Clients often come to me wanting to grow their confidence. They want to apply for the promotion, speak at the conference, have the difficult conversation. And they’ve concluded that a lack of confidence is what’s holding them back.
It’s a reasonable theory. It’s also, I think, the wrong way round.
Confidence isn’t built. It’s innate.
Watch a baby learning to walk. They are not competent. They fall over constantly. And yet they are completely confident. They pull themselves up, wobble, topple, grizzle for a moment, and go again. Nobody taught them to believe in themselves. The confidence was simply there, underneath, from the start.
Confidence is the thing that lets us become competent. It doesn’t come from competence. It comes first.
I’ve come to believe that confidence is innate, built into all of us, the way it’s built into that baby. It’s part of your natural state: the relaxed, open, willing way of being you drop into whenever the interference clears.
So where does it go?
The baby has one advantage over us: it isn’t yet caught up in insecure thinking.
We are. Somewhere along the way we learn to tell ourselves we can’t do something. Usually it isn’t really about the thing. It’s that we’ve decided we couldn’t handle the consequences of failing. So we hesitate, and we call the hesitation “a lack of confidence.”
But the confidence didn’t go anywhere. It got covered over. A baby who thought like an adult would never learn to walk, because falling is guaranteed at the start. The baby doesn’t get tangled in that thinking. It just stays in the feeling.
Aim for less insecurity, not more confidence
Here’s the reframe that changes the work.
You don’t need to add confidence. You can’t really manufacture it anyway, which is why hyping yourself up and reciting affirmations tends to feel hollow. The confidence is already there. What’s in the way is insecure thinking.
So the goal isn’t more confidence. It’s less insecurity. Those sound similar, but they point in opposite directions. One has you straining to build something on top. The other has you simply paying the anxious thoughts a little less attention as they arise, and noticing that when you do, the confidence that was always underneath comes back on its own.
That’s it. Not a technique to install. Something to stop doing.
The next time you catch yourself “lacking confidence,” try not believing it’s a lack. It’s interference. Give the insecure thinking less of your attention, and see what’s still standing when it quiets down.
