Confidence doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s a result of something…hours and days and weeks and years of constant work and dedication

— Roger Staubach

tl;dr

Confidence isn’t a prerequisite for action—it’s the result of it. Start with the courage to act, follow through with the perseverance to fail and improve, and confidence will inevitably follow.

Intro

Confidence. I often believe it’s the one thing I’m always missing.

“If only I had more confidence, I would’ve spoken up at the team meeting and shared my game-changing idea.”

“If only I had more confidence, I’d quit my soul-sucking job and finally start that business.”

“If only I had more confidence, I would’ve walked up to that gorgeous woman—or man—at the dog park instead of pretending to check my phone.”

“If only I had more confidence, I would’ve…”

You know what I’m talking about. For most of us, confidence seems to be the final link between aspiration and action.

As someone with chronic low self-confidence, I’ve devoured many self-help books and podcasts, hoping to crack the code. While some of it helped, none of it gave me the clear, systematic understanding my analytical brain craved. I found “confidence” was a buzzword that people threw around so much, in heterogeneous contexts, that it was impossible to triangulate a precise meaning.

In this post, I attempt to distill what I’ve learned into a systematic breakdown of self-confidence and how to build it. I’m not going to cover confidence in things beyond yourself, but the principles will equally apply. Let’s jump in.

What is self-confidence?

We know confidence when we feel it. But the concept is fuzzy and elusive. We can also recognize when others have it—and when they don’t. But almost nobody can pin down a definition.

Fortunately, over the last few decades, confidence has been subject to academic rigor. Researchers have studied it, dissected it, and given us a clearer understanding of what it actually is. Here’s one of the best definitions I’ve come across:

Confidence is the realistic expectation you have of being successful at something, given (a) your competence at it and (b) the risk involved with doing it.

Let’s consider a personal example: When I was a graduate student, I was required to get up in front of my research group, every week, to give a presentation on the progress of my research. I hadn’t done a lot of public speaking up to that point so my confidence in talking to a room full of people was pretty low. While presenting, I would suffer from the usual symptoms: Butterflies in the stomach, sweaty palms, stuttering speech. Why did I feel like this? I used to believe it was because I was naturally fearful of public speaking. But really, it was because I hadn’t developed enough experience to have a realistic expectation of doing well. I was still figuring out how to manage my nerves, collect my thoughts under pressure, and respond to unanticipated questions. Adding to that, there was the perceived risk, eg. if I stumble over my words or forget an important point, I’ll embarrass myself in front of my colleagues.

Fast forward three months: I had given a dozen or so presentations—most good, some bad, but all valuable for learning. Over time, I demonstrated to myself, a proficiency in public speaking. I fine-tuned a reliable process for preparing my slides, rehearsing my delivery, and anticipating possible questions. The experience I gained allowed me to spot and manage risks ahead of time, like running out of time or recovering after a mis-delivery.

Now, when I step in front of a group of people to speak, I feel confident—not because I’m guaranteed to deliver a flawless presentation, but because I have a realistic expectation of success. I know I’ve done the work, and I trust my ability to adapt if something unexpected comes up. Thanks to demonstrated ability, my competence has caught up with the challenge, and the perceived risk doesn’t feel so overwhelming anymore.

That is confidence in a nutshell: Given competence, you anticipate success, so you’re willing to take the risk.

Why it exists

In order to engineer self-confidence, it helps to understand its origins. Confidence, like many of our emotions, has deep genetic roots. It evolved over thousands of generations as a mental tool to guide our decision-making around risk. Our brain judges risk like a data-crunching machine: It unconsciously processes a bunch of data from your memory and your current state, integrates it with your past training, experiences, and successes, plus your present capabilities, to arrive at an informed evaluation of the risk. When the risk is presumed to be high, your confidence is low, and when it’s presumed to be low, your confidence is high.

For example: When a challenge arises, like hosting a neighborhood barbecue for the first time, your confidence system immediately activates and tells you how confident you should feel in this situation given the risks and rewards in relation to your level of competence. If your barbecue game is tight, and you’ve organized many social gatherings that were fun and delightful, your confidence is going to be sky-high. If the last time you planned a social event, the food was terrible, conversation was dull, and somebody had to be sent to the ER, your confidence is going to be low. This is by no means a comprehensive explanation of the mechanics of self-confidence, but the key takeaway is that its a function of empirical observations of your competence.

Evolution forced us to develop confidence levels that accurately tracked our competencies. “Accurately” is the operative word. If there was something faulty in how Paleolithic man judged his own competence (“Don’t worry about that lion crouched in the grass, I can totally beat it to submission if it attacks us”), he would eventually take a stupid risk that was fatal. That’s why it’s hard to fake true confidence effectively, because the first humans who faked it quickly died out.

