This covers Day 4 of 30 for the Hypnotherapy Project, which I'm collaborating on with Los Angeles-based hypnotherapist Greg Beckett. You can read more about this experiment, what motivated it and what we hope to accomplish here.

I have skills.

Nay, I have mad skillz.

I have a fierce, almost unnaturally healthy drive to do better. I have learned to work better/harder/faster, it would seem, as a matter of survival. The various "characters" who have buffed these skills out to a high gloss to save my damn bacon have come forward eagerly, willingly, wholly, in the first few days, introducing themselves and making their complaints heard. They're, like, over it.

There is one skill set, however, that is virtually non-existent: my inner She-Ra.

Most people would likely never guess at the frighteningly low levels of self-confidence I operate under most of the time. But it's true. Greg put me under and the poor, sad, half-formed, 98-lb.-weakling that is my Self-Confidence showed up to prove it. She has no "age", like the rest of the characters, because she was never allowed to develop. It just wasn't a priority. (Or maybe, disappearing act was its own act of self-preservation.) She has no shape, no strength, no presence, no say. She is Self-Confidence who isn't.

And yet to look at me, you'd probably never know it, just like if you saw me in most social situations, you'd probably never guess what a roaring introvert I am. I have gotten very, very good at doing things I'm not particularly suited for.

I'd feel terrible about my appalling lack of self-confidence except for one thing: I know it's there, ready to be developed, and I know that all of these other mad skillz will only be enhanced when they don't have to pull double-duty, standing in for something they're not.

Curiouser and curiouser, this trip down the rabbit hole...

xxx c

Image by massdistraction via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.