Faith and Courage: the pathway to confidence

Faith and Courage: the pathway to confidence

I truly believe in these four words: Faith, Focus, Finish, Fun.  It is these four words that helped me change in my life.  These words can help you too. 

Just a side note.  I provide these as a framework that worked for me.  Feel free to borrow these until you can define your own. 

These words, at least the first three, were given to me, by my wife, while I was coaching the high school volleyball team. She walked up to me with a piece of paper and said “these words are for you”.  My first thought was.  What am I supposed to do with this?  But by this stage in our marriage, I’ve learned to listen to my wife.  So, I took the words, put them in a place I would not lose them and kept going about my day.

Another side note: Sometimes things that are meant for you are given to someone else to deliver to you. It allows them to serve their purpose. That’s a different article. 

If you want to read more about how these words have developed.  Here is the article https://majorhwilliams.com/blog/b/fourphases

I dove a little deeper into how Faith is used in the framework here: 

https://majorhwilliams.com/blog/b/from-belief-to-success-the-importance-of-faith-in-achieving-goals

This article builds on the previous one about faith. I strongly believe that faith is the foundation of everything. it also requires some courage to make it work. Many self-help books emphasize the importance of faith, but they also stress the need for action. For example, in “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill, he teaches how to develop faith, but he also urges you to create a plan, network with others and move forward. Let’s face it, you need a bit of courage to do that.

It only takes a little courage to move forward.  You don’t need a lot.  I will use myself as an example, I actually wrote my first article in January of 2020.  The thought of writing articles was a few years before that. I had many people suggest to me over the years to actually write a book.  These were based on some small things I had written and conversations. 

For me, English was my worst subject in school. You would find my lowest grades, next to any subject related to English. I had an English teacher in High School once say, “You are the first person I met that writes worse than they speak.” Verbally, I was good.  Writing a whole other situation. As I’m writing this, I realized she never really offered to help me.  She just pointed it out. 

For me my self talk was, if you knew about my English grades you wouldn’t suggest I write anything.

2020 brought a lot of change. The country got more polarized.  I got more focused. A couple of life events, outside of the obvious, had me starting to question and figure out my why.  I finally developed the courage to write. I started believing I had something to say and wanted to say it. When I started, it kept flowing for a few hours.  Although it felt like an eternity and a few minutes all at the same time. I could not stop the words from flowing. It was not grammatically correct by any means.  However, I had just enough courage to start.

I completed my first article in rough draft form. It was done. An interesting thing happened the next week. I sat down and just started writing. Various topics and ideas would pop into my head, I would write them out. The ideas started coming so fast, I had to start making a list of topics and areas I wanted to write about.  This all started because I believed I had something to say, then had the courage to start.  It just shows a little faith mixed with courage can begin a life changing journey.  Notice I didn’t say, people wanted to hear it. My focus is on having something to say.  I’m not overly concerned with the outcome. I won’t claim to be the best writer. 

For my first article, I kept editing and editing and finally I developed enough courage to have someone read it.  I printed it and walk over to my wife and said, would you read this?  She was in the middle of something, she actually forgot about it for a day or two, then she read it. 

My wife is great at English and grammar. She had been an English teacher for a while and she is not known for pulling her punches.  I was waiting for a document with all the red marks on it.  Yes, she is that chick. 

She just looked at me and said, “How did you come up with this?  This is really good“. Knowing she doesn’t pull punches, I felt encouraged with an increased amount of confidence.

I got my first like.

My faith and courage turned into a little bit of confidence.  Here is something else I learned, confidence is not required to start something. Confidence is produced by finishing something. The more you do, the more confidence increases. I feel more confident in 2023 than I did in 2020. if I hadn’t started with a little faith and a dash of courage, I wouldn’t be writing this article right now.

The more you do, the more confident you become, the more confident you become the more you can do.

I didn’t even publish my first written article first. I still had a little doubt and it was a unique idea that people could reject.  I had a fear of rejection that guided many of my decisions.

For reference here is the first article I’ve ever written and the article I wrote about discovering my fear.

1st Article Written: https://majorhwilliams.com/blog/b/solvingcomplexproblems

Article about discovering my fear: https://majorhwilliams.com/blog/b/deepestfear

If you start with a small amount of Faith in yourself.  Mix in a little courage.  Maintain a focus on the goal and keep going until you finish.  You would find that you are having way more fun in your life than you did before. 

 Faith mixed with a little courage can result in life changing results.

Faith  Focus Finish Fun

Until Next Time…