Confidence is Elusive (While Trying to Publish a Book)...

"Such nice weather we've been having!"

"The subway was suuuuper slow this morning..."

Small talk, tall talk, all talk. Filling awkward silences is my forte. I just got back from my third silent retreat. Three days with no talking, walks in the forest, sitting by the lake, reading, eating and sleeping. Heaven. Beyond just taking a break from my incessant need to babble, I also crave silence in order to connect with my own voice, that normally gets lost in the melee of life noise. Connecting with that voice and not the voice of society/friends/media gives me a small measure of confidence in my place in the world and what I can/want to accomplish.

Impostor Syndrome is a beast

I've entered into a period of time marked by intensive impostor syndrome, so confidence is at a bit of a low. Anxiety rushes in. That elvish voice that sits in the back of your brain and taunts you, "They will figure you out, you dingbat!" I've just started to let the book I've been writing out of the cage of my computer and brain. Trying to sort out how I talk about it with other people and explore options to get it published before I look into the self-publishing route. I've got to at least give it a go, no?

Exposing something you've put so much effort into (early mornings in cafes before work, years of edits, vacations spent writing, rewrites upon rewrites) to the harshness of day, and other people's opinions and judgments is pretty scary to me. You dip your toe into a sea of potential criticism and send it to first readers. Big step! But they take a really long time to read it and your anxiety grows. You start talking to people about your concept in an initial elevator pitch (which never sounds as good as the version you practice in the mirror) and their eyes cloud over, or they tell you about all of the pitfalls. People love to tell you about the problems like your 3 A.M. mind hasn't beat you down with this information: how hard it is to publish; how your genre just isn't what people are buying this year; how your story sounds nice but it's been done before. 

Then you actually start researching the agent pitch process, and you run into these fun realizations:

• It's a new age for writers where social media rules and you need to be decent at marketing yourself (unless of course you're scouted at a writer's camp or through a competition of some kind). You need followers, and we're talking influencer-sized numbers. Heck, the next ten years of books are going to be written by influencers or super-talented literary writers, with not a lot left in between.
• You need writing credits to get a writing credit. Classic Catch-22. And all of this takes time. Most people aren't able to quit their day job to write, so I thought I'd done a pretty good job (over a crazy high number of years) in completing a full-length manuscript. But then to get it published, I need to have other writing credits! Self-publishing is looking mighty good. 
• Advice is often confusingly conflicting: 

Sell yourself/Be humble

Promote through Instagram/Don't bother with Instagram

Do something to make your query stand out/just follow the process outlined and don't do anything fancy. 

The list goes on. All of this is enough to make you even more confused and insecure.

But the alternative to getting into the game and keep trying is to live your life on the sidelines and never know what could be. Who you could help. What connection you could make or light you could share. And as you age, you start to realize that you really don't have the time to avoid risk. Life is too short to waste on avoiding rejection. 

Give me some confidence yo!

"Fake it till you make it!" is some pretty common advice in this area. But that always feels so disingenuous to me and pre-fixed on some future destination that is there and not here. The idea that when you get there, things will be okay.

A major theme in my book is to be okay with the uncertainty in the now. To sit in it, be mindful of it and fully experience it without pretending or drinking/eating or distracting yourself away. With that in mind, here's my little quick list of amp-ing up that confidence (outside of the obvious power poses in the bathroom mirror):

• Practice, practice, practice. I feel so uncomfortable saying my "elevator speech." It's so new. But the best way to get comfortable with it? Practice.
• Stop the negative talk. Your inner critic will give you enough of it, no need to repeat it out loud. Like me prefacing my elevator speech with "I know it will be hard to publish, but..." How about just approaching things from a place of confidence? Suspending disbelief. Acknowledging deep down that there are flaws, but choosing to present the positive. 
• Find your team. That cheesy song "Cheerleader" has it right. You need to surround yourself with at least a few of them. I know criticism is required and character building. But you really do need some people on your team that will give you a bit of a pep rally when you need a little push to keep going. 
• Rejection? Let that shit go! A lot of people won't like what you put out there for a million little reasons. Just like you don't love a bunch of stuff. C'est la vie. 
• Don't catastrophize or put too much weight on any one opinion. It's not all or nothing. One "no" or negative response is definitely not the end of the world. 
• Let go of perfectionism. There is no perfect set of steps that will get you what you want. 
• Do one thing every day that scares you. Or sets you up for a small rejection so that you can get used to them. Side job selling Duct cleaning anyone?
• Be wary of analysis paralysis. You will never be ready.
• Comparing is for chumps. We all know it makes us feel miserable and small. Every single life path is different. 
• Find your Sasha Fierce. Beyonce uses this alter ego that brings out all of her confident characteristics. Come up with your own alter ego that brings out all of those traits buried within you.
• Just do it anyway. Even with all of the insecurity. The fear will be there anyway. You don't have to be confident, you have to be brave.

So many other tips if you google it, but these are mine that I'm gonna try on for size. What are some of your confidence-boosting tips and tricks?