WiseUp ( Pevuka) episode 6

Welcome to WiseUp{PEVUKA}

One of my interest in life is to encourage students to stay in school , to love education and encourage self confidence , hence I will use this opportunity given by  World Pulse to help change the mind set of those students who read the articles published on this website . All articles posted on my account will have the name WiseUp ( PEVUKA) and under that topic we will discuss the different reasons why some students drop out from school and venture into other things. The Major Aim of the topics that will be posted in WiseUp (PEVUKA) , is to change the way of thinking of the young minds of today by letting them know that destiny is not a matter of chance but it’s a matter of choice and it’s not a thing to be waited for but rather a thing to be achieved, in other words kids these days needs to know that success does not come over night but rather it’s a journey that only the tough ones will achieve , therefore the topics that will be discussed in my account will target the following people : Parents , Teachers , The community and the students themselves , reason being is that students , teachers and parents both need to work hand in hand in order for the student to succeed in achieving their goal. 

Welcome TO WiseUp ( PEVUKA)  once again ,today topic is  :

                                                                                          Personality Trait (Confidence)  

Today am going to Talk about the first Chapter of the book am writing to first year students in the University , however this topic is also useful to high school students , the title of the Book is Freshman Year and will be published in my website  by September website.   So today we will discuss Personality Trait.

The decision that you make and action that you take, no matter how small you may think it is, will have a huge effect in the rest of your life, hence It is really important for one to know who they are, at this level of their life so that it will be easy to know who to associate yourself with, which activities should you be part in as well as which courses should you take. So ask yourself Who Am I?

Knowing your self is very important, and will help you discover a lot of hidden treasures about yourself. So knowing the following things about your self will take you few steps closer in discovering yourself.

• what are your strength


•  what are your weakness


• what is your temperament

We will look at Persons strength and under your strength we will look at Confidence as a personal trait that one needs to poses in order to be successful on whatever they are doing. 

What IS your Strength? 

Your strength are the things that are deep inside you that makes you strong , the things that makes you bring out the best not only in yourself but also brings out the best in the people surrounding you . Your strength can be your talent that your born with, or knowledge and skill that you have acquired along your journey in life. Let’s assume that Confidence is your strength, because you have the power standing up in front of people and telling them how you feel, and sending a message across the room.

Today I want to discuss Confidence, and how lack of confidence can make a person give up on their goals and dreams together on how it can be one of the reasons why students drop out from school.

The most important thing to always remember is that one should always believe in themselves, in others words one should always strive towards having high confidence because in most cases people who drop out from whatever goal they are working on, or drop out from school is usually because they are not confident enough if they will achieve their goal, dreams or pass and make it in the next stage of their current career or school grade.

I have had several people come to me who dropped out  from colleges and reason being is because they were not performing so well and their fellow students kept on laughing at them and even some say that their teacher made a comment to them that  they should consider other degrees or subjects . Now if we take a moment to analyze this statement with the WiseUp (Pevuka ) extra eyes you will notice that , I did say in my first article of choosing Goals , that one is responsible for choosing their own goal and making sure that they do each and everything possible  to make that goal come true or reality , In addition to that I did also say that parents and teachers are also required to monitor a child's behavior , character and help that child to make the right choice when it comes to goal setting  , but I want to highlight in this article once again that all that a parents and a teacher can do is to advice but it’s all up to the student /child  to make the final decision , If your gut is telling you that the goal that you set for your self is the right one and you are destined for it than you have to be confident enough to stand for it and make sure that  the goal becomes a reality .

Now the Question is, what is Confidence, How can it be  attained, how can it help a person’s life if managed properly, and how can it destroy a person’s life if not handled poorly, As well as how does too much and too little  confidence affect someone’s life.;

What Is Confidence and How Can It Be Attained

Confidence can be define as a positive feeling that a person has about themselves, It can also be seen as a belief that one believes that they can achieve anything if they work hard for it as well as the belief that they can face anything that comes on their way and stand for what they feel is right.

