From the author: published here: Self-confidence can become a firmament on which you can internally rely and, at the same time, a beacon illuminating the path. The concept of “faith” is often contrasted with the concept of “knowledge”. Faith replaces what you don't know. However, the word "faith" is the basis of such a word as "true." Dahl's article on the word “true” refers to the word “faith.” And “true” stands for “certainly, truly, truthfully, accurately, undoubtedly, not falsely.” This is amazing: what is based on faith is associated with truth. Maybe faith is just another (different from knowledge) way of seeing and feeling the truth. Maybe it was not for nothing that people attached such importance to faith. They went to death with faith, they gave their lives for faith. The first step on the path to gaining faith is to change your understanding of faith. Faith may be blind (for example, the expression “believe in yourself” appears where we are talking about a “you” that you have not yet seen, but which you feel inside), but at the same time it is one of the ways to gain knowledge. Faith arises where other methods of knowledge are generally powerless. See that behind faith there is something fundamental and real, in other words, true. We just don’t have enough vision to see with our own eyes how faith is born and how it is connected to the real world. The second step on the path to gaining faith is to remove doubts. Doubts are one of the types of pollution of consciousness, and they can and should be cleansed from them. When doubts arise, in addition to your own voice, additional voices appear in your head that have different opinions. The prefix “co” in the word “doubt” speaks of the presence in your mind, along with your own opinion, of the opinions of some other co-participants. To remove doubt, it is enough to realize that doubt lives in you. It’s ideal to remember whose opinion it is and why it stuck in your mind. But even if you don’t have the tools to cleanse your consciousness, you can overcome doubts with a simple choice. You once heard someone's opinion, and now what pops into your head is what that person might think or say in response to your decision. You are faced with a choice: whose opinion to listen to, who to believe: yourself or the one who taught you to live. It's just a choice. Which will either give you strength and make you self-confident, or deprive you of strength and make you doubt yourself. If you do not have such contaminations of consciousness as doubts, you always clearly and unambiguously know what you want and what you think about something. But even if you have doubts, your opinion is also always with you. To feel it, you can close your eyes and put your hand on your heart. And you won’t be able to lie to yourself, you will know what you want and what you personally think. As soon as you rely on others instead of this opinion, you deprive yourself of your strength, and then failure is possible. In the meantime, faith remains, all your strength is with you. And this power is much greater than it usually manifests itself in life. It is no coincidence that the Russians said: “Faith can move a mountain.” L.V. Kukhareva