Building Confidence Through Self-Efficacy

Psychologists spent years studying the difference between confident and unconfident people, and what they found was pretty shocking. Confident people are not born confident. There's no DNA strand that genetically makes you confident. Literally anyone can become confident if you're willing to do this one thing.

But first, some background. Psychologist Albert Bandura conducted hundreds of experiments involving confident and unconfident people. He gave them identical tasks, challenges, and environments, and repeatedly documented why some people are perceived as larger than life, while others are perceived as insignificant,

or why some people move through difficulty with ease, while other people avoided, withdrew, or just froze, and he came to one solid conclusion. Confident people are not confident because they don't experience doubt.

In fact, they experience self-doubt at the same rate as everybody else. What really made confident people so confident was something Bandura called self-efficacy. A quick experiment that shows you what I mean. Dr. Bandura took two groups of people with similar skill levels and gave them a

challenging task. But before starting the task, he told group one that they had performed very well on similar tasks in the past, and he told group B that they had performed very poorly on similar tasks in the past, and the results were

astounding. The group that believed that they had evidence of past success performed better and recovered faster from setbacks. The group that was told that they had not performed well in the past gave up sooner, despite having the same level of

capability as group one. The ultimate conclusion is this, your brain does not generate confidence from affirmations or positive thinking. It generates it from one thing only, an accumulated record of yourself doing difficult things and

surviving. Every time you move through doubt rather than waiting for it to disappear, your brain files that away as evidence. Every time you act before you feel ready, every time you take on that

challenge and make it to the other side, every time you walk into that restaurant or club and have fun and feel beautiful even though you don't feel like you look your best, every time you show up for yourself, every time you do the uncomfortable thing, every single time, your

brain updates its prediction about what you are capable of. The most confident people you know are not people who are different than you. They are no different than you. They're just people who've given their brain more evidence. That's it.