To a young man who wrote that he lacked self-confidence in dealing with others, the Rebbe responded:
Sit with friends and work together with friends. Soon you will see you can do as well as them. Then the inner strength of your soul will begin to shine through.
Self confidence demands taking the time to observe with our eyes and ears our entire environment. We must open our minds toward exploring new places, people and ideas. Patience must always be by our side so we learn to not only hear but to listen. These two are done first before we begin to step out on our own stage. Then we can slowly begin to introduce our abilities with our actions and our speech. With time we’ll gain more experience accumulating more knowledge both heartfelt and mindful of our own selves. There’ll come upon us a worldliness that’ll polish us up and make us shine in different degrees, however, we must be wary as to not gather up too much worldliness or we’ll lose our very own descriptive style. If that should happen then we’ll only become a repetitive model of most everything we’ve observed along the way, then we stand the chance of losing our very own style of self confidence. Reply
Unity-Confidence
Our ego demands us to have confidence in our self, to compete against others, even to profit off others. This is how the material world operates...
until G_d manipulated it so that we should live in a global world in which we are all connected within all our operations!
Today the old method of 'ego-mode' won't work anymore!
To confirm the advice given by the Rebbe to he young man, we see the same advice in Psalms 133:1:
"Behold how great and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity!"
- When we let go our differences, and our self-esteem and rather desire to work as one, on the same page - then within this harmonious connection of all our qualities G_d dwells together between us to reveal the correct solution which is always on a higher level than our minds.
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Rabbi Tzvi; I am the one who lacks self-confidence, I lost it long ago and I am still struggling to maintain it but thanks to your advice that we should practice to regain it.
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I moved from Austria to US in 1970. Since then I have tried to make friends with many people. I don’t know if it is something about me or something I do but I always had trouble holding on to potential friends. Yet, the friends I made in Austria are all still my friends and we communicate frequently over the different ways the Internet allows us to. I cannot sit down with them and do things with them. How else can I improve my self esteem?