Yogi: How do I overcome low self-confidence? I notice that it impedes my practice too.

Sayadaw: Firstly, you don’t lack self-confidence all the time, right? Use your awareness to recognize and acknowledge the times when you’re feeling normal confidence or good confidence. You want to acknowledge and be happy at those times; that will remind the mind whenever you feel confident.

Secondly, when you don’t have confidence, remember that if you have a lot of expectations and they are not met, you will feel low confidence. High expectation is wrong attitude and also unrealistic.

When something is unrealistic, we’ll have low confidence because we’ll feel like we are never going to achieve it. But why do we need to achieve it?

Watch the high expectation and feeling of low confidence with that background understanding, breathing deeply, and letting it go. If we can reduce it a bit, we’re doing good.

We can never get as much as we hope because what we get will match what we can do. Even if the low confidence reduces a little bit, it is a good sign – we need to celebrate small gains. Do it little by little and don’t have the expectation that it is going to disappear or it’ll set you up for low confidence.