What is NOT self-confidence

Sometimes, when people use the word “confidence”, they’re actually referring to something different. They might mean courage. Other times, they might mean self-esteem. These ideas are all interconnected, but technically speaking, they differ in important ways.

• Confidence is NOT Courage: Courage is what gets you to take action in the face of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, or Doubt). I’ll talk more about the relationship between courage and confidence later, but know it’s what inspires you to attempt something, especially when you lack self-confidence.
• Confidence is NOT Hope: Hope is the belief that things might work out, even if you don’t have a solid reason to believe they will. Like courage, hope might get you to try something new, but it’s not grounded in your actual abilities or a realistic expectation of success.
• Confidence is NOT Perseverance: Perseverance is the ability to stay the course, continuing to take action even when things get tough.
• Confidence is NOT Self-Esteem or Self-Worth: Self-esteem is how you feel about yourself overall, whereas self-confidence is domain-specific. It’s your sense of self-worth and value as a person, independent of your abilities or accomplishments. You can have low self-esteem but still feel confident in specific areas of your life, like a craft you’ve mastered. Similarly, you can have high self-esteem but lack self-confidence in a particular situation, like public speaking. While self-esteem and self-confidence often influence each other, they are distinct.

Engineering self-confidence

Confidence without evidence is delusion. You don’t become confident by shouting affirmations in the mirror, but by having a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are. Give yourself so much goddamn proof that you are the version of yourself you want to be, and you’ll become them.Outwork your self doubt.

— Alex Hormozi

There is pretty much no way around this dynamic: To build real confidence, you must boost real competence. It’s that simple (but not easy). And to boost competence, you need to learn, practice, and then repeatedly perform under real-life conditions, with real stakes, when real people are watching. The person who tries to sell their “ten tricks to be confident” is, sorry to say, selling bullshit.

So that leaves us with a catch 22…how can I become confident in something if I haven’t proven my competence, and how can I prove my competence if I’m not confident to act? The answer lies with courage and perseverance.

Courage + Perseverance = Evidence -> Confidence

To overcome the counter-inertia of low self-confidence when facing a new task, you need (1) a dose of courage to first take the risk, and then (2) an IV of perseverance to stick with it long enough to demonstrate performance.

Step 1: Courage

Courage is the bridge between hesitation and action. It pushes you past the FUD that comes with stepping outside your comfort zone. Courage doesn’t mean you’re free of fear—it just means you act despite the fear.

The first time I learned how to swim, ride a bike, or speak in public, my confidence was shaky or non-existent, and I felt terrified. But I gathered just enough courage to take the leap. That initial spark of courage is what gets you moving.

Step 2: Perseverance

Once courage has put you in motion, perseverance is what keeps you committed long enough to improve. It’s the grit to push through the awkward, messy, and painful process of failing, learning, and trying again.

Let’s go back to the example of public speaking. When you’re just starting out, your first presentation might be nerve-wracking. Your second might only be marginally better. Without perseverance, it’s easy to give up after those initial failures. But if you stick with it, you keep showing up, and learning from each attempt, over time, you start to see progress. First, you might notice that your slides are better organized. Then, your delivery becomes smoother. Later, your ability to handle questions improves. Little by little, your competence grows—and with it, your self-confidence.

Step 3: Evidence (-> Confidence)

Together, courage and perseverance create the conditions for you to mint the currency for self-confidence: evidence. Every time you face a challenge with courage and follow through with perseverance, you gather evidence. Sometimes, that evidence will be positive, showing you’re capable. Sometimes, the feedback will be negative. As long as you white knuckle your way through iteratively getting better, eventually the positive evidence will outweigh the rest, becoming the foundation of your self-confidence.

When you speak up in a meeting and move others, it’s more proof that your voice matters.

When you publish a blog post online and get positive engagement, it’s more proof that your ideas are worth sharing.

When you lift a heavier weight at the gym, it’s more proof that you’re physically strong.

Each time you perform, you add another piece of evidence to your internal “confidence bank.” Over time, this bank grows, and as long as the feedback skews towards positive (which may not always happen), so does your belief in your ability to succeed at an activity.

Now the amount of courage and perseverance you need to muster differs based on the task and your baseline abilities, but the essence of the formula for self-confidence remains the same: Courage + Perseverance = Evidence -> Confidence. There are ways to minimize the barrier to self-confidence—so you need less courage and perseverance, which I’ll explore next.

