To have confidence and my relationship with self-esteem

Hello guys. There are times when I wish to talk about my feelings... And sometimes, I feel there's something  very cathartic about bearing my soul to my readers on my blog like that and this is going to be one of those evenings. I am going to talk about having confidence and my self-esteem in light of something I am doing this week. I have an audition for a project in Switzerland - I can't reveal the details of it but they're looking for an East Asian actor who can speak English, French, Swiss-German and Italian for the role. And I'm like, wow, call of the search - as if you're going to find anyone who is as linguistically gifted as I am and who is going to be as brilliant as me. Oh and they need that actor to be able to ski as well - it just got to the point where I came to the conclusion, the casting director is wasting his/her time by seeing anyone else apart from me. At this point, the following brilliant Madonna track comes to mind.

I did a few Facebook status updates talking about that and yeah, I wasn't modest. Let's just say I let me friends know that I was feeling very confident about the audition. I had made my big German TV debut earlier this year, I have just returned from a trip to Rome so my Italian has never been better and French is my second language, I am totally fluent in French. I have skied twice this year and I have a very impressive track record as an actor. A good friend (whom I trust enough to listen to) cautioned me, "in an audition be confident, but don't be cocky, acting as if you already have the job - casting directors hate that!" Of course, whilst I feel confident, I would still be polite and professional during the audition but this made me think about the way my parents dealt with this issue with me when I was a child. My regular readers will know I had a very, very difficult relationship with my parents when I was younger.

We're talking about the period in the early 1990s, when I was a teenager in secondary school and JC - I think there were times when I had confidence and why shouldn't I? I was smart, talented, good at sports. I knew there were times when I was able to achieve my goals - such as when I went to a gymnastics competition, knowing the kind of competition I was up against. My parents hated that - I know it seems rather strange, but my parents couldn't understand why I had self-esteem, self-confidence and self-belief. They had a theory: if I went into an exam expecting to score well, or if I went into a gymnastics competition expecting to win: there is always the possibility that I would do badly and if that happened, then I would be disappointed and sad. But if I went in expecting the worst and say I got a mediocre result, then I would be pleasantly surprised that hey, I didn't completely fuck up. They told me that it was very unhealthy for a teenager to have that kind of confidence - well, they called it arrogance and preached that I should be more humble in my approach to life, that having this kind of confidence would only lead to disappointment.

Is it good to have self-confidence?

Did they set out intentionally to fuck up their son, to be the worst possible parents in Singapore? No, I don't think there was any malice whatsoever on their part. My parents were just, well, utterly and totally hopeless when it came to parenting. They weren't that educated and weren't exactly that smart either - neither of them ever grew up having much self-confidence so for them to see me as a teenager putting myself out there, as I faced the challenges in my life, well that confused the heck out of them, Neither of them ever had the kind of ambitions I did in life and they were just worried that I would be disappointed in trying to achieve so much. So yes, there were times when I came home from a gymnastics competition crying my eyes out over a silver medal when it should have been gold and they just didn't know what to do in such a situation. Their answer was to discourage me from trying again, so as to avoid further disappointment - but I refused to do so and just kept going at it till I succeeded in turning that silver into a gold medal. This refusal to listen to my parents pissed them off royally and my relationship with them nearly totally disintegrated as a teenager. You've heard of pushy parents - meet the polar opposite of that, my parents went out of their way to discourage me, and that was not even out of malice, but in their minds, they honestly thought I would be happier if I had achieved less and spared myself disappointments and rejections. Of course, I think they're completely wrong (hence I defied them), but in their minds, they really thought that they were doing the best thing for me.

But the strange way things worked out: I never got along with my parents so if my mother said, "don't do this", I would do it deliberately to upset her. They discouraged me from applying for a scholarship because they was afraid that I would not succeed and would be devastated by the rejection. After all my excellent grades would have granted me a place at NUS with ease, so why bother applying for a scholarship, they thought? So I applied for scholarship after scholarship, getting no less than three in a row including one to a top British university for my undergraduate studies. In fact, the very act of turning into this super arrogant egotistical bitch with so much self-confidence to do anything in life and never take no for an answer was not a result of careful planning for years; hell no, it was just doing the exact opposite of what my parents had instructed me to do. Just as well defying them this way made me turn out quite successful today, because the logical conclusion is that if I had done as I was told, then... Well, what do you think?

What is the right way to build one's self-confidence?

