Confidence starts with a commitment to truth.  You cannot become truly confident by just pretending your way into it.  Acting cocky, arrogant, and aggressive are all signs of false confidence.

“Real confidence is the deep recognition of a certain truth, the truth that you are a powerful being.”

-Steve Pavlina, Personal Development for Smart People

When starting out at guitar or trying to improve certain aspects of your playing, it is important to cultivate this confidence by staying honest with ourselves and our goals.  If we are in denial of the truth about our abilities in any form or fashion, we block ourselves from building our genuine confidence and actually hurt our personal guitar improvement.

Confidence comes in two forms:

• *Short-Term- The expectation of short term success.  For example, you may feel confident of playing your 12 bar blues progression today because you have done it so many times before, so it is very reasonable to expect continued success in this area.
• *Long-Term- The expectation of long-term success, even though short-term failures may occur.  This form of confidence comes from acknowledging that failure is an essential part of reaching goals.  Even though you may not learn that new song, or new scale right away, you feel confident that you will eventually succeed if you persist.

I don’t know how to play the banjo or even the drums very well.   But I feel confident that even though at first I would completely suck ass, eventually I would expect to become pretty good.  I am confident in my ability to practice and aquire new skills, because I am being honest and open about my current abilities.

This Long-Term success is vital to anyone at any stage of their guitar journey.  You are going to run into a lot of road blocks with the guitar and music.  But just know that everyone else is too.  Be honest with yourself and know that there is no limit to how musically great you can get except the ones you put on yourself.

For an honest and open conversation about what it really takes to be a professional guitar player, please check out our audio interview series, Studio Guitar Secrets:  Making Guitar Your Career, and give it a purchase!   It is over 6 and a half hours of interview clips that you can put onto your ipod and listen to in the car or on the train that will definitely motivate, inform, and inspire you to take your playing to new levels.

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