Confidence is one of the most important and challenging mental skills. Sometimes, you feel like you can take on the world. Other times, you feel like you can’t do anything correctly. Working with clients, I find that once they understand how confidence is trained things get so much easier. We want to focus on making confidence grounded and authentic. First, let’s look at some terms.
Sources of Confidence
Confidence has three major categories: achievement, self-regulation, and social climate. That means that we can get confidence from these three categories. Within each area listed below, you’ll see more specific sources.
We may find very successful people who are not confident. This is often because of the way they interact with their successes.
Confidence results from how one interacts with events, not from the actual events.
They may not take credit for their own role in the success. If a person always attributes their success to external factors, they may not derive the confidence boost that should come from success. Higher self-confidence has multiple benefits inside and outside of performance including: more positive emotions, increased concentration, continued goal-setting, increased effort, improved strategies, momentum, and improved performance outcomes.
Building Confidence
Since we know the sources of confidence, we can increase confidence by obtaining more small successes. Using little steps we can change the cycle of confidence (see image at the beginning of reading). Remember that confidence results from how one interacts with events, so there must also be a cognitive/perspective element. Before we can build confidence we must:
- Understand that thoughts and performance interact.
- Cultivate an honest self-awareness.
- Have an optimistic explanatory style.
Since explanatory style can be learned and is closely related to self-talk, we can retrain our behaviors (#3). Changing our behavior can change our perception of confidence (#1). By looking at our behaviors and working on modifying them, we can create a more honest self-awareness (#2).
When working with clients, I use mnemonic of HOPE to help them remember what needs to go into the process of building confidence. We are trying to get confidence from those nine sources. To make it authentic and grounded, we need to make sure we include:
- Honesty | note both positive and negative
- Optimism | focus on the goal & overcoming obstacles
- Preparation | practice the task and feeling confident
- Extraction | take the time to interact with your experiences and extract the most confidence you can (You will do this in the activity below.)
Confidence Myths
Since most people think of confidence as a trait, there are several misconceptions or myths. As you read these, remember that confidence is a mental skill.
Just like you train physically, you train confidence. You don’t just show up in the weight room one day and bench press an impressive amount. You train it. You lift regularly in smaller doses. That is how confidence is built also.
