Confidence Building

Confidence building is the work of developing well-founded belief in your ability to do particular things, mainly by building skill and by gathering real experience of coping with the situation you are worried about. It is a working estimate of what you can handle. That estimate moves when you act, and it moves far less when you only think about acting.

Confidence is specific rather than general. A person can be steady in a work meeting and awkward at a party, or sure of their driving and uneasy about a difficult conversation. In Bandura's social cognitive theory, perceived self-efficacy acts on the other determinants of behaviour. Perceived self-efficacy shapes which activities a person takes on and how much effort they put in¹. The useful question is not whether you are a confident person. It is what you are confident about, and what you would like to add.

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What confidence building means

Confidence building means changing your own estimate of what you can manage, and changing it on evidence. Two things move that estimate: getting better at the thing, and finding out through experience that you can get through it. Talking yourself up moves it least of all.

This is why the order surprises people. Confidence usually follows the action rather than arriving before it. Waiting to feel ready keeps the estimate where it is, because nothing new has happened to update it.

Bandura describes a sense of personal efficacy as constructed through a complex process of self-persuasion rather than produced by declaring oneself capable¹. Declaring yourself capable does not by itself make you so. What counts as persuasive is what you have actually done, and how you read it afterwards.

How confidence is actually built

Bandura describes efficacy beliefs as the product of information conveyed enactively, vicariously, socially and physiologically¹. In plainer words, four things feed your estimate of yourself: what you do, what you see others like you do, what people tell you, and what your body is doing at the time.

The first of those is the strongest, and the last is the most often misread. Doing the thing badly and surviving it still counts as data.

How you record the experience matters as much as having it. Bandura holds that noticing and remembering your successes can strengthen beliefs of personal efficacy, and that people who selectively attend to their poorer performances underestimate what they can do¹. Two people can have the same week and hold opposite views of themselves at the end of it, because they kept different records.

Confidence, self-esteem and self-efficacy

These three words get used as though they mean the same thing. They do not, and the difference decides what kind of help is worth looking for.

• Self-efficacy is your judgement of whether you can do a specific thing. Research on behaviour change defines self-efficacy as a person's confidence in executing and maintaining positive change despite temptation to relapse². It is task-shaped, and it responds to practice.
• Confidence in everyday speech usually means the same estimate, felt rather than reasoned. Optimism and pessimism are described in the research literature as broad, generalised versions of confidence and doubt, pertaining to life rather than to one specific context³.
• Self-esteem is your sense of your own worth, which is a different matter from your sense of your own competence. A person can be highly skilled and think little of themselves.

The distinction is not academic. Skills practice raises self-efficacy in the area you practise, and it may leave self-esteem where it was.

Low self-esteem also has a measured relationship with depression. A meta-analysis of longitudinal data covered 77 studies on depression. It found that low self-esteem predicted later depression more strongly than depression predicted later self-esteem. The same analysis reported that raising self-esteem might be useful in reducing the risk of depression⁴. That is a finding about groups over time, not a forecast about any one person.

Where the sense of worth rests is part of the picture too. Mikulincer and Shaver describe how people high in attachment anxiety tend to base self-appraisals on unstable, conditional sources of self-worth such as others' approval⁵. Confidence built on approval has to be re-earned every day, which is exhausting and is one reason self-help advice about achievement alone often fails to hold.

Does building confidence mean getting rid of self-doubt?

The popular version says confident people have no doubt. The research points to something different.

Bandura holds that some self-doubt during preparation drives people to acquire the skills they need, while in applying skills already developed a strong belief in efficacy helps mobilise and sustain effort¹. Self-doubt is useful during preparation. Students who feel entirely sure of a subject study less for it.

Doubt becomes costly at the moment of performance. Bandura reports that gifted athletes plagued by self-doubt can perform below their potential, while less talented but highly self-assured athletes sometimes outperform more talented competitors¹. The skill was there in both cases. What differed was how much of it reached the field.

