I meet professionals from all over who want to know, “how do I build up my confidence … to become a better speaker, negotiate my salary, advocate for my ideas …?”

Their curiosity is good, but they’re often a bit surprised when I politely tell them that there’s a better question to ask about confidence.

The reality is they already know how to build confidence (and you do, too) — just like they know how to tie their shoes.

In fact, strategies used to figure out how to loop shoelaces together are the same strategies you can use to build confidence for everything else, including the hard stuff.  The confidence-building process doesn’t change according to tasks.

What you (and professionals like you) really need the answer to is: “Do I have what it takes to endure the discomfort that is part of the confidence-building process?”

The Confidence-Building Process

Before you became a confident, shoe-tying master, you asked someone older and wiser to break down the steps for you. You listened. You watched. Then, you followed along. You skipped steps. You messed up, got frustrated, and wondered if tying shoes was really for you. You questioned if you were smart enough to make it happen while looking around for your velcro sneakers.

But, then you reminded yourself that you really wanted to learn how to tie your own shoes. You listened and focused more intently. And, you practiced on you own until you made your first bow. You repeatedly tied your laces until you felt sure you had it. 

Building confidence involves asking appropriate people for help — people who are knowledgeable and trustworthy. It calls for modeling confident people and following their example. Confidence-building also requires adjusting your attitude. According to Roger Fritz, author of The Power of a Positive Attitude, “Attitude affects how you feel both physically and mentally, and it affects how successful you are in achieving your goals.”

Reminding yourself of your strengths and practicing relentlessly are also important strategies to build confidence.

You know all of this. (Though, you may have forgotten how to access the information.)

So, then you don’t really struggle with how to build confidence. You’re likely struggling with something else: the discomfort that is part of the confidence-building process.

You don’t want the process to hurt. I get it. But, no one ever said that confidence-building was romantic.

The frustration, discouragement and difficulty experienced on the journey to tying a shoe is a similar, yet lightweight, version of the frustration, discouragement, and difficulty that may be associated with the pursuit of goals like becoming a better speaker or standing up for your ideas.

According to the psychologist Guy Winch, self-confidence “is built by demonstrating real ability.” But, few people talk about how mentally taxing it can be to achieve that “real ability.” 

The Right Question To Ask About Confidence

The question about confidence you must answer for yourself is, “Am I willing to endure the discomfort that is part of the confidence building process?” Too often, the question gets masked behind the more familiar “how to” question. 

So, where does this pain, or discomfort, come from?  

It comes from awareness of the seemingly unconquerable space between where you are and the skills you need to get where you are trying to go. Who likes to be bad at something that they actually want to be pretty decent in? Nobody. A professional who wants to negotiate her salary but has no idea what to say would need to admit that she don’t know where to start or fake it like she does. These actions raise internal questions about competence and authenticity, respectively, and can contribute to psychological distress. 

In addition, this professional would likely need to ask for help, which can also add to mental discomfort because the action is often (yet erroneously) translated to weakness or neediness.  Practice is the greatest indicator of progress but also the greatest reminder that there may be a lot more work to do. And, that recognition can hurt.

Humans are wired to be comfortable and choose the path of least resistance. Unfortunately, the easiest route is often avoidance. It’s why we so effortlessly and automatically retreat to a comfort zone when things don’t feel warm and fuzzy. This is the hard realization of building confidence. It’s the part that needs more consideration and conversation to help individuals build up the resource.

In order to develop confidence, you will have to endure distress. Or, in the words of one of my coaches, you’ll have to be willing “to be bad long enough to get good.” That means you’ll have to try, mess up, get frustrated, wonder if you’re making progress, experience cognitive overload, risk embarrassment, battle with ego and more before you reach a self-satisfactory level of confidence.  Whew. That’s a lot.

The Takeaway

Confidence is a key component of courage. If an appropriate (not perfect) level is missing for what you want to do, it’ll be tougher to act courageously. The question you’ll need to be able to answer about confidence is, “Am I willing to endure the pain that is part of the confidence building process.”

If you’d like a partner to assist you with building confidence to pursue your most meaningful goals, let’s talk about one-on-one coaching.

Where confidence and money differ, however, is in the fact that confidence always has to be built. You can’t get it from an inheritance or find it lying on the ground. You can’t borrow it from a friend or win it in a lottery.

