Most people have the order backwards.
They think it goes like this. First you feel confident. Then you act.
So they wait. They wait to feel ready before they apply for the job. They wait to feel ready before they speak up in the meeting. They wait to feel ready before they start the business, ask for the raise, make the call.
The feeling never comes. So the action never happens.
Here is the truth. It goes the other way.
You act first. Then the confidence shows up.
Where Confidence Really Comes From
Psychologist Albert Bandura spent his career studying what he called self-efficacy. That is the belief that you can handle a specific task. It is what most of us mean when we say confidence.
Bandura identified four sources of it. I covered all four in Self-Confidence vs. Self-Esteem: Know the Difference.
But he was clear that one source beats the rest. Mastery experience. Doing the thing. Having it go okay. Doing it again.
Not thinking about it. Not reading about it. Not being told you can do it. Doing it.
Every time you act and survive, you collect a piece of evidence. Enough evidence and your brain stops arguing with you.
Why Telling Yourself You’re Confident Can Backfire
The popular advice is to repeat affirmations. Look in the mirror. Say “I am confident.” Say “I am capable.”
In 2009, psychologist Joanne Wood and her colleagues at the University of Waterloo tested this. They had people repeat the statement “I am a lovable person.”
For people who already felt good about themselves, it helped a little.
For people with low self-esteem, it made them feel worse.
Why? Because when a statement is too far from what you actually believe, your mind pushes back. You say “I am confident,” and a voice in your head answers, “No, you’re not.” Now you have reminded yourself of the thing you were trying to forget.
Evidence works where affirmations don’t. You cannot argue with something you actually did.
Courage Comes First
If confidence comes after action, what gets you to act in the first place?
Courage.
Courage is not the absence of fear. It is doing the thing while you are still afraid. Confidence is what you earn on the other side of it.
That is the whole cycle. Act scared. Get through it. Collect the evidence. Next time, it is a little less scary.
Five Ways to Build Confidence by Acting
1. Go small. Don’t start with the hardest version. Start with the version you can do this week. Speak up once in a meeting before you give the presentation. Make one call before you make fifty.
2. Keep an evidence file. Write down every time you did something you were nervous about. What it was. How it went. When doubt shows up, read the file. It is harder to argue with a list.
3. Separate the feeling from the decision. You can feel nervous and still act. You don’t have to wait for the nerves to leave. Say it out loud if you have to: “I’m nervous, and I’m doing it anyway.”
4. Count the reps, not the results. Early on, the goal is not to be good. The goal is to show up. Every rep counts, even the ugly ones.
5. Review honestly. After you act, look at what actually happened, not what you were afraid would happen. Most of the time, it went better than the story in your head.
The Bottom Line
Confidence is not something you find. It is something you build. And you build it the only way anything gets built — one rep at a time.
Stop waiting to feel ready.
Do the small version today. Write it down.
Then do it again.
Sources
- Wood, J.V., Perunovic, W.Q.E., & Lee, J.W. (2009). “Positive Self-Statements: Power for Some, Peril for Others.” Psychological Science, 20(7), 860–866. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19493324/
- Bandura, A. (1997). Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. New York: W.H. Freeman. Overview: https://www.simplypsychology.org/self-efficacy.html