So the aim is not a mind with no doubt in it. If you still feel unsure while you prepare, that is doing useful work. If you are waiting for the doubt to clear before you begin, you will wait a long time, and the waiting is itself what keeps the estimate low.

Practical ways to build confidence

A short honest list beats a long one. These follow from what is above, and they work in the area you apply them to rather than across your whole life.

• Pick one area. Confidence does not transfer far. Choose the domain that actually matters to you now: speaking up in meetings, driving at night, being in a room of strangers.
• Set the first step low enough to finish. A step you complete gives you evidence. A step you abandon gives you the opposite.
• Raise the difficulty deliberately. Repeat a step until it stops frightening you, then add one increment. This is the same principle therapists use, described below.
• Keep a record of what you did. Memory is selective and it tends to keep the failures. Writing down what went adequately corrects a biased ledger.
• Prepare properly, then stop preparing. Preparation is the stage where some self-doubt helps. Once you are standing up to speak, the useful move is to trust the work already done.
• Use the people around you. Fraser Health, a regional health authority in British Columbia, notes that people close to you can build your self-confidence and remind you of your skills and accomplishments⁶. Ask someone specific what they have seen you handle.

Progress is uneven. Improvement comes quickly at the start of a new skill and slows later, and a flat patch is a normal feature of learning rather than a sign of your ceiling.

When low confidence is part of something more

Sometimes low confidence is a skills-and-practice matter. Sometimes it is a symptom, and then practice alone will not shift it.

Consider professional support if the difficulty looks like one of these:

• Fear of social or performance situations that is persistent, that centres on being judged or humiliated, and that leads you to avoid a widening range of situations.
• Low mood, loss of interest, and a harsh view of yourself that holds steady regardless of what you achieve.
• Confidence that collapsed after a specific event, an assault, an accident, a public failure, a job loss, and has not recovered since.
• Avoidance that is shrinking your life: fewer invitations accepted, fewer applications sent, fewer risks taken than a year ago.

None of these is a diagnosis you can make from a page. They are reasons to have a conversation with a qualified clinician in your own country, who can tell the difference between ordinary low confidence and a treatable condition.

What confidence-focused therapy involves

There is no branded treatment called confidence therapy. What exists is a set of methods clinicians use on the problems that show up as low confidence, and knowing what they look like lets you judge whether the approach fits you.

The first sessions are usually spent getting specific. Behavioural assessment asks for very specific detail about when and where a problem happens, because that detail shows how to define targets for change⁷. Your therapist will ask what you were doing, who was there, what went through your mind, and what you did next. "I have no confidence" is not workable. "I go quiet the moment my manager joins the meeting" is.

Where avoidance is holding the problem in place, the work is graded. Clinical treatment texts describe exposure as confronting progressively more anxiety-provoking situations, starting with those that bring a moderate amount of fear⁸. Each situation is repeated until it stops producing distress before the next one is attempted. You are not thrown into the worst thing on the list.

Alongside that, a therapist will usually work on the thinking that runs during those situations: the prediction that you will be found out, the sense that everyone noticed. The two halves fit together, because a prediction is best tested by an experience.

Group formats are also used for this kind of difficulty. Group treatment manuals for anxious children and adolescents most often use graded exposure to anxiety-provoking situations, homework and reinforcement to achieve symptomatic change⁹. A group has an obvious advantage for social confidence: the feared situation is in the room.

No responsible clinician will promise you an outcome. What they can describe is the method, the likely shape of the work, and how you would both know whether it is helping.

Confidence in children and teenagers

Adults building their own confidence and adults raising a child's confidence are doing different jobs. With a child, the instinct is to remove the frightening thing, and that instinct works against the goal.

The Child Mind Institute says teaching a child to manage their fears without parental intervention helps them build the confidence and independence they need¹⁰. Praise and protection are the two easiest responses, and neither gives a child the experience of coping. Letting a child be a little uncomfortable, with you nearby, does.

