How to build confidence from scratch
Confidence is the key, right? So when you’re not feeling a whole lot of it, it can feel like you’re stuck in a chicken or the egg dilemma…
How you do become confident when you don’t have much confidence in your ability to do it?
I think this is such an important part of the discussion around personal development because whether professionally, romantically, physically or anything else, there’s no lack of resources that give us tools and resources on how to improve our lives. But all of these resources tend to be a million times more useful for someone who’s already got the ball rolling a bit. Once you’ve got that tiniest bit of momentum, you get ravenous for more and there’s an overwhelming number of resources on how to further improve.
But if you’re feeling stuck in the rut that is low confidence, even starting on those tips can feel so far away from where you are. Or you may have tried and then fallen off the wagon quickly of whatever mindset shifts, workout regimen or habit you set out to do and then felt like that knocked your confidence down even further.
So let’s talk about where you should start if your confidence is low to get yourself moving in the right direction. This isn’t a roadmap all the way to the finish line (that would need to be at least a book’s length, not one post!) but rather we’re going to focus very specifically on that first 10 yards past the starting line, so to speak.
Where to start when confidence is low
Our goal here is to get you to a different state than you’re in right now, where the possibility of you succeeding exists in a real way. Sound good? Okay, let’s dive in…
What is confidence?
Before I dive into the practical ways I’d suggest you start, we have to pause and make sure we’re clear on what confidence actually is. This is step zero because I actually find that a lot of people, especially women, out there feel like they can’t build confidence because they’ve misconstrued what confidence is, in a way that isn’t actually achievable.
Let’s talk about what confidence isn’t…
Confidence isn’t an emotion (or feeling) like sadness or anger or guilt. Those emotions are chemical responses in our body controlled by our nervous system. There’s a deep, complex operating system that triggers emotions and while our conscious brain plays a role and can work with our body to shift from one emotion to another, it’s not really running the show in this regard.
In this way, confidence isn’t something that just washes over you as a result of things in your surroundings, like we associate happening when you see something that makes you happy or sad.
Instead, confidence is actually a mindset. It’s a belief system about yourself. It’s a way you see the world. Having confidence is likely to shift the types of emotions you feel in various situations but it isn’t a feeling itself.
Think about it this way - it’s unbelievably normal to be bummed when a guy you’ve gone on three dates with isn’t interested in continuing to go out. Someone with low confidence is likely to spiral into self-doubt about what they might have done wrong, shame about not being good enough or sadness about it not working out. On the other hand, someone with high confidence can still be sad that it didn’t work out (this is important - even confident people experience sadness or disappointment), but they might also experience more acceptance of “if he wasn’t interested, then better to give me the time back to find someone who is.” The confidence acts like a filter to your experience that might change the feelings you have about a situation but it’s not a feeling itself.
This is so important when thinking about confidence because if you want to build confidence and what you’re seeking is a feeling that comes over you where you believe in yourself and the fact that things are working out for you, you’ll probably be waiting forever.
So if confidence isn’t a feeling, but instead a mindset or belief system. But what’s that belief system? Does being confident mean believing that things always work out perfectly for you? Of course not.
Imagine meeting someone who played professional baseball. You talk to them about what it’s like to be on their team and they emphatically say to you: “Yeah, my team always wins.” Their conviction on this statement is firm, but you know that even the best teams in the MLB don’t win every game - they win 30-40% at best. So their conviction isn’t supported by fact. Do you see them as confident? No, you probably see them as delusional (in a bad way) and it’s not likely that any amount of effort is going to make this belief true.
That’s because confidence isn’t believing that things always go the way you want them to. It’s believing you can handle the situation regardless whether or not they go the way you want them to.
You might be thinking how nice it sounds to live in a dream world where everything went the way we want it to but I’d actually like to challenge that idea. If everything went the way we wanted it to, we’d actually be very very limited in how good things can get. Think of all those stories you hear of “it was better than I could have even imagined” - when we get what we want, we’re constantly having things meet expectations but it actually closes off the possibility of things exceeding expectations.
