How to build confidence in any area of your life.
‘’Confidence is a skill, not a trait. You're born with it and you build it every single day of your life.’’ - Mel Robbins
In high school, you’d always find me at the back of the class. Whenever the teacher was about to ask a question, I was the first to physically hide my head.
I wasn’t confident in my words or my actions. As a skinny kid prone to a lot of social anxiety, confidence felt like a distant concept that I simply had no access to.
Coming home and seeing everyone posting on social media made it worse. They all seemed to project so much confidence.
Meanwhile, I couldn’t even answer a phone call without feeling like my heart was about to burst out of my chest.
Five years later, I’ve moved to a different country, learned a new language, built my physique, and started coaching others who want to do the same.
All of that, starting with -1 confidence.
What I didn’t realize at the time is that confidence is not a prerequisite for achievement.
Confidence is built on experiences, and the more practice you get, the more confidence you stack up. More than that, there’s a system to build confidence
Ultimately, your brain stores all those memories and experiences in a mental vault that dictates your general level of confidence. Which I call the bank of mastery.
In this article, we’re going to deconstruct confidence and then I’m going to expose the system that you can start to use to build confidence right away.
Confidence is a skill, not a trait
You weren’t ready yesterday, you aren’t today, and you won’t be tomorrow.
There’s only one way to acquire confidence - build a bank of memories that prove you can do what you’re about to engage in.
If you’ve never exercised, you don’t have any proof to show your brain that you can pull it off. This results in feeling inadequate, stressed, and unsure of your decisions.
You have to back up confidence with experience.
‘’repetitions, repetitions, repetitions’’ - Dr. Ivan Joseph
You build confidence through actions, repetitions, and mastery. That’s the only way to do it.
It’s not about a complicated system. Repeated similar experiences are the only way to improve your self-assurance.
And it makes sense when you think about it. Don’t forget that your brain is designed for survival.
The worst thing is to tell it, “Let’s go do this hard thing we’ve never done before.”
Not only will your brain estimate your chances of success close to zero, but it will also judge the risks too high for the low chances of success.
The biggest issue with this system is that the first couple of interactions with this new behavior, situation, or activity … you will have to force it because your confidence will be non-existent.
That’s precisely why the first time is always the hardest. Each time you engage again, the threshold for activation decreases, making it 1% easier than it was before.
Still, there’s no way to jump from newbie to mastery and you have to face the frustration of not being able to do it, Yet…
So there you have it, to become confident, you basically have to convince your brain using memories and data that you’re able to do the thing.
In your brain’s perception, confidence is what makes the traffic light green.
Without it, you’ll wait a long time for the red light to turn green. Your brain will not want to go any further.
And initially, you’ll have to keep going regardless, even if it feels like you’re rushing through a red light.
Remember that, when you don’t know how something works, you can’t be confident, especially if no one ever showed you how to do it.
Humans are very good at copying others, for better or worse.
You learn behaviors and develop traits through watching others, and that’s especially true for kids. That’s the theory of social modelling.
But the opposite is also true. If you’ve only seen people acting out of fear and lack of confidence, you’ll integrate and then copy those mental models.
If, as a kid, you didn’t have ‘confident’ people around you, then chances are your brain is even more reluctant to try, and every new experience feels risky and impossible.
Learning from someone is a great and powerful tool to start acquiring a new skills. That being said, you have to make sure they’re using genuine confidence.
Some people only try imitate confidence. You can see a lot of this fake confidence on social media for example.
I highly suggest staying away from this type of imitation, this is like lying to yourself.
You display confidence in front of others, yet you’re convinced you don’t have any.
That’s especially detrimental because, in that scenario, you not only lack confidence, which is fine, but you also purposefully tell your brain that you have to fake it.
This results in you, reducing your chances of building confidence overtime rather than improving it.
You feel like a fraud and you develop stage IV type of imposter syndrome
Those people try to display confidence without having a big enough bank of mastery to back them up. They haven’t been through the necessary experiences conducive to solid confidence.
If you currently lack confidence, don’t fake it, It’s useless.
Most people can tell, and it will prevent you from building real confidence. Instead, embrace it, the lack of confidence is just your brain telling you ‘’we haven’t been doing this enough, I can’t provide an assured behavior’’, Yet.
We’ll talk about specific steps in the last part of the article, for now just remember this :
Confidence = (Modelling + Practice).
Your own distorsions are killing your confidence
Confidence is subjective. You are the one granting yourself confidence. That’s why it is subject to a lot of distortions.
Now, there’s a key principle to understand here: your emotions at a specific time aren’t indicative of how much true confidence you have in bank.
