Confidence can be understood as a lack of concern for one’s self. It’s opposite, neuroticism, would then be an overly amount of concern for one’s self, one’s well-being. By concern I mean something closer to consternation than general regard. People with confidence generally take good care of themselves, or maintain good practice, at least in those given areas. E.g. the professor good at math but with terrible social skills has good practice at math and bad practice in social situations.
When one is confident, they are not overly worried about themselves, what they are doing, how it will be perceived, who’s thinking what. They are thinking of the action they are going to take, and hopefully, the effects it is going to have. Confidence informs the growth mindset, and enhances peak states, or flow. The discursive mind is great at problem solving, communicating, and rationally planning and progressing society. It is terrible for action.
Being overly discursive saps confidence. Thinking puts action off, and it is very easy and tempting to think that we can think away our problems. Unless the thinking informs action, it changes nothing, and so we change nothing, and then feel less confident in our ability to effect change. Or it can happen in a much shorter time period, when our inner critic gets out of control and clamps down on our perceptions of our own ability to grow, to achieve. The more neurotic we are, the less inclined to action we become, for we are stuck in the loop-cycle of our own thoughts.
A basic confidence is required to break this cycle, it becomes a faith in one’s self. It is no surprise that the different contexts we identified earlier, any form of effective training really, has a system in place in order to help you generate that confidence, whether it is your faith in Jesus Christ’s forgiveness for our sins, the faith in your Buddhist practice, the faith you place in logic and reason to determine outcomes, or the faith you place in the training or education you are receiving.
It is interesting that confidence has this basic faith in one’s self, in one’s ability, to the point where often it allows for a greater ability to not have to make considerations for one’s self in decisions – no matter what the outcome, there is a confidence that the person will be alright, due to their basic confidence, their basic ability.