How to Find Confidence, With Actor and Writer Chris Fung

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Yurui’s Summary

• I think that you can force yourself to be more confident; that is, confidence is learnt.

• No one really cares about you, and when you reframe this realisation, you can do things without being limited by the judgement of others.

• Learning how to talk to people is a vehicle into the world of learning through looking at the world from a different perspective.

• The more confident you are, the more humble you are as well; when you are confident enough with your own ideology, you can shut up, humbly listen to others, and rationally consider their views, learning in the process.

• Leaving your comfort zone is the only way to grow as a person.

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Confidence manifests when an individual decides to express themself despite their insecurities. Of course, it would be irrational for me to say that everyone is completely confident in their own skin; no one is. Even the most successful people deal with imposter syndrome; the more successful you are, the more you will feel it. I know that I've struggled with confidence for a long time now, but when you take a step back, I think there are ways that you can force yourself to learn to be more confident.

Especially in the past decade, social media has created this belief of how everyone cares about you. No one does (except for your family and your closest mates). As with most things in life, you can take that in a positive, or a negative light. Once you realise nothing matters and that no one gives a damn about you, you are able to live freely.

You can do crazy things that you thought were ‘socially unacceptable’.

You can get out of your comfort zone.

You can be more comfortable in your own skin and with who you are.

You can project that influence onto others in your interactions with them.

I think it’s importance to realise that the more failures and conventionally ‘weird’ you have, the more confident you are. When you experience failure and learn from it, you kind of know ‘how it goes’. You gain the ability to deal with anything. You’ll become desensitised to failure and begin to view it in a different light. This practice is commonly known as rejection therapy.

Prince Hal (King Henry V from Shakespeare’s historical plays) describes his own confidence and ability to relate with people: “To conclude, I am so good a proficient in one quarter of an hour that I can drink with any tinker in his own language during my life”, which, courtesy of LitCharts, translates to “All in all, I got so good at drinking in fifteen minutes that I can be a good drinking buddy with people of any social class.” Once you have your own sense of confidence, your potential becomes limitless. You’ll be able to speak to and learn from any person you want. That, I think, is priceless.

We cannot confuse confidence with arrogance; there is an extremely fine line. Confidence is self-assurance; arrogance is believing that you’re ‘better’ than those around you. We should go into conversations knowing that the people we are talking know something that we don’t, and hence listen to them with the utmost respect. No two people have had the exact same life story, and hence everyone has a unique story to tell, packed with insights.

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” - William Butler Yeats

In a conversation with Chris Fung, actor and writer in the Edinburgh in the UK, we chat about how the more confident you are, the more humble you are as well. We already know everything that we are saying; only when you listen to others can you learn abundant amounts from them. Once we become more confident, we can learn to empathise with others, and learn from them without any sense of envy or desire to assert ourselves in the face of criticism. Confidence allows you to hold your own sense of self, in doing so, learning to filter out good from bad advice with the personal context of the person you’re talking to.

Confidence is humility.

Confidence is one of the most valuable skills to learn, in my opinion. We all start from different levels of social anxiety, but it is only through leaving our comfort zone that we learn and grow as individuals.

Yurui