Hello kind krafters!! I hope that you’re all doing well and are preparing to brave/enjoy the winter months. Similar to my last blog, I will be sharing a self-reflection with you this week and I hope that some of it might resonate with you!
 
Recently, I have found myself doing a lot of learning about myself as a person. I have been struggling with old ways of digesting information and have been working out a new set of tools to aid my learning process. It’s been a lot of fun but extremely frustrating at the same time because I have had to take a large step back because of the amount of time it took me to absorb the information. Because of this sudden change in my learning, I have been struggling with a lot of self-doubt. I doubt myself in many ways and that is constantly something I deal with, but I am really trying to rework that personality trait.
 
Luckily, I have MANY supportive friends, family, teachers, and mentors that are always willing to give advice and help me to work on my confidence. A friend of mine showed me a quote from Weston Sprott that explains the difference between confidence vs. ego. In the quote he states that ego is “an inflated sense of self-importance or superiority” and that confidence is actually “full trust; belief in the powers, trustworthiness, or reliability of a person or thing”. This really struck me as I often find myself beating any confidence out of myself because I don’t want to be labeled as cocky. I think that the line between ego and confidence is very blurred in my head and so it is definitely something for me to work on. I’m not sure why I associate confidence as a negative feeling for myself and not for other people. When I see other people with confidence I feel nothing but pride, but for me, I often feel the exact opposite.
 
Yesterday, someone with a bit more life experience than myself told me a quote from the book Tales from Barra: Told By the Coddie. In the introduction, he tells a story of when he finally realized that he could sell fish just as well as anyone else despite their differences. I don’t sell fish but obviously this lesson can be applied to any scenario. It is going to take a while to realize that I can do things just as well as anyone else and have that belief in myself but I know that I am now on the right track.
 
One of my resolutions for this year was to become more at peace with myself and learn to accept that I (and everything that I do) is a work in progress. In my musical and everyday worlds, I am an extreme perfectionist and I am constantly adjusting my expectations. As someone else mentioned to me the other day, when we start off learning an instrument we are never upset that we aren’t able to play a full piece after one hour of working with the instrument. Once we get to a certain level, we don’t allow ourselves to have these realistic readjustments and understand that we can always be improving and that we can’t always be perfect. I find this really hard to swallow sometimes and I think a large part of that is because in music there is little room for error as a performer. We can’t rewrite a test or hand in a better paper next time because a lot of what we are judged on is a five minute performance where if we make a wrong move we could ruin our chances for a high grade, a paying role, or a reputation in front of many people that we respect.
 
Rewriting this for myself will take a while and will definitely be full of ups and downs but I am so along for the ride and feel refreshed with this new mindset. Thank you for reading my thoughts kind krafters and maybe some of you might be able to take away a little part of what I have written about!
 
Lots of love,
Rhian