Confidence or the lack thereof is an issue for many people. It is very common for someone to say "I don't have the confidence to say or do this", without ever questioning what confidence really is and where it comes from.
Feeling a lack of confidence can be paralysing. It is a form of feeling small and inadequate that will likely keep us from standing up for ourselves, from speaking in front of a big audience, or from tackling an ambitious project.
One way of bolstering the sense of confidence and to gather courage might be to tell ourselves that we are as good at something as another person. Others might need to feel that they are better than someone else in order to dare facing a challenge. To some extent the sense of confidence is always in relation to someone else or it depends on some specific circumstance. Both these conditions can change at the drop of a hat, which makes our sense of confidence very unreliable - we never know if we can really trust it.
True Confidence is of an entirely different nature. It is unwavering and unchanging. It doesn't live on the level of the ego/mind/intellect, it exists as a characteristic of our True Nature, the Self. The Self is the very source of all manifestation, including every individual being and all its actions. When we are One with the Self we are not acting confidently, we are Confidence itself. This kind of action is free from doubt and worry. It is not originating from the mind, but from the unwavering space of Freedom of the Self.
One of the many gifts of Meditation is to transform lack of confidence into Self-Confidence. When the individual sense of I dissolves into the infinite space of the Self, any sense of being "less than"" is transformed into knowing that "I as the Self am everything, everywhere".
Contact Sampriya for a free half hour introduction to private Online Meditation Mentoring