When you hear the word “pride”, what do you think of? Is it someone arrogant? Rude? Harsh? Annoying? A Bully? Or someone along these lines? I bet you thought of the word “pride” as something in a negative light. If so, you are like most people who would think this way, but this is not how we should always view this word. This is because you need pride. You need to be proud of who you are and what you want to become. If you do not have pride for yourself, then you will not have the success that you want. If you want more in life, if you want that specific job, if you want to start that business, if you want anything in life, then you need to be proud of yourself. You need to appreciate who you are and not be ashamed. There needs to be a burning passion of how much you take pride in yourself. However, I say this, but I do not want you to misinterpret what I mean. I don’t mean for you to be narcissistic about yourself where it is over top and you are absolutely full of yourself. You need to be happy about who you are and who you are planning to become. Do not apologize for being you and having dreams/aspirations. You need to have the confidence and pride in yourself.
Success does not come so freely if you do not have pride for yourself
I want you to think about the times that you failed in life. When you failed, did you have confidence in yourself? Did you have pride for who you were? Were you nervous and shaky to do the task or chase after your goal? During your moments of failure, I bet you were not confident, did not have pride in yourself, and were really shaky and nervous.
Now, I want you to think about your successes. Were you successful because you were confident and you knew what to do? Sure, you could have still been nervous and you might have stumbled along the way, but did you have confidence in yourself? If you cannot tell, one of the determinants of success is based on your level of confidence in yourself. If you have pride in yourself, you can be more confident and can strive for more in life.
When you have pride in yourself and who you are, success will move more freely towards you and you will be able to pursue after new opportunities easily. For me, I am confident in my abilities to talk in interviews. I am so proud in my abilities that sometimes I do not do any preparation work before the interviews (I probably should actually prepare to guarantee the success, but that is beside the point). Because of my confidence, I have been able outshine many interviewees and receive well-paying internships and jobs. It also has opened doors for me to explore other opportunities. If I did not have my confidence in my abilities, I guarantee that I would not have as many opportunities. Also, I was able to achieve more through my abilities, because I had a lot shaky interviews in the past where I was not confident whatsoever. However, I was able to grow my confidence and pride about who I was.
Confidence reduces the hardships of failure
Before I carry on, do not be mistaken that confidence and pride can prevent all of your failures in life. On the contrary, it might land you into more; however, this is a good thing. Failures will still pop up in your life, but they are the best learning experiences. There will be plenty of failures that will be hard for you to handle and some that might be easier to bounce back from. Pride in yourself can help you make it where all of your failures are ones that you can learn from and bounce back from.
When you have a massive failure, you can recover from it a lot easier if you have the pride and confidence. I want you to think about any sports movie or some game. At one point or another, you will see a little comeback story. In a sports movie, you always see the underdog constantly struggle. But because the person or team put in the hard work and was confident in their abilities, they eventually win. Even when things are going wrong and the team is “failing”, they are still able to bounce back and win the whole thing. This same thing happens throughout life. Even when things are going wrong, if you have confidence in yourself and who you are, you will take on the obstacles a lot easier and will be able to push past them to see the success.
Pride will help carry you to success
Be proud of who you are and do not let others tell you otherwise. If you want success, then you need to be confident in yourself. Regardless of what kind of success you are looking for, you need to have pride. With pride, you are going to hit a lot of obstacles and road blocks, but you are going to push past those hurdles with your confidence. You are going to learn from those moments of failure and turn them into successes. When you are proud about yourself, nothing can stop you.
