How to Speed Up Rebuilding Your Self-confidence

I have been disabled for life since I was six months old. I lost my ability to walk like ordinary people. I felt unwanted and not good enough for several years. The first thing that I missed from my personality is self-confidence. That lack disturbed me for a long while.

Later in life, I observed the phenomenon of self-confidence as a performance scientist. I found that there seems to be a powerful, iterative relationship between self-confidence and a sense of achievement. The fundamental premise of this theory is that the mind does not seem to distinguish where your confidence comes from. It simply keeps storing self-confidence as a pool or reservoir, which we can use for anything in any setting.

WHERE THE CONFIDENCE COMES FROM

The source of confidence is a ‘sense of achievement or accomplishment.’ Our mind simply needs such a sense to feel confident. It does not care where that sense of achievement comes from. It does not care much about the level of achievement or its nature either.

When you get more sense of achievement, it tops ups that pool of self-confidence. Sometimes, even a bit of a sense of accomplishment adds incrementally to fill that pool. Essentially, you don’t have to be successful at the exact same task or domain in which you require to be more confident. This sense of achievement can be drawn from even completely irrelevant tasks or domains.

WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU ARE LOW IN CONFIDENCE

Sometimes, you may face some failure that can negatively affect your sense of achievement at that moment. But the world has told you not to give up. You keep attacking the same problem again and again. If unfortunately, you face failure after failure, your self-confidence may deplete soon.

The mistake we make is that we keep searching for self-confidence in the exact same task that reduced our sense of achievement in the first place. So, we let that confidence-eroding cycle continue. The only way to break that cycle is to get some sense of accomplishment somewhere else.

All you have to do is start doing something you have not touched for a while, even if it is remotely not connected to your project or work where you lack confidence. Take on a small but reasonably difficult assignment that could be accomplished quickly. The task can be as simple as fixing a broken Lego or opening a stuck screw in the cabinet. Any amount of sense of achievement you would gain out of it will go towards filling up the pool of your self-confidence.

You might have seen some executives immersed in playing with a Rubik’s cube just before talking to a demanding customer or making a high-stakes presentation. By conquering that small hurdle, they get an instant boost in the sense of achievement before a more significant challenge.

BUILD SELF-CONFIDENCE RESERVES INCREMENTALLY

As long as you keep accomplishing something that helps you attain a sense of achievement, however small it may be, it continues to increase confidence incrementally. When you take on a more significant or challenging task, the mind draws upon the accumulated confidence.

Thus, the key here is to learn to detour momentarily from the mainstream route. Stay engaged in a series of small-scale, achievable tasks that can grow your sense of achievement incrementally. Keep doing these side hustles till you build up significant reserves of confidence.

This article first appeared in Brainz magazine in March 2022, available at this link.