Confidence can be someone’s natural born talent or can be a skill to some other people. This mean that some people are born naturally confident from a young age, they have this belief that they are born for a higher purpose, and will achieve that seems like the impossible to other people, such a person can usually stand in front of a huge crowd and present their ides and advice people or sing and do an act without having the fear of what if something goes wrong at a very young age. Now on the other hand we have the people that Confidence to them is a skill, in other words they were not born with that talent they had to practice to be confident, they had to attend certain programs that helped to build up their confidence. 

Whether your confidence is a skill or it’s a talent does not matter , what matters is having the right level of confidence in your life , and knowing  that confidence can help you to define Who you are .

Importance of Confidence

Like highlighted above, confidence can help you define who you are, when one has confidence they are usually not scared to have a chat with themselves and highlight both their strong points and weak points, and embrace the strong points and work on the weak points. So the number one advantage of being confident is the fact that it:

Scenario

let’s look at a situation where you are name is Ayabulela , and you are in your first year university taking bachelor of commerce in Accounting , and this is your second time doing your first year , because you had failed your business management , financial management and economics last year and  this is frustrating you because you do not understand why you keep on failing because , you always attend your lectures , your tutorials , your SI sessions as well as you are always at the library studying after classes , and what is more frustrating you is that some of the students in your class are always going for parties , while you are always studying but they pass with good marks while you fail to even get the minimum mark required for you to move to the next level of your studies .

1.  Eliminates fear _ when you confident you feel powerful and you feel like you can handle which ever challenge that comes your way, and this means that it prepares you to accept or to learn the things about yourself that pulls you away from achieving your goals and dreams. So when you are confident about yourself as a student it will help you admit certain facts about yourself without it hurting your feelings.

• Reaction of a person with High Confidence – If Aya has high confidence regardless of the fact that the she situation is breaking her heart , she would seat down with herself and ask herself why she is failing , she would look at all possible reason , and give herself honest answers , and if she fails to come up with any points by herself she would not be scared to ask someone to advice her, so A confident person is not scared to be told the truth because they no better that one is not born perfect and in order to succeed in life one needs to know the truth so that they can work on improving themselves.  In the scenario we can clearly see that Aya’s problem is not because she is not studying, but one can point the fact that maybe she is not studying smart, there is a difference between studying hard and studying smart ( this will be discussed further on its own article )  as well as another reason could be because she choose a wrong course to study , maybe she was doing good in physical studies and chemistry and now , commerce is a whole different field for her and she is finding hard to survive . So all in all , a confident person will always be honest with themselves and will have no fear of admitting the truth to themselves

• Reaction of a person with low Confidence – If Aya has a low self confidence , she will be so scared to face the truth , admitting to herself where she is going wrong , her only focus will be that am studying so hard , spending so much time in the books but am still failing , maybe is because am not intelligent , and will never make it .Eventually she will start believing in her own words and start thinking that she is not intelligent like the others and might end up dropping out from university and such behavior might later result in  her giving up in life as a whole.

1. Eliminates self doubt _ the more confident one is the less they start doubting their selves and what they do, what they stand for. Self confidence increases the value one has on themselves. In the scenario above , Aya would stop torturing herself so much with the issues and start coming up with solutions to help her , either she changes the way she studies , by trying group studying , if that does not work , she can try hiring a private tutor , if that does not work still , she can try taking breaks in between her studies , if she used to study long hours without breaks and if that does not work still , than she should ask herself the honest question whether she choose the right course for herself , she should make sure that her hobbies together with goals are in the same line with the course she is currently taking

1. Increases your strength _ the higher your confidence the stronger you feel about yourself and capacity to achieve your heart desires , self confidence helps you to understand that you can handle any challenge , learn from the challenge and eventually benefit from whatever challenge that comes your way , and this will definitely increase your level of happiness . In this Case if Aya has high confidence, this will help her deal with the situation more calmly which will help her come up with better solutions that will be beneficial to her.  

                                                            To  Be Continued