confidence but we turn inwards understand our spirituality and let that spirituality define our self-understanding then we will have the self-confidence to move forward through life and whatever life may get us to our spirituality will get us through. So I’ll summarise what I spoke today.
I spoke on this topic of how to develop self-confidence. I started with the incident where a voice inside me said that make a mess of your public speaking and that’s what happened thereafter. So what was that inner voice? I started exploring and I talked about how this inner voice starts with you are not good enough and it’s inferiority complex, depression and even suicide and sometimes that inner voice functions the totally unwarranted reference point like this girl who became fearful that I may not come first and ended up committing suicide.
So then how do we develop self-confidence? I talked about self. Does anyone remember? What was S? Spirituality. So why explore spirituality? Because for self-understanding we need to understand what is there in our world and science looks at physical things but inside us what is there is not necessarily physical.
We can’t have a lavometer because science can’t measure, quantify that which is non-physical. So the yoga text offers a model of the self which is three-level. What are those three levels? Does anyone remember that? Body, mind and soul.
That’s like the hardware, software and user. And when we lose self-confidence it is often because the software of the mind has become corrupted with negativity. So we did a thought experiment to visualise how the body is a hand which we clench and unclench as a part of the outer scene.
We can see that on the inner screen but both of them we are beyond it as the inner sphere of that. So spirituality helps us to understand that we are beyond our situations and beyond our emotions. We are secure.
And E was what? Exploration. Thank you. So I look at how once we are secure in our spirituality then we can explore, look at ourselves as if we were looking at it with a social scientist’s eye.
And then we may be able to discover that we all have gifts. Once we stop looking at ourselves from the social mirror we will find that we have gifts. All of us if we have a plate with distinctive deserts instead of craving for the deserts that we have we learn to savour the desert that we ourselves have.
So by self discovery you can find talents which may have been neglected or denied because of what is glamorised in social mirror. And then L was what? Love. So I talked about we are our only resource.
So we need to love ourselves so that we can utilise this resource. This does not mean that we paint ourselves white and deny our faults. It is not self-obsession.
It is not narcissism but it is also not self-loathing. If I have only one car to drive I will use it as well as I can. So by the same objectivity if we learn to love ourselves then we will find that we can utilise whatever abilities we have better.
The negativity which will stop us from using our abilities can be removed if we learn to love ourselves. And F was faith. Faith meant that we for our very existence depend on something beyond ourselves.
Whether it is for the air that we breathe, the supply of the air outside or even the food that goes inside to digest it. We don’t know how it happens. Even science is based on the faith that there is an order in nature which scientific research will discover.
So this idea of faith is expanded in spirituality by explaining that we are parts of a whole. And we don’t have to become the whole. As long as we think I have to become the whole we will never have self-confidence.
But as soon as we accept that I just have to play the part of the part and the whole will take care of the whole, then we can find ourselves relieved of that burden of being someone who we can’t be. And then we can just put our energy in being the best that we can be. And thus we will find that even if there is negativity around us, whatever our life may get us to, our spirituality will get us through.
Thank you very much. Thank you very Do you have time for questions? We do have time for some questions. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.
Yes, please. So my question is, what if you have the opposite problem? What if you have too much confidence? What does the yoga text say about that? Good question. So if you have the opposite problem of too much self-confidence, yeah, that is also because of distorted self-understanding.
Some of us may be gifted in such a way that we have a lot of abilities that are glamorised in social mirror. Or somehow we have acquired a conception of ourselves that is, that is too white. Now there are three broad possibilities in it.
First is that we don’t have much to be proud of, but still we are proud. That is just illusion. And that will, we are soon in for a big, big fall.
But if we have a lot of abilities, and then we feel confident in whatever we do. The confidence is good. Arrogance is not good.
And the difference between the two of them is primarily in our attitude towards others. If we have confidence, that means, yes, I can do this. And if we are not able to do this, we will be able to discover that, no, I can’t do, I am not able to do it, we accept the mistake and we move on.
But arrogance means we become dismissive towards others. You are good for nothing, you are good for nothing, you are good for nothing, you are good for nothing, you are good for nothing, you are good for nothing, you are good for nothing, you are good for nothing, you are good for nothing, you are good for nothing, you are good for nothing, you are good for nothing, you are good for are good for nothing, you are good for nothing, you are good for nothing, you are good for nothing, you are good for nothing, you are good for nothing, you are good for nothing, you are good for we will fall. So it is better that we take others’ opinions and we would not necessarily accept them but objectively evaluate them and then come to a healthier understanding of ourselves.
Is that answer your question. Thank you. Any other questions? So if we have some abilities but we are too hard on ourselves, we abuse ourselves, we abuse the people around us, generally this happens when we have set too high an expectation for ourselves or too high an expectation for others and then we are not able to meet that expectation.
