The Secret to Confidence from an Extremely Unconfident Person

This month, we’re taking a look at confidence. And let me tell you, if ever there was a subject that I was qualified to offer advice on… this isn’t it. I’m not a confident man. I lack confidence in my art, in my life, and in myself. I do have confidence that I’m going to fall short and/or let everyone down, if that counts for anything, but I’m fairly certain it does not.

So if I don’t have confidence, how am I supposed to write an article about how YOU can have confidence in your art, in yourself, or in any other aspect of your life? Well, like almost any topic I write about, I started by Googling it. I looked at a couple of articles, I watched a few TED Talks, and I soaked up as much as I could of what the experts have to say about how to have more confidence. And I have to say, I learned quite a bit!

Does that qualify me to write an article about it? No, probably not. But what I learned in my research was… When it comes to having confidence, that “probably not” is kind of the point.

Fake It Till You Make It
I know what you’re thinking. “Ugh, is he really pulling out THAT old cliché?” To be honest, I’ve always been a bit skeptical of it too. If you don’t have confidence, pretend that you do! Make people think you know what you’re doing, and by the time they figure it out, you’ll have actually become the person you’re pretending to be!

It can’t really be that simple. How can you expect to fake your way into success if you have no confidence in yourself or what you’re doing? How can you expect them to believe in you when you don’t even believe in yourself? Do you honestly think that no one will catch on?

The thing is, that’s the wrong way of thinking about it. “Fake it till you make it” is often presented as a con or a ruse, but that’s not what it’s about. Sure, some people are able to walk into a room and convince everybody who matters to give them a shot, even if they have no experience and no clue what they’re doing. But I’m pretty sure those people aren’t the ones Googling, “How can I have more confidence?”

So what DOES “Fake it till you make it” mean? It’s about taking action, even when you’re scared to. We tend to think of confidence as a feeling. We “feel confident,” and so we act with confidence. But in reality, it’s the other way around. If we act with confidence, then over time, that leads us to feel more confident. But the action comes first.

If you don’t do something because you don’t feel confident, then it’ll never get done. If you wait around until you feel like you have the confidence to take it on, then you’ll be waiting around forever. But if you push yourself out of your comfort zone and do something that terrifies you, that will lead to confidence, whether you “feel it” or not.

Consistency Is Key
Taking action is a great start, but there’s an implied additional step. You don’t just fake it. You fake it till you make it. You can’t just take action once. In order to gain that confidence, you need to continue taking action, again and again. The more action you take, the more confident you’ll feel.

You may think that this is about getting better over time. And it’s true, if you keep working at something, there’s a good chance you’ll improve. But the brain is weird, and you may not actually realize that you’re improving. The more you learn about a particular discipline, the more you realize there IS to know, and the more you come to understand just how much there is that you DON’T know.  Which can make feeling confident in what you’re doing remain difficult, even in the face of experience.

But again, the feeling isn’t the important thing. The action is what matters. And if you continue to act, regularly over time, what it leads to is familiarity. The first time you try something, you’re terrified. But you got through it, so you give it another go, and, knowing that you CAN get through it, it feels a little better. You feel a little more confident—if only a little.

So you do it a few more times and get a little more confident. Eventually, you work up the courage to take the next step: do something a little more complicated, a little more risky. It terrifies you, of course, but now that you’ve got a bit more experience behind you, it just might be worth a shot. And so it goes, from the next hurdle to the next milestone, gradually moving forward, not because you feel ready, but because you understand that you don’t have to feel ready. That’s what confidence truly is.

On the other hand, without that consistency, the familiarity never really builds, and so the confidence doesn’t either. So every time you think about taking a step forward, it feels like starting again from scratch. The problem is, when you take that first step and see how difficult it is, how long the journey is going to be, and especially how bad you are in the beginning, it can get discouraging—particularly when you’re already nervous about taking those first steps. Which is why there’s another important factor on the road to confidence that must be addressed.

Get Comfortable with Failure
I could have a whole section here about how mistakes are how we learn, failure is the first step towards success, etc. But you already know all of that. You’ve heard it a thousand times. So let’s put it a different way. Mistakes are inevitable, and failure is a certainty, so you’d better get used to them.

Harsh? Maybe. But it’s the truth. No matter how good you get at something, you’ll never reach the point where you don’t make any mistakes. And no matter how much success you enjoy, you’re never immune to failure. Both will happen and continue happening throughout your life.

So what does that mean for you? Two things.

1. Failure isn’t an indictment of your character and mistakes aren’t an indicator of your inferiority, your unworthiness, or even of your lack of ability. They’re just a fact of life.

2. If your confidence is rooted solely in your success or in the quality of your work, then it’s only a matter of time before it comes crashing down.

The only way to have real, lasting confidence is to get comfortable with your failure, to understand that it isn’t a reflection of who you are as a person, and, most importantly, to keep going in spite of it. Once again, it’s all about action and consistency. No matter what the external circumstances are, don’t let them sway you from your course. Keep taking the actions, whether you feel it or not.

But as stated, pressing on like that in the face of failure can be discouraging. Maintaining consistency does help, but it’s still a difficult battle. So what can we do to mitigate the discouragement and help us maintain that consistency, even in the face of defeat?

Find Success in Your Failure
In the movie Defending Your Life, Albert Brooks finds himself in a courtroom in the afterlife, forced to relive key moments from his life on Earth to demonstrate that he was able to overcome his fear—something that it’s clear to the audience he was not, in fact, able to do.

One scene in particular shows Brooks’ character faced with a public speaking engagement. Overwhelmed by the size of the crowd, the heat of the lights, and the enormity of the situation, he stands on the stage, frozen stiff, sweating profusely, unable to utter a word, for an uncomfortably long time, until he’s interrupted by the announcement of a gas leak in the building, which will cut the event short and necessitate everyone’s evacuation.

After viewing the scene, his lawyer, Rip Torn, then argues that, rather than an indicator of fear, this event is actually a perfect illustration of how fearless Brooks really is. “In spite of all of his anxieties,” he says, “He still went out there to that microphone!”

Now, in the movie, this is portrayed as a desperate attempt to spin a particularly incriminating piece of evidence. But fortunately for us, we don’t have to meet the same standard that Albert Brooks did. We’re allowed to feel fear. The presence of fear doesn’t negate our actions. Being afraid doesn’t make us worth any less. And in that context, going out there to the microphone is still something worth celebrating.

Sometimes you’ll make mistakes. Sometimes you’ll fail. Sometimes you may even fail spectacularly. But if you want to have confidence in yourself and your art, you need to find the things worth being proud of, even in the face of that failure. You may not have accomplished your goal, but what DID you do? What did you do that you’d never done before? What did you really dread doing, that you did anyway? What progress did you make that will help you next time?

If you can find those small victories, even in the face of defeat, then it can help build your confidence. What’s more, it can give you a goal for next time. You fell short of your goal, but you made it partway. So next time, you can aim to make it a little further. And then a little further, and a little further… Suddenly, it doesn’t feel like failure anymore. It feels like the stepping stones to success.

And before you know it, you’ve built up momentum. You continue moving forward. You fail yourself all the way to your goal, and then keep going, failing towards the next one and the next. Will you make it this time? You’ll definitely make it to somewhere. Do you know what you’re doing? Who knows? You keep going, regardless. The fear and anxiety are still there, but by now they’re familiar companions, along for the ride. At times, they even feel like excitement. You use them, or you push through them, on to the next action, the next goal, the next accomplishment. To look at you, an outside observer might even think you had confidence…

I won’t tell if you won’t.