Confidence

Picture this: you've just received praise for a project that consumed months of your life, and for a moment, you feel invincible. Then, within hours, a single critical comment arrives, and suddenly you're questioning everything about yourself. Sound familiar? We live in a world where our sense of worth swings wildly between the highs of success and the lows of failure, between the rush of recognition and the sting of being overlooked.

This emotional rollercoaster isn't a modern phenomenon. Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Buddha identified eight fundamental forces that knock us off balance: pleasure and pain, praise and criticism, fame and insignificance, success and failure. These "worldly winds" continue to buffet our confidence daily, perhaps more intensely than ever in our hyperconnected age. The path to genuine confidence isn't about avoiding these winds, but learning to hold our seat while they blow through our lives. This journey requires us to develop four essential powers that transform our relationship with uncertainty, vulnerability, and the inevitable ups and downs of human existence.

There's a moment every parent dreads, and mine came during a particularly chaotic morning when my daughter was having what professionals euphemistically call "a difficult transition." She was melting down about wearing her coat, and I found myself getting increasingly agitated. My inner dialogue became a familiar soundtrack: "You're failing as a parent. Look how stressed she is. Other parents have this figured out." Within minutes, I'd gone from feeling reasonably competent to questioning my entire approach to raising a human being.

This is the power of what Buddhist teachings call the eight worldly winds. They arrive as pairs: pleasure and pain, praise and criticism, fame and insignificance, success and failure. These forces operate like an internal weather system, and most of us spend our lives being blown around by them like inflatable tube figures at a car dealership, dancing frantically when the wind picks up, then collapsing in despair when it dies down.

The Buddha taught about these winds first because they're so immediate and inescapable. Before we can develop any lasting confidence, we need to understand how hope and fear operate in our nervous systems. Hope isn't inherently positive, nor is fear inherently negative. Both become problematic when we're unconscious of their influence. When we chase our hopes mindlessly, we become addicted to temporary highs that inevitably crash. When we run from our fears, we become increasingly fragile and defensive.

The key insight is this: the winds will never stop blowing. Our confidence can't depend on controlling these external forces, but rather on developing the capacity to hold our seat while they move through us. This doesn't mean becoming numb or indifferent. It means learning to ride these energies with awareness and compassion, transforming them from sources of instability into reminders of our shared humanity.

I once attended a month-long meditation retreat where we ate simple, wholesome food and drank mostly water. When it ended, I stopped at a gas station and bought a Coke to celebrate my return to the "real world." A few sips into that half-liter bottle, dopamine cascaded through my brain like a tidal wave. I felt higher than I'd ever been on any substance. The experience was so overwhelming it was almost aggressive. As we drove down the highway, I had a startling realization: everything in our world is designed to be four times brighter, louder, faster, and sweeter than necessary because we're only expected to pay one-quarter of our attention.

This is how pleasure and pain operate in our nervous systems. Our brains evolved to exaggerate the significance of these sensations, treating each moment of pleasure as potential salvation and each discomfort as a threat to survival. Add our modern dopamine delivery systems, smartphones, social media, and engineered foods to this ancient wiring, and we become puppets dancing to neurochemical strings we didn't even know existed.

The social winds of praise and criticism operate similarly but cut even deeper. When someone we respect offers genuine appreciation, our hearts open and we feel worthy of belonging. When we receive harsh criticism, especially about something we care deeply about, it can feel as visceral as a physical wound. Our reputation becomes our true avatar in the social world, and threats to it activate the same alarm systems as threats to our physical safety.

I learned this personally when a trusted colleague gave me difficult feedback about my tendency to speak for others rather than letting them speak for themselves. My initial reaction wasn't acceptance but a familiar defensive spiral: "But I've been working on this for twenty years! Don't they know how hard I'm trying?" The feedback stung because it challenged my self-image as someone with good listening skills. Yet this discomfort became a doorway to growth, reminding me that sensitivity to others' perspectives isn't a weakness to overcome but a capacity to cultivate.

The Disney movie Coco introduced me to a concept that fundamentally shifted my understanding of human mortality: the idea that we die twice. The first death happens when our body stops functioning. The second death occurs when the last person who remembers us passes away, when our name disappears from family altars and our stories fade from living memory. This concept illuminated something profound about our relationship with significance and recognition.

Most of us carry complex relationships with visibility and achievement. We long to matter, to have our contributions recognized, yet we're often uncomfortable when attention actually comes our way. Social media has weaponized this complexity, allowing us to track numerical representations of our significance through followers, likes, and shares. For the first time in history, we can quantify our relevance in real-time, creating new forms of both validation and anxiety.