The same principle holds with teenagers, allowing for the fact that their audience has changed. What a fifteen-year-old is measuring themselves against is other fifteen-year-olds, and reassurance from a parent carries less weight than it used to.

Choosing a therapist, and what to ask

Fit matters, and you are allowed to assess it. Research summarised by Cain and colleagues lists enhancement of the client's sense of self-efficacy, respect, trustworthiness and adapting to client needs among the therapist qualities clients say they prefer¹¹. Notice that the first item is about your capability growing, not about the therapist's cleverness.

Reasonable questions for a first contact or first session:

• How do you usually work with someone whose difficulty is avoidance and low confidence in a specific situation?
• Would we set targets together, and how would we know whether things are shifting?
• Do you work with the practical steps as well as the thinking behind them?
• What is your training and registration, and with which body in this country?

Registration bodies, protected titles and fees differ from country to country, so check the credentials that apply where you live rather than assuming a standard from elsewhere. You can search for a qualified therapist in your own country through the TherapyRoute directory, and our guide on how to find the right therapist covers the practical side of choosing one.

Related terms

• Self-Esteem: your sense of your own worth, which is distinct from your sense of your own competence.
• Assertiveness: stating what you need and where your limits are, a skill that both draws on confidence and builds it.
• Self-efficacy: your judgement of whether you can carry out a specific task in a specific situation.
• Graded exposure: working through feared situations in order of difficulty, repeating each until it settles.

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References

1. [1] Bandura, A. (1997). Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. Print edition. Held copy: Bandura - Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control (1997). Pages cited: (pp 49-50), (pp 89-90), (pp 99-100), (pp 129-130), (pp 399-400).
2. [2] National Library of Medicine, NCBI Bookshelf. Record NBK556005: stages of behaviour change and self-efficacy. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK556005..
3. [3] PubMed Central. Article PMC4161121: optimism, pessimism and generalised expectancies. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4161121..
4. [4] PubMed. Record 22730921: meta-analysis of longitudinal data on low self-esteem, depression and anxiety. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22730921..
5. [5] Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2016). Attachment in Adulthood (2nd ed.). Print edition. Held copy: Mikulincer & Shaver - Attachment in Adulthood (2nd ed, 2016). Pages cited: (pp 178-185).
6. [6] Fraser Health (British Columbia, Canada). Mental wellness. fraserhealth.ca/health-topics-a-to-z/mental-health-and-substance-use/mental-wellness..
7. [7] Sadock, B. J., Sadock, V. A., & Ruiz, P. (2017). Kaplan & Sadock's Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry (10th ed.), chapter 33.3, Behaviour Therapy. Print edition. Held copy: Kaplan & Sadock's Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, 10th ed (2017, vols 1+2). Pages cited: (pp 6860-6867).
8. [8] Gabbard, G. O. (2007). Gabbard's Treatments of Psychiatric Disorders, chapter 30, Social Anxiety Disorder and Specific Phobias. Print edition. Held copy: Gabbard's Treatments of Psychiatric Disorders (2007).
9. [9] Sadock, B. J., Sadock, V. A., & Ruiz, P. (2017). Kaplan & Sadock's Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry (10th ed.), chapter 54.4, Group Psychotherapy. Print edition. Held copy: Kaplan & Sadock's Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, 10th ed (2017, vols 1+2).
10. [10] Child Mind Institute. Helping children manage fears. childmind.org/article/help-children-manage-fears..
11. [11] Cain, D. J., Keenan, K., & Rubin, S. (2016). Humanistic Psychotherapies: Handbook of Research and Practice (2nd ed.). American Psychological Association. Print edition. Held copy: Cain, Keenan & Rubin - Humanistic Psychotherapies: Handbook of Research and Practice (2nd ed, 2016, APA). Pages cited: (pp 535-542).