So then we start beating ourselves up because of that. So now having expectations is just natural, it’s human and in many ways it is helpful. So when we are going to face a situation or going to enter into a situation, having expectations can help us to shape that situation.
So if you are going to do a project, then having expectation, I want to do it at this level of excellence, that can help us to work hard and do the needful. But sometimes the expectations, so we are here, the expectations are here and the reality is here. Like I talked about three levels, seer, screen and scene.
So the expectations are present in the screen and we are the seers and then the scene is the reality. So the expectations can help us to transform the reality in a positive way. But sometimes the reality is such that it is radically different from our expectations and at that time say we are here, the reality is here and the expectations are somewhere here and all our energy is going and dealing with the expectations.
But the expectation is not connected with the reality at all. So why are things not like this, why are things not like this, why are things not like this? That does not help us to deal with the reality. A simple example to illustrate this, say somebody decided to learn rowing and then they practised and then they called all their friends and relatives and I want to do a demonstration of my rowing skills and they enter into the sea with a boat with oars and they plan gracefully I am going to move my hands and people will click photos and they put it on my Facebook pages and I will enjoy watching it all.
And then as they are rowing, suddenly from nowhere a monster wave comes and that wave knocks over and now there is no boat, there are no oars and still in their mind, oh I wanted to do this and they are still moving their hands as if they are rowing. They do that, they will simply sink at that time. So, at that time if the reality has changed so much and one has to accept, okay, I can’t row now, I have to just first get back to the land now, just start swimming and get back to the land.
So similarly, so what happens is, the reality is here, the expectations are somewhere here and if we keep dealing with the expectations and then that obstructs us from dealing with the reality, then we hurt ourselves. So when we abuse ourselves or when we abuse anyone else, it is because of the big distance between the expectation and the reality and we are just beating ourselves, why am I not here? Why is the reality not according to the expectations? But after some time, when if reality has changed, if the expectations are coming in the way, we need the psychological flexibility by which we can distance ourselves from our expectations. Having expectations is natural, but being attached to the expectations is a problem.
So psychological rigidity means that this is the way I think and this is the way things should be. Psychological flexibility means that I can distance myself, okay, I was thinking like this, but now the reality is like this, so I will stop thinking like this, I will look at this and deal with it. So if we develop the psychological flexibility to accept reality, even if it is distant from our expectations, then we will be able to give up that tendency to abuse ourselves or abuse others.
Now that doesn’t mean we just quit, it just means that we recalibrate. If our expectations can help us to shape the reality positively, then we can celebrate. But if the expectations are simply coming in the way of our dealing with reality, because the reality has changed so drastically, then we need to recalibrate, okay, how do I deal with this reality now? So when we learn to do that, that’s why I conclude by talking about self-acceptance.
Self-abuse is simply a very aggressive expression of a vehement reluctance to accept oneself. So once we accept ourselves, okay, this is what I thought I was, but this is where I am right now. I accept myself, then I can work to elevate myself, to change myself, to change my reality.
Does it answer your question? Thank you. So I thank all of you for your attention and participation. Thank you very much for coming here.
And I have a few books, if any of you would like to have a look, we have these books behind. So this is Demystifying Reincarnation. I mentioned about this three-level model of the self.
So that is the scientific pointers towards that in the sense of near-death experiences, past life memories and consciousness studies, as well as description of answers to common questions if there is something called reincarnation, why can’t we remember our past lives? What determines what kind of life we’ll get in the future? Are there things like ghosts and spirits? These questions are answered in this book. We also have Inner Change. This is 121 reflections from a yoga text called the Bhagavad Gita.
They explain how we can do introspection for improving ourselves. The Searching I, this is the spiritual wisdom applied to social issues, depression, suicide, religious violence, gender discrimination, these kind of issues, how spiritual wisdom can help us to deal with that is described in this book. We also have 10 Leadership Sutras based on the yoga text Bhagavad Gita.
In the corporate world, in the competitive corporate world, how can we apply principles of spirituality? It’s explained here. We also have, do you have Mind It? You don’t have to get it. There is one book called Mind It, much of what I talked on the mind today, that you will find in that book Mind It, 64 reflections for better understanding how our mind can trick us and how we can deal with it.
This is Science and Spirituality. This is how Science and Spirituality can be two distinct domains of knowledge, both of which can empower us during our life journey. So if any of you want any of these books, they are there.
We also have some meditation cards, do we have them? There are some 365 meditation cards based on the wisdom from the Bhagavad Gita. They are available as a card deck. You could keep that on your desk and that can give something for reflection and inspiration or you could give it as a gift to somebody who you know is depressed or going through some negativities and can help them.
Thank you very much.