Mind & Body: Mental exercises for physical wellbeing; physical exercises for mental wellbeing

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TWO: CONFIDENCE

Introduction

To a dramatic extent, our success in life does not depend on talent alone. A sizeable, even decisive, contribution is made by that highly elusive and emotional factor: our degree of confidence in ourselves.

 
Self-confidence is not the conviction that we’re bound to succeed at everything we try. The belief that we can’t fail is an irrational delusion bound eventually to lead to disaster. Genuine confidence is precisely the opposite: the inner sureness that we’ll be okay even if we fail quite a few times or don’t pull off what we’re aiming at. To the confident person, the stakes are manageable, which leaves them free to try the many interesting things in the world where success cannot be guaranteed.

 
At the core of a properly confident mentality is a sense that trying and making mistakes are integral parts of the process of mastery. The people who look highly competent now must have stumbled many times. Failure is no sign that we must lose in the end.

 
True confidence builds on an idea that embarrassing ourselves is normal at the start of anything worthwhile. We should see that messing up is a standard feature of the human condition, not a strange failing of our own. It should never prevent us from the chance to become more competent in the future, since every person whose competence we admire once began from a position of weakness. We learn to get good at things not by never finding them difficult, but by developing the right sort of attitude towards difficulty.

 
The challenge is to give ourselves physical experiences that can turn these theoretical ideas into reality. Fortunately, there are plenty of exercises that can help.

 
(i) Singing

Most of what we would really like to do is annihilated long before birth by a masochistic sense of our own incompetence. We can’t possibly invite people to dinner at home because we’re not really great cooks; we can’t show anyone the poem we’ve written because it’s not quite right yet; we won’t strip off and dive into the sea because our body is not in beach shape. We would so much like to love, live, be free, be authentic, but...

 
Few activities fit more neatly into this category of throttled aspiration than singing. How much we would like to give it a go, but how well we anticipate our likely absurdity. We’re reluctant even to try to string a few notes together in solitude. We could be walking in a desert and still feel anxious about humming, so deeply have we internalised a worry about judgement.

 
This is a particular pity because singing is one of the most basic forms of expression at which no one could ever – in any priori way – be bad. Our remote ancestors probably sang before they could speak; as babies we responded to lullabies long before we could comprehend words.

 
Many societies have made collective singing a central part of communal existence. Nowadays, even the remaining fragments of opportunity – in a church or on the football terraces – are often inaccessible; some part of us might long to join in and merge our own weak and out-of-tune voice with the crowd, but these occasions can feel as if they belong to others whose outlook and convictions we don’t directly share.

 
The ideal collective anthem has an easy enough, forgiving tune, enabling us to follow the phrasing and the lilt of the melody, even if (to an expert ear) we’re never quite in key. It also expresses ideas that are meaningful to us.

 
Some good options for a singing exercise include:

Encouragement: The Beatles: ‘Hey Jude’

 
Kindness: Mozart’s aria ‘Blow gently you breezes’ from Act I of Cosi Fan Tutte

Universality: Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’

 
In a singing ritual, the words should be printed out and distributed, and someone should take us quickly through the tune so we’ve all got the basics. The lights should be lowered to create a sense of occasion; an awesome amplifier should be on hand to power things on, and then the music should be let loose. After a familiar introductory melody, we’d be given the signal to start. Of course we would lose the timing of the words, we would put the stresses on the wrong points at times, our breathing would be all askew; but we’d be doing it. We’d be soaring.
We’d be aware, as we were singing, that others were believing the same things: they, like us, would be breaking through the barriers of embarrassment and awkwardness to join with us in creating a superlative collective moment.

 
From this point of view, the greatest glory of collective singing isn’t performance by a famous choir. It is in the back room of a pub or around a campfire or in someone's house, when people who can’t really sing manage to sing together and what they sing gives collective voice to the buried longings in their lonely, yearning hearts.

 
We’re encountering a fundamental idea: that we don’t need to be good at something for us to join in; we belong here anyway, we deserve to exist. Others are like us much more than we think: they’re not judging us harshly most of the time; they’re wishing that they could take the step we’re taking. They are finding some of the encouragement they need in our own inept, gloriously out of key but genuine choral efforts.