For example, the fear you feel when talking to someone for the first time doesn’t mean you have 0 confidence in your social skills.
A lot of people mistake their emotional response for an absence of confidence, but it’s not.
Of course it is linked but there’s a line to draw between your emotional response and your confidence level.
This is a cognitive bias called emotional reasoning. It means you’re using your emotion at a specific time to filter your perception of the world. (psychcentral.com)
The quality of your self-talk, the dialogue in your mind, is also especially important. If it’s negative, it will negatively taint your perception.
You end up diminishing your own perception of what you’re capable of doing when you’re in a stressful situation.
For example, if you have a presentation or a public speech to give, chances are you’ll be stressed, fearful, and doubtful.
You have to use your self-talk to counter the stress response. Otherwise, your brain will try to convince you that giving the speech isn’t a good idea.
This whole process considerably diminishes your sense of self-confidence.
You see, there’s no possible confidence if there isn’t emotional stability.
In fact, research as shown that confidence is highly negatively correlated with the lack emotional stability. (K. Burns - 2016)
Now, this doesn’t mean the goal is to not feel any emotion. It means you need to maintain a balanced inner state if you want to feel confident.
You are not your emotions nor your confidence level. At the end of the day, these are feedback and interpretations made by your brain.
But at any time, you can bypass them and engage regardless using your willpower, that’s the whole beauty of it.
In fact, your thinking, especially when influenced by emotions, is highly biased. If you tend to have low self-esteem, you’ve experienced this.
Your perception of your ability to produce the work required fluctuates depending on your mood and self-talk.
When I was younger, I played the guitar. I practiced a little bit every day. I wasn’t great, but I knew how to use the instrument.
When I was alone in my room, I felt confident playing. I knew I could do a riff because I practiced it.
But just the thought of playing in front of an audience made me forget all the practice I had put in. I felt like I would never be able to play in that context.
Nothing changed about my ability to play the song, but the context switch made my perceived ability shrink.
That’s how powerful your mind is. Even if your body is more than able to do it, your mind oftentimes takes over and decides.
The same thing happens regularly with my clients. They start coming regularly to the gym, and a few days or weeks in, some are struck by a phase of doubt.
They convince themselves they can’t keep going, even though all they have to do is keep doing the exact same thing they’ve been doing so far.
That’s exactly why learning how to control your emotional response is very important, especially when it comes to your stress response.
If you’re interested in this subject, my last article talks about exactly that. (Last article here)
Here, we’ve just discovered our enemy, mental distorsions, so now our equation looks like this.
Confidence = (Modelling + Practice) - Distorsions
Confidence is not complex to build
Now, let’s deconstruct the system to see how we can reverse engineer our way in.
Visual representation of the confidence system.
Confidence is a system with a specific loop that you need to understand to influence it.
The most important thing to know is that you don’t have direct influence over the major part of it (bank of mastery).
If you currently have low confidence, telling yourself that you need to improve it is useless.
As mentioned, general confidence is built from mastery and proof—evidence that your brain has collected.
This is stored in the bank of mastery. It’s subconscious, meaning you don’t have direct access to it and it’s dictated by every action you take daily.
All the things you do or don’t do are stored by your brain and used to estimate your general ability to tackle anything new.
This treasure chest connects and powers all the different domains in your life: your relationships, hobbies, work, fitness —whatever it is.
Now, those more narrow domains display your confidence on a local scale. They are all linked to your bank of mastery but are individually malleable.
For example, you can be confident in your relationship but less confident in your work.
I’m confident in my ability to train but not in my ability to draw.
You’re more or less able to ballpark your confidence level in those more narrowed domains. Meaning that you’re relatively conscious of it.
For example if I were to ask you : ‘’on a scale of 1 to 10 how confident are you about your fitness’’ you’d be able to give me an approximation.
And here I present you the key to this system, the key to building confidence.
Those local domains of confidence decompose into specific skills and micro-confidence.
For example, one of my domains is the gym, and it decomposes into small specific skills like the technique, knowledge of equipment, and workout planning.
Again, you don’t have direct impact over your general sense of confidence. (bank of mastery) So might as well not focus on it.
That being said, you do have all the power and control you need to engage in those specific skills that will shape your local confidence in a specific domain.
Keep in mind, confidence is built through actions and repetitions.
You can decide to become better at your relationships, for example, the simple thought of improvement won’t make things better.You have to work on specific skills that are part of the relationship domain, such as active listening, conflict resolution, and emotional stability.
