Self Confidence

Is self confidence possible without a vision?

This is the problem that brought itself to my mind yesterday as I trudged through another day.  At the end of it, having accomplished much of what I wanted to do but not everything and looking forward to another day exactly the same, I suddenly felt abandoned by any sense of forward motion.

Self confidence is the life blood of success - without it, one cannot keep at the day to day activities required in the pursuit of a greater goal.  One deeply has to believe in what one is trying to do and that one has the ability to do them in order to put one's self through the required activities necessarily to accomplish anything of value.

But is this self confidence possible without a vision?

I will be the first to admit that even on a good day I have problems with self confidence.  I may acknowledge myself as skillful and even adequate, but the believe that I am capable to do much of what needs to be done often eludes me.  I do not have a singular cause to pin this on - I do tend to be very goal oriented so that is an issue of course, and struggling through the realization that I am much more of a loyal lieutenant than a true leader can create the conception that I am not competent (although the world is in need of loyal lieutenants as much as true leaders).

But I lack a vision.

If you asked me what I could see myself doing I could give you a host of imagined possibilities - a shepherd, an author, a teacher of swordsmanship, a cheese maker, a vintner, a farmer.  But if you asked me what I truly believed is possible in my life, I would simply sit there and stare at you blankly, start to speak once or twice, and then simply shake my head and say "I can't imagine anything."  There is no vision, only the sense that today and tomorrow and the tomorrow after that will be exactly like yesterday was.

When your vision is simply a long landscape of what has already been and seeing no change to that future, the concept of self confidence becomes elusive - self confidence for what?  To what end?

How do I resolve this?  I am not really sure.   Merely trying to gin up more confidence does not seem to get the job done because it is almost artificially generated and so there is no sustaining mechanism to keep it going.  And my situation is so much of my life, while stable, is hardly the sort of situation that encourages a vision of an achievable future, let alone one I would much more like to be in.

But perhaps I have finally identified the problem.  The question is:  What do I do about it?