Jump-starting self-confidence

It’s easy for me to say “build competence and the confidence will come”. It’s harder for me to prescribe how to break out of the feelings of low confidence, anxiety, and passivity. There’s no way around that discomfort of being a beginner. The process of acquiring self-confidence is gradual—it doesn’t happen overnight. But there are ways to chip away at the margins of those inhibitive feelings to help you clear them, ie. by lowering the courage and perseverance you must summon. This is not an exhaustive list, but it includes the ones I’ve found effective.

1) Accepting the feelings

First, normalize the feelings revolving around your un-confidence. All of these thoughts are commonly experienced by everybody:

• “I’ll always suck at everything.” (Overly self-critical)
• “I’ve never done anything like this, so why start now?” (Lack of experience)
• “I failed at that, and that, and that…” (Rehashing old setbacks)
• “I’m too afraid to try.” (Preoccupation with fear)
• “If I try that, the result will be an unmitigated disaster.” (Catastrophizing)
• “There’s no time and no money or mentors to help me.” (Giving in to obstacles)
• “I’ll never be as good as _____.” (Adverse comparison to others)
• “I should be a playboy billionaire by now.” (Unrealistic expectations)
• “If I can’t be the best, what’s the point.” (Perfectionism)

Plus many more harmful thoughts. Trying to ignore or distract yourself from the feelings doesn’t work (believe me, I’ve tried). Acknowledging them, and recognizing you’re not alone in having them (yes, every sane human has felt the same things, especially the top performers), is the only way to process them.

2) Harness meta-confidence

Given our definition, your confidence varies depending on the domain. You can be confident from developing skill and displaying performance in, say, hacking computers but that doesn’t mean you’re automatically confident as a ballroom dancer. You don’t have a master confidence level that covers every aspect of life, because that would be stupid, and maladaptive from an evolutionary perspective. If your odds of success in one domain don’t predict your odds of success in another domain, why then should confidence in one spillover to confidence in the other?

But there’s something magical that happens as you practice more skills and master more domains: you become more confident in developing confidence. I call this meta-confidence. The more times you are terrified at doing something novel, but suffer through the dip of low confidence, the more confident you become at trying new challenges. I’m not introducing a totally new idea. It’s just the formula for self-confidence applied recursively to itself. Through demonstrating your capacity to act, fail, improve, repeat your way to competence at challenging and risky things, you grow your meta-confidence.

This meta-confidence reduces the amount of courage and grit you must channel in a new domain. So consciously recall those past occasions where you successfully navigated the self-doubt, criticism, and failure—even when they’re unrelated to the present task. That’s why each year, I sign-up for some feat that takes me physically out of my comfort zone. Whether it’s doing a century ride (cycling for 100 miles), training with a Navy Seal, or running a half-marathon over trails with 3000 ft of elevation–it’s the most sample-efficient way of creating meta-confidence. The memories become proof that I’m capable of adapting and running through walls, making it seamless to slide into the right frame of mind to confront any new challenge.

Sidebar: Is meta-confidence just self-esteem by another name? Short answer is, I don’t know. But intuitively, I can see there being a strong relationship between the two. If a rising meta-confidence leads to further aptitude in more areas, that could increase your belief in your whole value as a human being. I think self-esteem encompasses self-confidence, but because confidence is tightly coupled with competence, I think there’s still more to self-esteem.

3) Confidence “borrowing”

When you don’t have any piece of evidence of prior success at a task, you can “borrow” it from someone else. The fact this works must be a glitch in the matrix, but you can exploit it. When I face a new challenge, I pattern-match the situation to find somebody similar to me, who overcame the a similar challenge. This role model can be someone you know, but it doesn’t have to be. A big reason I feel confident in founding a successful startup eventually, despite having no demonstrated proof, is because there are so many people around me, who are just like me, who have done it.

4) Preparation and process

Planning and preparation before a risky undertaking can help—but to a point. It can easily become an excuse for inaction, but in moderation, it can help assuage the FUD just enough so that it’s no longer a blocker for action. For example, preparing a script and having a few conversation starters helps me feel comfortable when cold-calling potential customers. I might not use them, but having them helps me feel confident enough to make the calls. I have to be mindful of the trap of avoidance though, where I’m endlessly perfecting my preparation to avoid executing.

5) Fake it (a little)

You can’t fake true confidence for very long, but you can employ tricks to give your brain a short burst of confidence. Sounds corny, but certain power poses have been shown to empirically work. I feel marginally more confident when I fix my posture, and stand tall with my shoulders back and chest open. Behaving as if I’m already confident, like speaking clearly, maintaining eye contact, and smiling, has shown to feed back into my emotions, helping me feel more self-assured. Research and experiment to find hacks that work for you, like “dressing for success”. But remember, these aren’t substitutes for building real self-confidence, they just help you start the process of iterative improvement to gaining confidence.