Same thing with fitness, think about it … How confident would you be if you knew how to lift weight properly, if you knew how to program your workout and if you had the social abilities to make contact in the gym ?
A hell lot more.
Once you reframe your mindset this way, understanding that confidence is built through the repetitions of specific skills within a particular domain, you become unstoppable.
As you basically have the recipe to build confidence in all areas of life.
The biggest mistake people make about confidence is that they assume it’s only a top-down process, meaning that their general level of confidence decides everything and that they have no control over it.
Wrong.
It’s also a bottom-up loop. If you get the hang of a specific skill, you improve your local confidence in a selected domain. Do that enough, and you’ll build up and reinforce your general confidence indirectly.
Keep in mind that this works as a loop. Prove to your bank of mastery that you’re capable of doing more, and your brain will back you up even more, making everything seem easier.
This mindset reframing part is you cheat code and understanding it will boost your confidence equation
Confidence = Mindset Reframing x (Modelling + Practice) - Distorsions
How to reframe your mindset to build confidence in any area of your life.
Now ‘all of this sounds nice but way too abstract’, you might say. So here are 5 actionable steps to start building your confidence directly.
1. Stop seeing confidence as an absolute, treat it as a game.
Your confidence level is not absolute. you’re not condemned to live your life unconfident if you’re currently not that self-assured.
Avoid labeling yourself as having low confidence. Instead, focus on what truly matters:
showing your brain that you have experiences to back up your confidence.
Treat it as a game. Every time you experience something, you gain experience points. The more points you have in a specific domain, the more confidence you have.
2. Choose one domain
Make sure you’re engaging in pertinent experiences that align with your goals and long-term vision. Use your time wisely, this is your best ally if you want to build confidence.
If you spend a lot of time playing one video game, you’ll probably get very good at it and confident in your level.
However, all this time spent is time you can’t spend building other domains of your life. Manage your time investment to work on building the skills that matter.
You don’t have control over your general sense of confidence, build it locally.
So, pick one local domain in your life that you’d like to invest in sustainably. As a coach, I recommend picking training if you’re not currently exercising. I’ve come to find that’s the domain that builds confidence the most and the quickest.
3. Find a model, study, copy
If you’re just starting to build confidence in a specific domain, you can’t yet understand all the underlying mechanisms. It will be overwhelming.
The best thing you can do is to find a model, someone who does exactly what you want to do and to - study them.
Once you understand the most basic principles, copy them. Imitate without feeling bad for doing so. You don’t have the capacity to do it on your own yet.
I started my journey by copying fitness Youtubers that shared their workouts, diets and support. The greatest start is not the one you have in mind but what has already been proven to work.
4. Become aware of your distorsions
Whatever the local domain of confidence you chose, you’ll come to find that your mind brings its load of mental distortions.
One day, going to the gym feels easy, and you’re confident; the next day, for no apparent reason, it’s the opposite.
Expect that your perception, whether it’s the difficulty of the skills or your self-perception of your abilities to work out, will be shaky at first.
Additionally, your emotions will interfere with your ability to clearly assess your level of confidence, this is very important. Don’t mistake your emotional reaction for an incapacitant lack of confidence.
5. Practice, practice and practice.
None of this will matter if you don’t keep engaging and repeatedly engage in the same actions that will lead to building those specific skills.
Confidence is built through practice. You have to give tangible reasons for your brain to believe you’re able to do this or that.
Soon enough, you’ll stop emulating someone and create your own approach, your personal set of skills.
Moreover, the distortions will have less impact on your engagement. Your mind will be more stable.
In the end you’ll become generally more self-assured because you’ve experienced it enough times to know what is reality and what is just your mind playing games.
Oh and by the way, you never fully become "confident"—it's a continuous process, not an end goal.
So as always, I hope this helps, trust the process.
Talk to you next week,
Gab
References : Cognitive model of confidencehttps://theconversation.com/the-secrets-to-self-confidence-according-to-cognitive-science-213628Confidence and its link to Neuroticismhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4834661/The skill of self confidence | Dr. Ivan Joseph |https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-HYZv6HzAs&t=37s&ab_channel=TEDxTalksExploring Self Confidence Psychologyhttps://kapable.club/blog/self-confidence/self-confidence-psychology/15 common cognitive distortionshttps://psychcentral.com/lib/cognitive-distortions-negative-thinkingThis Is How You Become More Articulate & Confident | Cal Newporthttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi8Cx7SmAf4&ab_channel=CalNewportA Toolkit for Confidence: How to Build UNSHAKABLE Self Confidence | The Mel Robbins Podcasthttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMtNkJcJn3M&ab_channel=MelRobbins