I was taught that there were only two types of people in the world: the proud and the humble. The former were those who blow their own horns like "My insert a thing/skill here is better than the others because it's mine." The latter say things along the lines of, "My insert thing/skill here is no match to his/hers because everybody is just better than me." As time went on and my experiences increased in breadth and depth, I have come across this third classification - the confident.

The confident were those who say things like they mean them because they actually do mean them. They say things as they are because they have proved to themselves that they really are who they say they are. They achieve this state through deliberate action - through actively working on that thing/skill. To know more about what a confident person is, you can read further here: Confidence Project Manifesto.

As my interest toward this third type grew, I tagged along my friends Jay and Joan to make a project out of it. We envisioned for the project to reach people who were on the same journey as we were. It was our great dream to build a community of confident individuals. For three months, we continued on with the endeavor. We were able to produce the following content:

Takeaway 1: Identify Your Areas of Focus
Takeaway 2: Establish Your Motivation
Takeaway 3: Aligning Your Principles and Values
Confidence Project: The Relaunch

We were also able to put up our email address where we interact with our audience (confidenceproject2018@gmail.com). We have gotten support from the Steemit community and through other social media platforms as well. However, there were roadblocks that we failed to anticipate thus leading for us to pause the project for 8 months. Here is a run-through of the things that we believed we did right and the things we think we can still work on:

What did we do right?

Road Map

We take pride in the framework that we have developed. We call this the "Four-Dimensional Approach To Confidence."

We have designed for the project to work from the "inside-out." We start with building the foundations of confidence within ourselves first. We then move from the self to our inner circles, expressing our earnestly built confidences to the people that we interact with on a daily basis. We then transition from our inner circles to our small groups - our classmates, peers, colleagues, neighbors and members of our organizations. These are then culminated by the impact of the confidence that we have built from the ground-up on our communities.

References

We also base our takeaways on books and studies that tackled our subject matter deeply. We are not psychologists but we work in scientific fields thus, we base our claims on published references.

Personality

We were very particular with the confidence that we were promoting - being bold without being intimidating.

What can be improved?

Logistics

A project of this scale would have been made more cohesive should we have had a single website to post all of our takeaways. This would enable the audience to easily access our posts.

Traffic

The project manifesto gained a lot of views and we owe it to our friends and existing network of readers. To remain competent in driving more people to read our content, we would have to strike the perfect mix of staying true to the established persona of the project and adapting to the demands of the blog reader of today.

Marketing

The perception of an online movement is owed greatly through its branding. Confidence personified should embody the characteristics of the "confident" individual.

Participation

We have made an email address (confidenceproject2018@gmail.com) for our audience to directly keep in touch with us. We also had a reward system in place for those who participate in our challenges. We plan to make it easier for the audience to join in on our challenges.

Timeliness

We have accepted that writing the takeaways is not an easy task to accomplish. We shall be taking into account this limitation and reschedule our frequency of posting.

What will happen to Confidence Project?

Confidence Project will continue. We still believe in it and the impact that it can have on one's confidence. We shall be scaling Confidence Project down, we will now be a part of a bigger project that Anne of zarinsbeautyblog, Rox of proteancreatorconfessions and myself are launching this June 2019. The proponents will still be composed of Jay of abinofthoughts and Joan of joanwrites. We still are very passionate about transforming our vision of building a community of confident people to a reality.

Until then, we shall be incorporating the things that we did right and the things that we can still improve on so that we can have more to share with you. Stay tuned!

Best regards,
Gail