I experienced this personally during a moment of professional triumph. After years of uncertainty, a prestigious publisher agreed to publish my second book. I felt like I'd finally "made it" as a writer. Within hours of celebrating this news, I learned that a college acquaintance had been awarded a MacArthur "genius" grant. Suddenly, my moment of success felt insignificant. My inner tube man deflated completely. This wasn't about my friend's success, it was about my mind's tendency to weaponize comparison against itself.

The teaching here isn't that we should suppress our desires for recognition or achievement. These longings point us toward meaningful work and remind us of our interconnection with others. The problem arises when we mistake temporary validation for permanent security, or when we allow comparative mind to eclipse our appreciation for our own journey. True confidence comes from understanding that everyone's path unfolds differently, and that our worth isn't determined by how we measure against others but by how fully we show up to our own lives.

When Kevin Durant won the NBA's Most Valuable Player award, he delivered a twenty-six-minute acceptance speech that bordered on tedium. He thanked virtually everyone who had ever been part of his basketball journey, from star teammates to third-string players to equipment managers. But the speech's power emerged in its final moments when he turned to his mother, who had single-parented four children through American poverty, and declared through tears: "You're the real MVP."

This moment captures the essence of the first power of confidence: compassion. Durant understood intuitively what individualistic culture often obscures, that no achievement belongs to one person alone. True confidence isn't built in isolation but emerges from recognizing our interdependence with others. Compassion allows us to see our struggles and successes in context, connecting us to something larger than our individual anxieties.

The second power, lineage, reminds us that we inherit wisdom traditions that can support us through difficulty. Whether our lineage includes spiritual teachers, family ancestors, or heroes from whatever work we're doing in the world, we're never the first people to face the challenges we encounter. When I visualize the supportive figures from my past during meditation, including my fierce grandmother Claire who produced Broadway shows and taught me about claiming space in the world, I feel less alone and more capable of taking my seat.

The third power, awareness, offers the most unconditional support. Unlike any particular experience that arises in consciousness, awareness itself can't be knocked off balance. It's the spacious knowing that holds all our thoughts, emotions, and sensations without being threatened by any of them. Learning to recognize and rest in this awareness is like discovering that you have an unshakeable foundation beneath all of life's turbulence.

The fourth power, windhorse, teaches us to harness the very energies that seem to destabilize us. Rather than trying to eliminate the eight worldly winds, we learn to ride them like a skilled horseback rider. This practice involves joining heaven and earth, grounding ourselves in practical reality while remaining open to creative possibility, allowing us to meet whatever arises with both tenderness and strength.

During the chaotic years when my primary spiritual community was falling apart due to revelations about our teacher's harmful behavior, I found myself grappling with questions that cut to the core of confidence and power. How do we maintain our seats when the very structures we've relied on for stability crumble? How do we distinguish between healthy authority and harmful hierarchy? How do we claim our own power without replicating the patterns that caused harm in the first place?

I realized that genuine confidence requires a willingness to remain vulnerable and transparent, especially when we're in positions of influence. The old model of confidence, based on projecting invulnerability and avoiding difficult questions, has led to countless scandals and systemic failures. True power isn't rigid but tender, not defensive but open to feedback and course correction.

This understanding transformed my approach to teaching and leadership. Instead of trying to appear like I had everything figured out, I began sharing my own struggles and uncertainties when appropriate. Rather than positioning myself as an expert dispensing wisdom from above, I framed our work together as mutual exploration where everyone's insights contribute to our collective understanding. This shift didn't diminish my authority; it made it more trustworthy because it was more human.

The practices in this book aren't designed to make the eight worldly winds stop blowing. They're meant to help us develop what I call "unconditional confidence," the kind that remains stable regardless of external circumstances. When we can hold our seats through praise and criticism, success and failure, we become sources of stability for others who are struggling with these same forces. Our vulnerability becomes a gift rather than a liability, and our power serves life rather than ego.

The journey toward genuine confidence isn't about building walls against life's uncertainties but about learning to dance with them. Through countless stories of human struggle and awakening, we see that the eight worldly winds of pleasure and pain, praise and criticism, fame and insignificance, success and failure will continue to blow through our lives regardless of our spiritual progress or personal achievements. The question isn't how to avoid these forces but how to remain grounded and open-hearted while they move through us.

The four powers of compassion, lineage, awareness, and windhorse offer us practical pathways to unconditional confidence. By recognizing our interdependence with others, drawing strength from those who came before us, resting in the spacious awareness that holds all experience, and learning to harness life's energies rather than resist them, we discover that we already possess everything we need to hold our seat with dignity and grace. This isn't a confidence that depends on external validation or the absence of difficulty, but one that emerges from fully embracing our humanity and supporting others in doing the same. When we take our seats in this way, we become forces for healing and wisdom in a world that desperately needs both.