The Key to Building Confidence

Confidence is not the same as being comfortable. One of the biggest misconceptions about becoming self-confident is that it means living fearlessly. The key to building confidence is quite the opposite. It means we are willing to let fear be present as we do the things that matter to us. When we establish some self-confidence in something, it feels good. We want to stay there and hold on to it. But if we only go where we feel confident, then confidence never expands beyond that. If we only do the things we know we can do well, fear of the new and unknown tends to grow. Building confidence inevitably demands that we make friends with vulnerability because it is the only way to be without confidence for a while.

But the only way confidence can grow is when we are willing to be without it. When we can step into fear and sit with the unknown, it is the courage of doing so that builds confidence from the ground up. Courage comes first, confidence comes second. This doesn’t mean that we have to dive in at the emotional deep end and risk overwhelming ourselves. But it does mean that we must recognize how fear helps us to perform at our best and that we need to change our relationship with that fear so that we no longer need to eliminate it before we try. We learn to take fear with us.

Note down what aspects of your life might be in the comfort zone, what tasks feel challenging but manageable and which things you would put in the panic zone. Every time you step into the stretch zone, you are doing the work of building your confidence by flexing your courage. When you are trying to build self-confidence, it is a process of building self-acceptance, self-compassion and learning the value in vulnerability and fear. It is often a balancing act that doesn’t always feel easy. Build up your capacity to both lean into effort and tolerate the discomfort, then pull back and replenish.