Born Confidence: Become Your Best Self

By David Maebane

At any particular point in your life, either you'll have confidence, or you won't. Gaining it, or even reclaiming it, can be tough. But that is where the magic happens - when you first gain confidence, or you lose your confidence and it has to be reborn. In those moments, you feel inspired and ready to conquer the world.

Confidence is what opens every gateway, a universal key to go anywhere you want to go in life, anywhere you want doors to open for you. Inspiring confidence in others always begins with inspiring confidence within yourself. You have to believe in yourself before anyone else will believe in you.

The source of your power to succeed at anything is confidence. It's the secret sauce of life, but not everybody has the recipe - not everyone knows how to find it.

In "Born Confidence," David Maebane shares his journey in finding, keeping, and renewing confidence, and shows how you can do the same.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Maebane
• Release date: Jan 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9780463626450

Book preview

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Born Confidence

Copyright © 2021 David Maebane

Smashwords version

All Rights Reserved

No parts of this book may be used or reused in any manner whatsoever without permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not scanning, reproducing, or distributing without permission.

This book is dedicated to my mother, Rachel Love,

and my late father, Michael L. Maebane.

Thank you for always believing in me,

and for planting the seeds of

born confidence.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Coming Into Your Own Confidence

The Roots of Your Confidence

Learning Confidence from Others

Confidence to Take the First Step

Confidence in Hard Choices

Born Confidence

Questions:

Confidence Lost And Reborn

Confidence Lost

Finding Confidence to Move Forward

Confidence Reborn

Questions:

The Confidence To Build You

Prepare to Be Confident

Will to Be Confident

Work to Be Confident

Work Hard to be Confident

Daily Reminders:

Leading In Confidence

Confidence at the Top

Your Confidence in Your Team

Your Team’s Confidence in You

Things to Work On:

Confidence And Manifesting Your Dreams

Use Confidence to Support Your Dreams

Why You Want What You Want

Confidence in Your Why

Visualize Your Goals and Dreams

Daily Check-ins with Yourself

Update and Upgrade Your Goals

Focus Means Constant Confidence

Love the Journey to Your Dreams

Questions:

Confidence – The Key To Unlocking Potential

Wasted Potential

Eliminate Potential Regrets

Potential Only Grows Moving Forward

Pushing Potential Through Adversity

Investing in Potential

Put Your Potential to Work

Daily Reminders:

Fashioning Your Confidence

Spark Your Vision into Life

Focus Your Vision

Share Your Vision

Be Realistic About Your Vision

Your Vision at Work

Make Your Vision Stand Out

Put Your Vision Out Into the Universe

From Vision to Reality

Your Passion is Your Launch Pad

Finding the Right Fit

Things to Work On:

In Love With Confidence

Conquer Fears of Rejection

Put Yourself Out There

Dial-in Your Confidence

Don’t Stop There

A House of Confidence

Don’t Lose Yourself

Daily Reminders:

Overcoming Your Fear With Confidence

Face Your Fears

Pushing Past Your Fears

Don’t Let Others Feed Your Fears

Take Chances

Stand for Something

Keep Moving On

Daily Reminders:

Confidence Is Key To Self-Esteem And Mental Health

You Have Control

Digital Dilemma

Get Better, Get Help

We’ve Got to Love Ourselves

We’ve Got to Love Each Other

Daily Reminders:

Conclusion:

All You Have To Do … Is Believe In You!

Racing and Pacing

Calibration and Repairs

Stay Ready

Introduction

I’m not a guy who came from wealth or privilege. When I was growing up, my family was usually living from paycheck to paycheck, and I worked my way through college and business school. With hard work and determination, and the crucial ingredient of confidence, I’ve succeeded in all the areas I’ve challenged myself to work in: management in corporate America, selling and investing in real estate, and even running my own fashion line. I’ve had the privilege of meeting lots of famous athletes, actors, musicians, and other celebrities. I have earned myself a great, successful life!

Some people start out with money and connections, and those things can certainly make the journey easier. Where I was truly lucky, though, was in having amazing parents. My father was the most supportive father anyone could ask for. He gave me a solid foundation of confidence. He encouraged me to play football as a kid, and he supported my decision to go to college and walk onto the football team, which took a lot of guts. My mother sharpened my self-discipline, helping me to never give up, especially when things weren’t easy.

And having started out with a good supply of confidence, I was able to recover it when life tore it away from me for a while. I learned that confidence can be born again, reborn even if it’s been shattered by adversity.

