cept, sustaining engagements, illuminate patterns
of relating with others, ideas, and projects that are
helpful for feeling confident.
Sustaining Engagements
The second core concept, sustaining engagements,
signifies the participants’ descriptions of feeling
confident as feeling good about, and believing in,
themselves in connection with their activities, ac-
complishments, and relationships that “reawak-
ened” and “refueled” their confidence. Participants
all shared details about, for example, feeling confi-
dent when they were “able to do things” both for
themselves and for others. One participant shared,
“I try to do things that make me feel good about
myself. It has to do with building my confidence. I
feel better about myself, because I am able to do
more, smile more, that is confidence inspiring.”
Another participant said, “Accomplishing the tini-
est little things, as small as being able to operate a
door handle, gives me the confidence to keep on the
healing path,” while someone else described feeling
confident as a “freedom to believe in myself that I
get from motorcycling, water skiing, and boating.”
The notion of sustaining engagements is also il-
luminated in the words of one participant who de-
scribed feeling confident as the moments when she
is either with someone, or she is doing something,
and her injury “just disappears.” She shared, “It
could be when I am lying in bed with a friend or sit-
ting in a restaurant. And those episodes usually
happen when I am dealing with a challenge and I
am managing it. I think that when it disappears for
me, people around me see it less too, and that’s di-
rectly related to confidence. I have learned to trust
myself.” For others, sustaining engagements is
evident in their descriptions of feeling loved,
supported, and cared for. One participant said,
“Staying near the things I love, my friends and fam-
ily having confidence in me, every experience I face,
positive or negative, they all reawaken my confi-
dence.” Similarly, others described experiences that
contributed to their feeling confident that included
having: “huge support from friends and family”;
“the support of a team and a doctor that called
every day and showed they cared”; and “people that
listen to what I have to say.”
Several other participants described feeling con-
fident in connection with sustaining engagements
with objects or symbols of their confidence. For ex-
ample, one participant said, “Some old family pho-
tographs are a symbol of my confidence. I have pic-
tures of when I am water-skiing and I was always
very confident. Looking at pictures of water-skiing
really gives me a whole new rush of confidence.
Those pictures help refuel the fire.” Another of-
fered, “My bicycle is a symbol of my confidence.
Being a quadriplegic and being able to walk and
ride a bicycle is a really big feat. I have an intimate
connection with my bicycle. The bicycle is a gauge
to how I am doing.”
The core concept of sustaining engagements sig-
nifies the participants’ descriptions of feeling confi-
dent as emboldening involvements with others,
activities, and objects. It is conceptually integrated
with human becoming as connecting-separating—
the paradoxical rhythm of being with and away
from others, ideas, objects, and events (Parse,
1998). When the participants in this study spoke
about feeling confident in ways that led the re-
searcher to the core concept of sustaining engage-
ments, they talked about the importance of being
with and away from family, friends, health-care
providers, activities, and objects in ways that helped
them to feel confident. For example, one partici-
pant described confidence as inspiring connections
with old photographs of himself and his family tak-
ing part in activities from which he was simultane-
ously separating, since he could no longer be
involved with them in the same way. Others de-
scribed connecting with people and activities—
such as skiing, horseback riding, public speaking,
teaching, or attending school—that helped them
to feel confident, yet also separating from the
way their relationships with those same people
and activities were prior to their accidents. Partici-
pants described feeling confident in relation to
connecting with either friends or health-care
providers who were helpful and who inspired their
confidence and separating from those who did not
as they were persisting and striving to accomplish
what was important to them.Persistently Pursuing the Cherished
The third core concept, persistently pursuing the
cherished, captures the participants’ descriptions of
feeling confident as a determined and ardent quest
to achieve what was important to them. When they
described their experiences offeeling confident,the
participants talked about, for example, the “inten-CHAPTER 14 Applications of Parse’s Human Becoming School of Thought 203