How to Build Self Confidence

Most advice about how to build self confidence starts in the wrong place all together. It tells you to push yourself outside your comfort zone, collect evidence of your achievements and remind yourself of everything you have accomplished whenever the doubt creeps in.

While none of that is exactly wrong, it tends to work the way a plaster works on something that needs stitches. It holds things together for a while and then the same feeling comes back, usually in a slightly different situation, and you are back to wondering why nothing ever seems to stick.

The reason it does not stick is that most confidence advice is built on a misunderstanding of what confidence actually is.

I agree that confidence in a specific field comes from having a stack of evidence that you do what you do. If a long jumper wants to feel confident standing at the start of the runway then having a thousand jumps behind them is definitely not going to hurt. However, most people who struggle with confidence don't just want it in one field — they want it in day to day life, no matter what they are doing. To achieve this, look at the people in your life who strike you as genuinely confident. Not the loud ones or the performative ones, but the ones with a settled 'I am who I am' quality to them. The ones who do not need the room to validate them before they say what they think. What those people have in common is that they know who they are and they have stopped apologising for it.

That is what real confidence looks like and you cannot build it from the outside in.

The reason so many people struggle with it has very little to do with capability and almost everything to do with the gap between who they actually are and who they have been presenting to the world. When you spend years shaping yourself around what is most likely to earn approval from the people around you, the praise and the validation all get directed at the constructed version of you rather than the real one. Some part of you knows this and gradually discounts every piece of praise because it knows the praise was not really for you but for the character you are performing.

That is why confidence built on external validation is so fragile. It depends entirely on the validation continuing and you are only ever one critical comment away from feeling exactly as uncertain as before.

If you are built from compliments you will collapse at the sight of an insult. In order to build true confidence you must align with who you genuinely are — not just what the world tells you that you are.

That is the work I do. It starts with a free twenty minute conversation.