How to Live the Confident Life You Never Imagined.

Via Anna Polovin

“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined.” ~ Henry David Thoreau

This quote is written on a greeting card that has sat on a bookshelf in my living room for the last few years now. It collects dust frequently due to my basement-dwelling lifestyle and I find myself taking comfort in the bold, black and white presence it embodies in my colorful house.

This morning as I looked over at this card for most likely the millionth time, it generated a dialogue in my mind that I have not been able to shake: When was the last time you went confidently into anything? I thought.

I racked my brain for ideas, areas in my life I surely had to feel confident in:

Walking my dog? Nope. She owns those hikes.

Academia? I survived! Somehow. I thought.

I winced while reminiscing about the countless math and science tests I had failed throughout my life. The times I cried because our education system valued academic intellect over emotional and social intelligence. I thought of all the times I never felt confident in this system and laughed at the fact that all those C’s, D’s and F’s on tests never actually stopped me from pursuing topics I felt most passionate about. So, my father was right, one day those grades really will only be remembered as letters on a paper, the feelings and emotions of failure attached to them will soon be forgotten.

Relationships? Confidence? Not quite.

I thought of all the relationships I had tiptoed into unsure of how to navigate such vulnerable waters. It wasn’t that I felt an over-arching feeling of insecurity, or the need for reassurance, and I certainly knew I had not lived a life I had imagined. And this was exactly the point.

Sometimes we simply just live life.

My thoughts echoed back to each other. I thought of different work roles I had been in, jobs held, social settings which with age I found myself increasingly interested in examining the minute details of wall paint and textures feeling overwhelmed by the need to socialize and later exhausted after the small talk had died down for the evening.

How often is it that things in our life go in ways that we would have dreamed them to have gone? Where our results surely are not always negative outcomes, but rather unexpected outcomes we may have never intended on.

Then I remembered I was questioning one of the greatest American poets of all time. How could I!? Henry David Thoreau, an American poet of the 1800s, an abolitionist, a man who wrote books such as Walden, how much I wanted to follow those words, the ideas and concepts in that book about living such simple lifestyles among our natural habitat, surrounded by trees, mountains, and lakes. Yet, on such a morning, modern construction trucks roared in the background, ripping up pavement, scraping the earths surface creating unbearable sounds that caused my dogs ears to twitch uncontrollably and I found myself unable to really relate to this quote.

There are few things I’ve gone into confidently, I concluded.

I kept going. My mind wasn’t ready to give up this conversation yet, so I followed it down a path that, like my life, I did not know the answers to, or where the journey would take me.

I never let that stop me. I went. I would go.

Just go! Just continue to go. I got excited about the fact that a lack of confidence never stopped me from doing. In fact, I think that a lack of confidence actually taught me self-advocacy, encouraged curiosity, and fostered self-growth.

So maybe we do not live a life we imagined. Maybe we live pieces of it, maybe we strive to reach certain goals we have set, but for so many of us our lives are far from what we ever imagined. If we imagined our life at all.

So maybe you do not go confidently in the direction of your dreams.

Maybe, like me, you struggle to truly go confidently into most things.

But this does not stop you.

Because you still see the value and worth in going.

Like me, perhaps you too believe in the power of experiences, in finding and learning new things in the simple pleasures of being.

So maybe you do not live the life you have always imagined, but you live a life of purpose, a life worthy of doing.

Just go. Just keep going. Never stop. Your confidence will come later, you will build more of it, you will learn to live the life you always imagined and that same life will also be the one you had never imagined living at all.

~

Author: Anna Polovin