Being Able to See the Real You

Confidence Holds No Barrier

Confidence can range anywhere from being our own worst enemy to being our absolute best friend. For example, what if your confidence and self-esteem were so low, that you could not even pick up a napkin or walk in a straight line? I know what you are thinking. It is hard to fathom that any individual’s self confidence in the world could possibly be that degraded or devalued, even for people who are clinically depressed.

Look into a mirror and ask yourself one important question. Who do you honestly see? I have a habit of seeing someone I’m not. I visualize someone more successful, more rich and powerful, and to an enormous extent, a person I believe I won’t ever be in the future. I draw conclusions before I even try. This is what I like to call career limiting, and on a higher level, life limiting.

For several years I was under the erroneous assumption that only financially successful people were qualified to be confident. This statement would mean that workers like me shouldn’t be confident. For three weeks, I surveyed several stores such as Walmart and Krogers. What I found in three weeks contradicted my assumption. The Workers were working very hard, and they enjoyed being employed with their current boss. The workers were genuinely confident in what they did for a living.

How I learned to be confident

At first, I was very shy at trying new activities and even talking to people in general. I had trouble getting up from my seat in lunch to put a tray away due to the thought that I would knock all the trays off. The worst thing that I had experienced was being scared to pick up a napkin from a table. I literally thought I would knock the whole container off.

I have learned to be confident from working and by doing many of the activities that I thought I couldn’t do. When I just decided to bite the bullet and try some of the daunting challenges that I thought in a million years I would never do, and succeeded, I started to become more confident in everything I did. It was a very long process and did not happen overnight or in one weekend, but if done at a steady pace, it can yield significant results.

My first baby step towards building up confidence inside myself was to start easy and work myself up. I started by putting my tray away before someone else had to do it for me. I adopted the policy of grabbing a napkin everytime I had to eat messy food. I even got up to the point where I could walk in a straight line infront of a group of people. I found that my premonitions of the worse outcomes were very exaggerated and not logically possible when looked at realistically.

You Have the Power

So we have learned that being confident is not a rich person attribute. We just have to get up to the point to where we can express our confidence more often. This can be done by challenging ourselves more often and succeeding. I find that a lack of confidence is usually found in individuals that have never experienced success or praise in their daily work or people that believe that because they do not receive constant feedback, they must be doing everything wrong or just enough to get by.

Success is in the eyes of the beholder. If success is the reason for not being motivated or not being confident, I suggest that you take an honest view at yourself. What do you do best? Are you the best worker in your specific career, or business? Are you an expert on a subject? Chances are you are good at something. If lack of praise is a problem, know that not everyone is accustomed to giving praise where praise is due. They do not realize that praise is the easiest way of motivating hard workers.

Most importantly, don’t expect anything from other people. Expect everything from yourself. You don’t have to change yourself to experience success. All you have to do is to be yourself and challenge yourself to do more everyday. Even if it is a small obstacle, work to overcome it. Little by little. I feel that we can make that happen, one day at a time, one challenge after another.

Let this be the beginning of your success.

Living with a Disability: The Less you Know the More you Stand to Gain

Falling off a Cliff…

I am sure we have all had that one moment in life when we have beaten ourselves up for being slow at learning a new skill. I know that feeling of falling off a cliff, the feeling that emanates from being a gradual leaner in a world that seems to run on by. Just the thought of being a lesser force in the eyes of other people can be stressful and can lower our self-confidence.

I am by formal diagnosis, developmentally disabled. The specific label for my handicap is called autism. I have trouble comprehending physical tasks such as mopping, sweeping, and even mowing. I can do computer tasks perfectly – it is the assignments that require hand and muscle to perform that causes the initial problem.

I usually need several demonstrations and elaborations for me to finally get a new task down, but the important concept is to finally get the task down and mastered. Since I do have trouble learning new tasks, I have a job coach at my place of work. Job coaches help new workers succeed by providing specific examples of specific tasks that need completed by oral communication and visual example. They also assist in giving feedback, so that we can do our job more efficiently the next time around.

At first I was like a salmon trying to swim upstream. I could not push myself to work hard anymore after my first few mistakes on the job. I felt like what a baseball player must feel after losing an important game. I felt very discounted, and felt above all else, that I would never learn anything.

Common Negative Feelings about Being Developmentally Disabled

“I Am Useless”
“Someone Could do Better”
“I do not Have Enough Experience”
“I am being Watched and Evaluated”
“I Only Fight the Small Fires”

Most of the reasons above that I have listed were also my beginning thoughts when I had started working. I believe that others might feel the same way – judged, constantly evaluated and often labeled by others as less competent. It is true that we are slow at learning things, but the only importance is that we get to where we are going eventually and are still happy while doing it.

After many questions and coaching, I finally got all the tasks down. And after two weeks went by, I was constantly being referred to as a hard worker. Just because we learn at a slower rate, doesn’t imply that we won’t ever be an hard worker.

It’s Time to be Yourself

I don’t want you to get the idea that being a unique learner is actually bad, it isn’t. There are several key perks about being developmentally disabled that I have discovered during my time at the humane society. The key to feeling confident about being a slow learner is that the less that you know – the more you stand to gain. It is as easy as it sounds.

In the working world, it is only natural to feel good about ourselves when we finally conquer a new skill. The longer a skill takes to master, the better we feel. In other words, the less we know, the more we have to learn and the more we have to gain. So if that one hard task requires an extra day to learn, than that is just one more reward that you deserve – along with a pat on the back!

The second good thing about being developmentally disabled is that I find it possible to never get bored of work. I feel every new skill is a huge stepping stone towards a much bigger objective. It is much like a video game in that we get assigned harder tasks when we advance past the simple ones. The positive end of this thinking is that you will succeed much more professionally if you do not stress about the small stuff and learn from past errors.

Reward Yourself

I have realized that people whom are learning disabled are usually very hard workers since additional work is mandated to get to where we are wanting to go in life. If you are like me, you also put off rewarding yourself until later. Studies have shown that if rewards are given right when we succeed, it increases our confidence. So I have been rewarding myself a lot more lately for my hard work and I encourage you to do it as well.

Being developmentally disabled is not a bad thing. Being slow to learn things can be annoying, but I have found that learning information at a slower pace can increase our overall general understanding too, and that is the most important thing – the final result after everything is said and done.