6) Momentum

Don’t underestimate the power of small wins, especially at the beginning.

If the challenge feels daunting, see if you can break it down into smaller, manageable steps. Start with something lower-risk that feels achievable, and gradually raise the stakes as your confidence grows. For example, 6 years ago, I started cycling long distances. I had zero prior experience but the goal was to complete a century-ride (100 miles) in under eight hours, while climbing 10K ft of elevation. I’ve always been a well-rounded athlete, but whenever I decide to pursue a new fitness challenge, I start small. Really small. If I remember correctly, I started training each day by riding for an 20 minutes, on flat routes. That’s it. But that was enough to build momentum. I would slowly raise the difficulty by micro-increments, eg. from 20 minutes to 25 minutes. Each small win was evidence of a bump in competence, and over time, those small wins compounded into big confidence, which helped me conquer my original goal.

This example highlights another important lesson: Don’t immediately try to be a hero and fight the final boss on max. difficulty. Dialing up the difficulty level too high too quickly is a surefire way of discouraging yourself from persevering. Early in the confidence-building process, you don’t have a lot of currency in the bank and missing an over-ambitious target is like sending your bank balance deep into the negative. So be measured about building and sustaining momentum, so that you don’t lose confidence and quit.

7) Growth mindset and re-framing

The last suggestion I’ll make is not an instant fix. Like meta-confidence, it takes time to develop. But the best thing you can do to procure durable courage and perseverance is to adopt a growth mindset. I know this is a hackneyed idea, co-opted by every corporation in America as a cultural value. But goddammit, it works. In a growth mindset, you only need to believe two things:

1. Your abilities can be improved through dedication and hard work (as opposed to being limited by genetics, background, circumstances).
2. Failures and setbacks can help you learn to get better.

Study after study has demonstrated that almost all top performers have a growth mindset. They treat each mistake as a data point to learn from, not a verdict on their competence, and use each attempt as practice, not a final performance. This way, failure becomes less intimidating, and they’re able to take the necessary risks to build self-confidence.

So figure out how you can internalize a growth mindset. One thing that’s worked for me is re-framing negative self-talk in a constructive way. Instead of telling myself, “I’m an embarrassing failure”, I replace it with, “I’m still learning, I’ll get better with practice, and everybody watching me gets that.” Or I’ll replace, “I’ll never be as good as them” with “everyone was once a beginner, I’m on my own path, and I’m getting better everyday.” Re-framing my inner dialogue has seriously helped, but like I said, requires many repetitions over a long period of time.

Maintaining self-confidence

So once you’ve survived the crucible to gain self-confidence in a domain, you’ve got it forever…right? Typically, no. But it depends on the skill. Remember, confidence evolved as a mental tool to reflect our current competence. So if a skill atrophies, your confidence will decrease in proportion. But if you maintain or build the skill, your confidence won’t deplete. Fortunately, the same techniques for skill development that I’ve described, that help us gain self-confidence, are the same techniques we can use to preserve it.

Sometimes though, your ego can may hold onto a confidence that’s no longer grounded in reality. There’s a funny anecdote from the growth years of Facebook (before it was Meta). This was well-after Facebook moved out of a Harvard dorm, and they graduated to a mature company with an official HQ. Mark Zuckerberg’s programming days were well behind him, but his ego hadn’t quite caught up to the fact that he was no longer the best coder in the room. One day, during a discussion with the engineering team, Zuckerberg insisted on personally fixing a particularly tricky bug in the system. He was struggling. It didn’t take long for the team to realize that his skills, once cutting-edge, were now outdated compared to even junior engineers. I’m sure that was a humbling experience for him. So be skeptical when your confidence in a domain persists, despite not practicing, and be open to recalibrating based on new feedback.

Conclusion

This post could’ve had more tactical detail, but hopefully it gives you a enough of a systematic framework for thinking about engineering your own confidence (thereby, making you more confident about building confidence). I copied a lot of the ideas from the book Mate, by Geoffrey Miller and Tucker Max, so most of the credit goes to their hard work.

I was going to write a section about this but this piece is already way too long so I’m including it as the coda: We tend to habitually underestimate our competence, making us un-confident. Part of it is evolutionary (best to err on the side of caution than risk being eaten), but in modern times, there is no shortage of ways our society makes us feel inadequate. It’s just a lot harder to avoid social comparison, preoccupations with failure, pathological perfectionism, etc. But knowing this fact, I feel more empowered.