How lack of self-confidence affects you

In fact, when I wrote this title, I started to think about should I use “affect” or “influence”, it’s a question. I graduated from my university this summer and I am woking in a foriegn enterprise now, we need to use English writing emails, and speak English with all foreign colleagues in the company. Luckily, we also have a large amount of Chinese colleagues, most time we still speak Chinese. When I firstly came to the comany, I was very strict with the grammars and vocaburaries, I would spend a lot of time thinking about the correctness of what I wrote and what I spoke. Actually, most time when I spoke with our foreign colleagues, I’m usually too nervous to consider the correctness of sentences. But when I wrote, I was rather careful and strict with the correctness, so I always spent a lot of time thinking about how to write and reply eamils. Then I found that it was too inefficient. Also, I started realizing that I didn’t have to do that, because people can still undestand me even if there are a few mistakes occuring in what I wrote. So I wouldn’t care about the correctness too much and too intensely, only if there isn’t any big mistakes. As a matter of fact, this also teaches me that sometimes we shouldn’t be too strict to allow and accept imperfection and mistakes. We should have more acceptance, especially foreign culture and language. Even if foreigner himself, he also may usually make grammar mistakes, not to mention our language learners. So I stopped myself from thinking too much about use “affect” or “influence” in my title. If I can express myself well, then that is ok.

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Ok, come to the point. I have always known that I’m not a confident person, which bothers me a lot. I dislike myself like this, and I also really want to change myself. However, it isn’t an easy thing, especially in this company. Why I said this? When I first came to the company, I started having a strong feeling that colleagues around me are so good at English, especially when I saw them talking with our foreigners so fluently and confidently, it seems like they didn’t need time to think in the head before they speak. Then I looked at myself, I felt I had a long distance with them if I want to achieve what they achieved. Every time when my foreign colleague and boss talk to me, I feels nervous strongly, and a lot of embarrassing things happened during my work. I still remembered when my boss came to talk to me and asked me to help him do one specific thing, but I didn’t understand. All my face was written with confusion. OMG, how could this happen? I cannot believe it! How my English listening can be so poor! My boss must be rather disapointed at me! I dislike myself! Then, I feel really really afraid and nervous when any foreigner came to speak with me. And every time when a foreigner was coming towards me, I was hoping he wasn’t coming to speak with me. I would rather he writes me email, rather than talking to me.

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I’d haven a inferiority feeling since many years ago. I know it came from my home and people around me in my university. But when I entered my company and started my career, my inferiority feeling becomes stronger and stronger. I hate this. I want to change, and I keep trying. I knew if I want to become more confident, the first thing I need to do is to improve my English and be more brave to speak English. Now that I know I need to improve my English listening, so I mainly focus on my listening trainning. Therefore, I spend most of my spare time listening English materials, watching English TV series. I realized my weakness, and I try to fix it. However, lack of self-confidence makes me still be afraid of speaking with my foreign colleagues, I always worry I cannot understand what they said and I’m afraid they will laugh at me, which makes me feel more nervous when communicating. But I’m still makeing efforts to overcome it, and I always believe I can make it at last, because I know who I am~

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