Confident, Then Good
Will Bamberg | Updated
It’s funny how we wait to “get good” at something before allowing ourselves to be confident in it. The irony! If you truly want to get good, get confident.
Performance = Confidence x Skill
A common misconception is the idea that confidence comes from skill. Confidence doesn’t come from skill, confidence and skill multiply. They’re distinct, intertwined parts of performance. No matter how skilled you get, lack of confidence will multiply right down to zero.
We hold on to this story to compartmentalize away the uncomfortable experience of wrestling with our shadow. Confidence goes hand-in-hand with self-esteem and identity: it touches every fraught area of the psyche. The discomfort of facing your fears and insecurities is the price of growth.
In practice, skill is nothing without confidence. Social dance epitomizes this. Dancing well isn’t about skill, it’s about feeling—having fun and interacting with people through music. You can’t lie in dance. If you enjoy dancing, you’ll dance well. If you think you’re a bad dancer, you won’t. Extrapolate this to any domain. Expect failure and you’ve already lost. You have to believe in yourself!
Inhabiting Confidence
Besides the lifelong arc of introspection, shadow reckoning and growth, how do you get more confident in the moment?
Confidence is both a quality you have (conviction, spirit) and a practice you do. “Act confident” is an actionable instruction for everyone. We instinctively and intuitively know what confidence behavior is like. Action drives thought.
Breathe Breathing calms you and regulates your nervous system. When stressed, we constrict, “get in our heads”, and literally dissociate from our bodies. To regain confidence, recenter yourself in your breathing. Draw your awareness within. Seek and release tension.
Fake it till you make it “Fake it till you make it” is a powerful spell that sidelines rationality in favor of embodied intuition. It works because confidence is a posture. Confidence is in your bearing, the shape of your awareness, your attitude and self-talk. Hold yourself like a confident person, and voila—you feel and act more confident!
Build the muscle of reaching for confidence. Practice grounding yourself, settling your breathing, and focusing on the task at hand. Learn to put on the confident version of you. With time, your body will carry you like this naturally.
Cultivating Self
The foundation of confidence is self-esteem. Your relationship to the world cannot be separated from your relationship to yourself. Insecurity and self-consciousness are never really about other people, they’re our own fears and judgments manifested in the guise of others.
The ingredients of self-esteem are understanding and acceptance. You cannot embrace that which you deny. You cannot resolve an internal deadlock you’re unaware of Common pattern: you crash out over failing to accomplish some task or commitment because of "lack of motivation". You relentlessly self criticize. "Why can't you do anything, you're worthless".
What really happened: A pulled you in one direction, and B pulled you in another. They cancelled out and left you at 0. . Get to know the myriad desires, patterns, and parts within you and you gain leverage. Once you can see the moving pieces you can experiment, problem-solve, and learn.
Do your thing Introspection and solitude are vital to cultivating self. Sometimes you have to get away from the noise of others to hear within. Spend time in your own company. Tune in to subtle desires and curiosities. Grant yourself permission to follow whims and sprout dreams. Intrinsic motivation is home-grown.
Self-simulation is the void Beware of looking to others for validation. Simulating how people view you is naught but self-tormenting fantasy. You don’t know what other people think, you can only project your own insecurities I struggled with this as an adolescent. It took me years to understand how much I externalized my identity and distorted my sense of self based on the idea of others. Thankfully, I've slowly recalibrated my identity around more stable, substantial foundation: what I do, what I enjoy, and who I aspire to be. . Accept that you can’t control how you’re perceived, and recenter. You have a self-other boundary, which you can make less permeable. Safeguard your psyche!
You always have the power to investigate and rewrite your stories about who you are, what you care about, and what you do. Open your eyes and observe the ways you behave. Ask questions, take notes, and journal. Treat identity as a project and experiment.
Release Your Inhibitions
Confidence is a state of harmony that allows you to act with intention and whole awareness. In a sense, “confidence” is only relevant when you lack it. When truly confident you don’t think to question or doubt yourself, you are simply in practice. Unconfidence is a symptom of disintegration.
Most chains are of our own making. We reject part of ourselves, based on a story we’ve absorbed about who we have to be. We contort ourselves around this knot, as if denying its existence can make it go away. This ultimately fails, because it is the turning away itself that gives these patterns their power to divide us. Thus, facing up to your disowned parts is the very act that heals them. The truth will set you free—if and only if you can open your heart to it.
Liberation is found in surrender. We suffer because we hold too tightly, we’re too attached to expectations or narratives. Parts of us pull in different directions and we freeze, doubt, or panic as our construction of self is threatened. We fear that if we let go we’ll fall. In truth, there’s nowhere to fall. You’re perfectly alright as you are, quirks and flaws in all Aspiring to grow and change is perfectly compatible with existential self-acceptance. Any voice denying that you are enough as you are is directly knotted into the narrative baggage you carry blocking you from greater joy. . Let go and be free.
You can thrive happily under your own guidance alone. You’re always able to give yourself permission, reset, or release what you’re carrying. The opportunity to redefine your values and goals is always open. Build trust in yourself, one choice at a time. Have courage to face your fears and so dissolve them.
Confidence Flows Upward
Confidence creates the conditions for an upward spiral of flourishing.
When you’re able to calm your body, quiet your mind, and focus, you fall into flow. In flow, you get so close to your practice that questions of confidence become irrelevant. The world falls away, time slips by, and you fly at your intuitive edge.
This is the inner game See "The Inner Game of Tennis" by Timothy Gallway . Realizing your potential happens when you get out of your own way and allow your body to act. Only in this zone of relaxed concentration and full immersion in practice do you do your best work and push your limits.
When you spend time in flow, you surprise yourself by doing things you didn’t know you were capable of. As you see yourself improve—both in the moment and looking back over your trajectory—you become excited and emboldened. You feel proud of your progress and wonder at the future. You make bigger choices, take more leaps, and continue to grow. And so on and so forth.
Confidence, and the ability to practice it, are universal resources you apply across your life, that filter your whole experience. The way you do anything is the way you do everything—confidence built in one domain translates to all others.
Confidence is rooted deeper than skill, reason, or rationale. It’s unblocked life force, the sign of a thriving and unfettered spirit.
If you want to be good, be confident.
Originally published