There was a time in my life when I was deeply uncomfortable placing my order at McDonald’s. However, it wasn’t because I had inner turmoil about the massive load of saturated fat I was about to put into my body. It was because I had to speak to someone to do it. Sounds crazy, huh? If you’re reading this book, though, I’m guessing it sounds a little too familiar . . .

I remember one particular instance at an Applebee’s. The waitress had come around to my side of the table to take my order, but I wasn’t quite ready so I tried to stall her by asking her what she recommended.

I could sense her eyes burning a hole through my menu, the rest of the table staring at me and wishing I hadn’t come, and the cooks in the back covertly planning to spit in my food. I started sweating all over and my ears became so hot I thought they were going to melt right off my head. I had made such a huge mistake, and now deserved to be outcast from the group.

I felt rushed and latched on to the first menu item my eyes landed on. When the food came, I ate it as quickly as possible, left some money on the table, and, to my friends’ protests, made up an excuse about having to go home. At home, I stewed over it for eons—after all, it was the single most embarrassing and awful disaster that had ever happened, right?

Of course, to everyone else, their friend was just asking the waitress for her recommendation, and to the waitress, a customer was having a difficult time deciding what to order. That’s it. These might have been your thoughts as well; that I was making incredible leaps to conclusions that were blown out of proportion. But at no point did I truly think I was acting irrationally. I felt I had made such a blunder that I deserved to be cast out from civilized society. Seriously.

That’s the role of confidence in our lives, and I’m speaking as someone who’s been in your shoes and knows how it feels. I know how crippling and fear-driven it is, and how it can prevent you from living life the way you want to. Little by little over the years, I conquered my fears of ordering food at restaurants, and graduated to becoming comfortable with public speaking and meeting new people. I’ve come a long way from that day in Applebee’s.

Confidence may not be a cure-all, but because it can be so deeply rooted within people for so long, it causes us anxiety in ways we may not realize.

There’s a poetic saying proposing when a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, it causes a tsunami in Japan.