It is so important to have self-confidence in life no matter what you do because if you don't have any self-confidence, then the worst part of it is that you won't even try to do anything: you won't apply for that scholarship, you won't try to be the team leader, you won't apply for that job you want, you won't put yourself forward for that promotion which you deserve, you won't ask that girl/guy of your dreams out because you assume you will be rejected. Instead, to try to spare yourself a life of disappointment, you always undersell yourself and go for certainty, you never take any chances and just when you think you can look back and say, "hey I may not have achieved much but at least I was never disappointed" - you realize, oh shit, actually my whole life was a fucking disappointment because I never even tried to do half the things I would have liked to have done with my life. Surely the whole point in life is to make your dreams come true, to be able to look back on your achievements and think, oh yeah look at what I have done, isn't it amazing?

The point of life shouldn't be to spare oneself of disappointment - to make your dreams come true, you will have to face disappointment after disappointment, rejection after rejection. This is why I am glad I had role models who taught me that lesson, so I listened to them instead of my parents. One of my favourite gymnasts of all time is the diva-like double Olympic gold medalist Svetlana Khorkina who is famous for some of her diva-like quotes over the years. She competed in so many international competitions from the period between 1994 and 2004 - was she always successful? No, there have been quite a few thrills and spills along the way when she crashed and burned. Was she disappointed each time she failed? Of course. Did it affect her? Did she ever let it affect her? No, she had enough self-belief and confidence to pick herself up and keep going: she refused to let self-doubt consume her and it led to numerous world and Olympic titles. Khorkina was criticized a lot over the years as conceited, vain, arrogant, opinionated; but if she didn't build up her diva persona to deal with the kind of rejection and disappointments that being in gymnastics threw at her, then she wouldn't have the very long and successful competitive career that she had.

When I worked in sales, I remember having to take loads of rejection each time a client said no to me. But somehow, it was like water off a duck's back for me. I didn't even waste a moment thinking about it, I just moved onto the next sales prospect. I remember other colleagues taking rejection very personally and I wondered why it bothered them so much. One former colleague (let's call her Janice) simply explained it by, "I guess I'm just a sensitive person, I can't help but take it personally." I figured Janice probably had a very sheltered upbringing with loving parents who hugged her and told her "I love you" several times a day. Yet none of that prepared her for what she was to face in the brutal business world - it was ironic that my dysfunctional family and rebellious teenage years actually gave me the tools I needed to survive in the business world. Go figure. I would have given an arm and a leg to have had an upbringing like Janice, but would I have turned out to be as confident as I am today with that kind of upbringing? I'm not sure. Don't get me wrong, Janice is an incredibly nice person - it's just that she lacked the kind of self-confidence needed to thrive in the world of sales and sure enough, she is doing something else different today.

So many people will find characters like Khorkina and myself quite repulsive: people like my parents may look at us and think, "how rude these people are, how dare they flaunt their confidence in public like that - haven't they ever heard about being humble?" Whether you are in Asia or the West, there is a certain section of society that does value putting up this front of humility even if it means faking it. Is it so bad to tell the world that you have self-respect and self-confidence? I think it's crazy sometimes when I look at the way women read all these beauty magazines: half of those glossy magazines are made of ads anyway to tell the readers, hey you're not thin enough, you're not pretty enough, your clothes look wrong, buy this eye-liner to make your eyes look better, buy this concealer to hide the blemishes on your skin, buy all these lovely designer clothes so people will look at your expensive clothes and not your face or body, buy this, buy that - there is such a viscous nasty beauty and fashion industry just feeding off people feeling insecure about the way they look. My theory is that there is big money in keeping people feeling shit about themselves. Just imagine if everyone walked around thinking, "I'm fine, I'm confident, I'm happy, I look perfectly fine the way I am, I love what I see in the mirror, so I don't need to spend hundreds of dollars on make up or clothes to cover up my insecurities!" Ooh, if that happened, then a lot of shops in the high street would just close overnight.

You can call it what you want: maybe it is some misguided notion of Asian parenting, maybe my parents are just brainwashed by the consumer society we live in or maybe my parents just didn't know what to do with a terribly rebellious kid like me. But at the end of the day, I somehow turned out okay but the high price I had to pay for my self-esteem is a very distant and broken relationship I have with my parents today. In hindsight, it was an awful choice: either I could honour my parents by allowing them to discourage me, or I could choose to have self-confidence but piss them off royally in the process. One thing I can tell you though, is that my Asian parents somehow have this Asian blind spot that makes them see what they want to see and ignore everything else that is inconvenient to their version of events. They are probably telling everyone what a confident adult I am today and that's all thanks to their brilliant upbringing. Well they can say what they want to their friends and I'm free to tell my readers my side of the story.

Yes, I just needed to get that off my chest for now. Wish me luck for my audition on Tuesday. Thanks for reading.