Don't wait for confidence

Most of the people I work with believe confidence is something you either have or you don't. They tell me they'll go for the promotion, speak up in the meeting or change careers once they feel more confident. Then they wait, and the feeling doesn't arrive.

In my time as a coach, I've come to think this is the single most common misunderstanding about confidence, and research backs this up. Confidence is less a personality trait than a set of beliefs and habits, and it is built in a particular order.

This article explores what psychology says about how confidence works, offers some different perspectives, and explains what that means if you're trying to build more of it.

Confidence follows action, not the other way round

The psychologist Albert Bandura spent decades studying what he called self-efficacy, our belief in our ability to handle a particular task. He found that the strongest source of that belief is mastery experience: actually doing the thing and getting through it (Bandura, 1977). Watching others succeed, encouragement from people we trust, and how we interpret our own physical reactions all help, but none are as powerful as direct experience.

This highlights something that many people find uncomfortable. If you wait to feel confident before you act, you deny yourself the very experience that builds confidence. A more useful approach is to take small, manageable steps while you still feel unsure and let the evidence accumulate. Confidence tends to arrive after action, not before.

Three fresh perspectives on confidence

Quick fixes don't change behaviour

You may have heard that standing in a power pose for two minutes before a big moment makes you more confident. The idea spread widely after 2010, but a 2017 special issue of Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology brought together pre-registered studies that tested it properly. Power posing did make people report feeling a little more powerful. It made virtually no difference to how they actually behaved (Jonas et al., 2017). Lasting confidence has to be built on something more than a moment of feeling good.

Nerves don't need to be argued away

Feeling nervous before something that matters is a normal, healthy response, not a sign that something is wrong with you. Trying to force yourself to calm down, or to talk yourself into feeling something you don't, rarely works and can leave you feeling worse.

What does seem to help is acknowledging the feeling honestly. Putting an emotion into words has been shown to reduce activity in the brain's threat response (Lieberman et al., 2007). Understanding what the body is doing can help too. In one study, people who learned that a racing heart and quickened breathing are the body's way of preparing to meet a challenge showed healthier cardiovascular responses to stress and were less drawn towards threat (Jamieson et al., 2012).

Your nerves don't need to disappear before you act. Many people find relief in hearing that feeling nervous and being capable can sit side by side.

How we describe ourselves is part of the picture

A large set of experiments with over 4,000 adults and over 10,000 school-aged young people found that women rated their own performance on a maths and science test less favourably than men who had performed equally well (Exley & Kessler, 2022).

Strikingly, the gap remained even when participants were told exactly how well they had done, and even when there was nothing to gain from talking themselves up. It appeared as early as age eleven or twelve.

This suggests that low confidence isn't always about lacking information on our abilities. Sometimes it's about long-practised habits in how we talk about them, and that's exactly the kind of thing that can be worked on.

Why confidence comes and goes depending on the room

One of the things I hear most often is "I'm confident with my team, but I freeze in front of senior leaders" or "I'm fine at work, but I can't speak up with my family". This makes complete sense. Bandura's research showed that self-efficacy is specific to particular tasks and settings rather than a single global quality (Bandura, 1977). You can feel highly confident in one room and unsure in the next.

The feeling of being found out, often called imposter phenomenon, is remarkably common. A systematic review of 62 studies found reported prevalence ranging from 9% to 82% depending on the group and measure used, with links to anxiety, burnout and lower job satisfaction (Bravata et al., 2020). It shows up frequently among capable, high-achieving people, which suggests confidence and competence aren't the same.

Seeing confidence as contextual is useful, because it turns a vague sense of "I'm not a confident person" into something specific you can work with: which situations, which people, which stories you tell yourself there.

How coaching can help you build confidence

The research points to a clear conclusion. Confidence grows through experience, how we interpret our feelings, and how we talk about ourselves. These are all things you can practise, and structured support makes it easier. A meta-analysis of workplace coaching studies found positive effects on performance and skills, wellbeing, coping and goal-directed self-regulation (Theeboom et al., 2014).

Building confidence usually means three things. First, getting specific about where your confidence drops and what happens for you in those moments. Second, understanding the inner voices that hold you back, which often turn out to be protective rather than simply critical. Third, planning small, achievable steps so you can build the kind of evidence Bandura described, one experience at a time. 

You don't need to feel confident to make that first step. It is, in itself, the first piece of evidence.

References

Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215.

Bravata, D. M., Watts, S. A., Keefer, A. L., Madhusudhan, D. K., Taylor, K. T., Clark, D. M., Nelson, R. S., Cokley, K. O., & Hagg, H. K. (2020). Prevalence, predictors, and treatment of impostor syndrome: A systematic review. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 35(4), 1252–1275.

Jamieson, J. P., Nock, M. K., & Mendes, W. B. (2012). Mind over matter: Reappraising arousal improves cardiovascular and cognitive responses to stress. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141(3), 417–422.

Exley, C. L., & Kessler, J. B. (2022). The gender gap in self-promotion. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 137(3), 1345–1381.

Jonas, K. J., Cesario, J., Alger, M., et al. (2017). Power poses: Where do we stand? Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology, 2(1), 139–141.

Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428.

Theeboom, T., Beersma, B., & van Vianen, A. E. M. (2014). Does coaching work? A meta-analysis on the effects of coaching on individual level outcomes in an organizational context. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 9(1), 1–18.