Confidence comes from repeated physical and/or psychological labor a person exerts to build up their abilities to the point where they can trust, or rely, on those abilities.

Building confidence always takes work. And fortunately, there are a lot of ways to work it up.

Here are 9 effective ways to build the confidence you need to pursue the things you want. 

Practice.

If you meditate for two minutes on the activities you’re really confident about doing — tying your shoe, cooking a favorite food, riding a bike — you’ll probably realize that you’ve practiced those actions over and over. You’ve tied a shoe everyday for years and you’ve likely ridden a bike over a thousand times. Practice is an important way to building up technical skill, experience and resilience for any activity, whether simple or hard. Practice allows you to use what you have, recognize what you need and develop what you want. And, each time you choose passivity over practice, you lose an opportunity to build confidence.

Observe/Model Confident People. 

Take a look around. Find people who you believe to be confident, and watch them. Really. Observing how someone confidently responds to a situation that you may later encounter could increase your propensity to respond in a similar way. This means confidence is contagious.

Strike a Power Pose.

If you don’t have real life confident people you can model to help you raise your confidence level, try imitating a superhero like Wonder Woman. Superheroes have super poses where they spread their legs apart slightly beyond shoulder width, push their chests out and place their fists on their hips. You usually see characters strike this pose right before facing an enemy or immediately after defeating one. Social psychologist Amy Cuddy says that posing in a posture that people mentally associate with being powerful can help them feel and behave more assertively.

Remember Strengths and Wins.

Your brain is hardwired to pay extra special attention to negative emotions and experiences. It’s why you may immediately think back to a prior negative outcome when you consider repeating the same action later. Your fear wants to shield you from all kinds of harm, including physical and social. Ruminating on negative experiences, though, does nothing to help you build confidence. What helps, instead, is putting in some extra mental work to remember your strengths and wins. According to authors of Confidence Code for Girls, remembering your strengths and past accomplishments activates the brain’s pleasure center and keeps the brain’s fear center calm. It may be helpful to create and keep a confidence notebook close by so you can access your strengths and previous wins more quickly.

Utilize Positive Visualization.

Can you think back to the time you learned a new skill, aced a test or won an award? Do you remember what you heard, felt and saw during those positive, confident moments? Or, can you project yourself into a future scenario where you are confident, calm and in control? The power of positive visualization comes from using all of your senses to connect to your confidence. It’s part of a process of training your mind to think positively. Done repeatedly, positive visualization can help you take your confidence to an entirely new level.

Compare Yourself Only to Former Versions of Yourself.

Rihanna may have said it best: the biggest mistake you can make is to compare yourself with someone else. When you measure yourself against a friend (or foe) who appears to be more successful than you, you simultaneously depreciate your effort, dismiss your progress and diminish your ambition. It’s basically a blow to your confidence, rather than a boost. But, if you want to elevate your confidence through comparison, try sizing yourself up to former versions of yourself. There are points in your past when you were hoping to be where you are right now.

Have a Conversation with Fear.

This may sound a bit strange, but questioning fear, even if momentarily, suspends its power and allows the voice of your inner confidence to emerge. Your appeal to fear may sound something like this: Fear, I appreciate you wanting to protect me from embarrassment, rejection and failure. But, why do you always have to think the worst? The pause that comes next is filled with opportunity to disrupt fear’s over-protectiveness and uncover its irrationality. And, at the same time, it is making room for your confidence to expand.

Get Feedback. 

Getting genuine, affirming feedback from people in your circle can help boost your confidence level. Psychologist Albert Bandura revealed through research that confidence can be influenced by verbal persuasion.  Trust is a main portal through which people can be persuaded. So, surrounding yourself with trustworthy people — people who are familiar and/or similar to you — and listening to their encouraging words can take your confidence level up a few notches.

Recite Affirmations.

If you don’t have trustworthy people in your circle that you can listen to to help you boost your confidence, try talking to yourself. Regularly reciting affirmations — statements that inspire, motivate and help create something you want — can help you condition your thinking to be positive and confident. Affirmations have been shown to help people focus away from negative experiences, and you can easily develop your own. You’ll just want to ensure that your affirmations are positive, personal and written in the present tense.

The Takeaway:

Confidence isn’t something you wait for someone to hand to you. You have to put in the regular work to build it up yourself.  The good news is that there are several ways to develop and strengthen your confidence.  

What helps you feel confident? Do you use strategies that are not listed here?