When my father died, it just about crushed me. I had to pick myself up emotionally and go forward. And not just to what my life had been up to then, but to take on more challenges. I had to regain my confidence to start and finish an MBA program while paying my way through.

After I’d worked long enough for someone else’s company, I left my management job and have now fulfilled my dream of starting my own fashion line. I have enjoyed a lot of success, and I know that I owe it all to confidence — and my ability to regain it when it slips during times of adversity.

In a general definition, confidence is having a belief and positive regard for yourself and your ability to succeed. In this book, I refer to confidence as the fuel that gives you the power to achieve your goals and reach your dreams. No matter your passion or pursuit, you have to push with purpose, and confidence is the fuel behind that fire, the wind in your sails. The source of your power to succeed at anything is confidence. It’s the secret sauce of life, but not everybody has the recipe — not everyone knows how to find it — so I’m sharing it with you here, step by step. I wrote Born Confidence to share my journey in finding, keeping, and renewing confidence. My goal is to show you how you can do the same. Together, we’ll climb to get to that beautiful place where you’re feeling super-confident. And why shouldn’t you?!

Chapter 1

Coming Into Your Own Confidence

I see my dreams realized because I have the self-confidence to pursue them without giving up. I avoid surrendering my dreams. Even if I feel sad or afraid, I know that those emotions are only temporary. I can do anything I put my mind to. Belief in myself helps me to move forward in life. By showing others that they can be self-assured and brave, I learn a great deal. When I help others, I help myself. My confidence grows when I see others succeed after I have helped them.

— Will Smith

I AM YOU. I’m the everyday success story that confidence makes possible, and I hope my story will help you see that success can be yours as well.

I believe that at every level of my life I have had to possess and display some confidence to continue on in life. For me, as for anyone, there has been and will continue to be adversity and downtimes. I’ve had confidence, lost it, and regained it throughout my journey.

At any particular point in your life, either you’ll have confidence, or you won’t. Gaining it, or even reclaiming it can be tough. But that is where the magic happens — when you first gain confidence, or you lose your confidence and it has to be reborn. In those moments, you feel inspired and ready to conquer the world.

So how does that relate to you? Confidence is what opens every gateway, a universal key to go anywhere you want to go in life, anywhere you want doors to open for you. Inspiring confidence in others always begins with inspiring confidence within yourself.

You have to believe in yourself before anyone else will believe in you, whether it be a coach giving you a shot, a girl saying yes to your first dance or date in high school, or a college or corporate interviewer being impressed enough by your confidence to give you a shot at a degree at their school or the first job you land afterward.

First chances and foundations are built on confidence. Don’t wait for an opportunity to come knocking; be the knock on whatever new door you want to open for you, step through it, and announce yourself with conviction: I’m the right man for the job! I won’t let you down.

The Roots of Your Confidence

No matter how you apply it, confidence is always going to be the strength to push you through, but it always begins with the roots of your confidence. Were you literally born confident, or was confidence instilled in you as a child, by a parent or maybe a coach? Was it something it took you longer to learn because you didn’t have a ready example to follow?

If you’re a parent now, looking for the confidence to be the best parent you can be, know that you have a huge opportunity in front of you because you have the opportunity to instill confidence in your child or children from day one. According to Business Insider magazine, confidence is one of the greatest gifts a parent can give their child. The support of a parent is what shaped my view of confidence from my earliest memories on through the rest of my life.

My biggest influence growing up was my father. He was my best friend, my hero, the root of all my confidence, and someone who always made me feel like I was the most important thing in his world. He’d had me in his forties when my mother was eighteen, so I went into childhood realizing early on that he wasn’t going to be around my whole life, and I learned young to appreciate things in the moment a lot more than most kids my age would.

As a kid, I noticed that my father always projected confidence and was a charismatic guy whom everybody always wanted to be around. He could walk into the barbershop and have conversations about politics or sports, and everybody wanted to be in on the conversation with him. I would just watch and learn from a distance, and he was like my idol.

When I started playing football and realized, Oh my God, this is the love of my life! my dad played a big role in boosting my confidence. He would come to all my practices and all my games. He was that father who would buy me all the little extras I didn’t really need just to play — the best shoes, the wrist band, things like that. It felt like, Wow, this dude’s really in it with me! We would talk about the game in-depth and really break it down, and even talk about the coaches and the players.

At the time, I wasn’t as naturally athletic as some of my teammates, but my dad was able to will me to a level of confidence where I believed, probably more than I should have, that I was good enough to be out there on the field. That helped tremendously in developing my confidence as a player, to the point where I worked so hard that I eventually became good. Along with everything the team’s coaches did, that extra