But if you’re reading this, I know you don’t struggle with believing that everything works out for you. In fact, you’re probably on the other end of the spectrum, deeply believing that things never work out for you. And even if you did believe it, we don’t live in a world where things work out for everybody so why am I spending time even exploring this idea?
Because a key part of confidence is learning to appreciate uncertainty. While your brain is wired to focus on all the bad things that could happen if things don’t go the way you want them to, it’s conveniently ignoring all the good things that could happen if things don’t go the way you want them to. All the “better than you can imagine” possibilities that are only possible if you go about your life taking enough action (and by extension, taking a healthy amount of risk) to allow for pleasant surprises.
This is a key insight in starting to build your confidence - it’s not about being more sure of how things are going to go (imagine somebody walking into a conference room saying “I know for a fact we’re going to win this pitch”) but rather being better at managing and allowing for uncertainty (think instead “we’ve done such good work on this pitch that I’m going to proud of the team regardless of the outcome.”)
Why confidence matters
So let’s circle back to the definition of confidence - confidence is the belief you can handle the situation regardless of whether it goes the way you want it to.
A confident person doesn’t believe that every guy they go out with will want to marry them. They have the mindset such that if a guy doesn’t want to keep going out, they have the resilience to handle it so it’s not the end of the world. And that if a guy does want to keep going out (and maybe eventually marry them), that that would be great too.
A confident person doesn’t believe that they’re going to succeed in negotiating a 20% raise. They know that they’re giving themselves a chance to do so (more than someone who isn’t confident and maybe wouldn’t even ask) but they also believe that if the company says a flat out no, that they can figure out next steps from there. To take it a step further, even if everything goes terribly awry and they get fired, a confident person probably has some level of belief in their own skills that they know it might take them 3 or 6 months but that they’d find a new job or a way to be okay.
When we're feeling low confidence, it’s really a sign of fear or doubt about one or more future outcomes. We’re hoping desperately for one outcome but deeply scared of the outcome that we don’t want. As a result, we walk into the scenario with more fear and doubt, which unfortunately often makes it more likely that we get the outcome we don’t want. Think about how you show up on a date when you’re worried someone’s going to end things vs. if you know you’ll be fine either way. Think about how you’d go into a negotiation if you were worried about getting fired vs. if you knew you’d be fine if that happened but also want to give yourself the shot at the raise.
It makes sense then why when we’re low confidence we often feel stuck. We are so worried about the outcome we don’t want that often we talk ourselves out of going on the date or asking for the raise! Basically taking risks that could lead to what we do want! Our fixation on the bad outcome subtly blocks the good outcome.
Over time, this low confidence can lead to us looking around at other people who got the promotion or raise, the people in relationships or who built the social media following or side project and assuming that they are just better than we are or have some skill that we don’t. When in fact, we took ourselves out of the running for many of these things for fear that we won’t get them.
At it’s most basic level, the mindset of confidence is risk-tolerant. Confident people go after what they want because they think it’s possible, not because it’s guaranteed. They go on the date, ask for the raise, post the video knowing they might get dumped, get told no or get 300 views but they do it anyway because they know that the risk opens up the possibility for reward.
If you feel like you have a long history of not getting the rewards, it’s not because you’re not worthy or good enough to get those things, you have to realize that the confident people out there probably have faced as many if not way way more failures than you have but were willing to keep going and eventually saw the rewards come through.
If confidence is a mindset where you believe you can handle the situation regardless of the outcome, you’re actually okay with “failing” and you just keep going anyway.
Summary
So as we move forward into how you’re going to begin to build confidence, there are two really key things to focus on:
I’m not chasing a feeling, I’m creating a mindset - which means focusing on your conscious thoughts and actions, the things you can control, vs. waiting for a feeling to occur in our body to give us permission or motivation to take a next step
I’m going to get more comfortable with the “bad” outcome happening (or uncertainty in general) - the more that we can de-stigmatize whatever it is you’re avoiding, the more effective we’ll be at getting over those fear instincts that might be stopping you from starting and will help you support yourself if it does happen to keep going rather than shrink back into a shell.
Now that we’ve established what we’re working toward here, in part 2 of this confidence series (coming soon), we’re going to dive into some practical things you should be thinking about to get yourself moving toward more confidence.
