Confidence Is A Habit, Not A Feeling

Confidence is not a mood, belief or feeling. It’s an action of the mind that can be developed as a habit. Here’s how.

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Many people imagine that to feel confident you need to talk yourself into it. Like you’ve got to have some perfect internal conversation with yourself and feel perfectly confident in order to be and appear confident. You’ll have better luck trying to bring a conspiracy theorist back to reality. Fortunately, there’s a more direct route, one that relies on decision and action, and cuts a path along which those pesky fears and worries will eventually fall in line.

If you were paying attention during the Five Motivational States series, you’ll be well drilled in the idea that you can take action, despite your feelings, and your feelings will fall in line. This was proven Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi through his studies of the flow state or state of optimal experience. Hopefully you’ve arrived at it and proved it to yourself by applying and testing it by gathering your own evidence.

This week we’re going to apply that same principle to the subject of confidence.

When we talk about confidence, we are really talking about the appearance of confidence. After all, nobody can know for sure what another person is really thinking or feeling. So, what we’re really commenting on is a person’s attitude or approach, which is only available to us through their observable behaviour. We regard a person as confident to the degree that they do something without fuss.

Here’s an example: someone is about to do a bungee jump. They get strapped in with barely a word, walk up to the ledge, and jump, no fuss. The next person comes along and can’t stop chattering, takes a few minutes and much cajoling to get to the ledge, screams out loud, then jumps. You would naturally consider the first person more confident than the second. However, you’d have no idea what was really going on for that first person. Maybe nothing at all. And maybe they’re just very good at managing their internal world.

If we were to interview them and found that they really had nothing going on at all, we might think they’re lucky to be so naturally brave and confident. Or we might be dealing with a case of what I call “stupid confidence”. That’s when you’re too, let’s say, naïve or unaware to have any doubts about yourself. U2’s Bono has been quoted as saying, “When you’re 16 you think you can take on the world—and sometimes you’re right!” That kind of stupid. Naïve stupid. Those are harsh words, but the point is that bravery—or confidence—can sometimes be down to naivety, as in the case of Bono, or, as for some other famous people, a lack of awareness or sensitivity. And who would want that?

So, what we’re really looking at is something like what this quote points to: “Courage is not the absence of fear, but acting in spite of fear.” (It’s often attributed to Nelson Mandela, but I believe he was quoting Mark Twain.) This opens up the possibility that you don’t have to talk yourself into confidence. You don’t have to, for example, convince yourself that you’re good at something, or that you’ll be safe. You can do that, and it can have some effect, but it’s what I call fighting content with content. In other words, when you conjure up positive thoughts (content), they will inevitably be met by some negative thoughts (more content) that cancel them out. And the answer isn’t more positive thoughts. That would just mean more negative thoughts to join them. You can think of it like standing on a street corner with lots of money: you’re going to attract people without money; and flashing more money isn’t going to make them go away!

When you fight content with content, all you get is a crushing crowd of thoughts.

Being conscious and deliberate about confidence

The more effective approach is to look directly at what’s happening—to look at it in a particular way—and to have an insight based on seeing things as they are. When you see something, it’s undeniable. You can’t unsee it. Like if someone walked into your crowd on the street corner while you’re flashing your money and pulled out a gun. You can’t unsee that. It will stay in your mind forever.

Your ability to decide and act is independent of your thoughts and feelings

And what you can see when it comes to our bungee scenario is this: both bungee jumpers, fuss or no fuss, were able to make the decision to jump, and were able to act on that decision, despite whatever thoughts or feelings they had. By extrapolation, your ability to decide and act is independent of your thoughts and feelings. You do this all the time, like when you get up off the couch on a Sunday to check your emails, or exercise, or wash the dishes, and when you drag yourself to work on a Monday, although hopefully you’ve been paying attention and don’t do that anymore! It’s the same principle, the same action of the mind.

Remember when we talked about getting through the dip to go for a run. You just gave up the resistance to taking the action. You slid past the arguments against doing it. You surrendered to the decision and found yourself doing the thing. You ran to the second lamppost before you even thought about it. Suddenly, you found yourself in the flow state.

Now we’re talking about doing it more consciously and deliberately and applying it to a situation that requires confidence.

Let’s look at an example.

An important phone call—a practical example

You need to call someone important to ask for something. A job, perhaps, or a round of funding for your new business. Of course, you plan what you’re going to say, and you rehearse. Then you give up your resistance and just find yourself dialling the number and talking all the way through two exchanges. You’re at the second lamppost. Then, let’s say you fumble your words. You might become agitated and find that those negative thoughts and feelings crowd you; you try to fight them with positive ones, but that just makes it worse.

When you focus on your performance, that’s when feelings of doubt arise. Focus instead on the subject matter

Now you’re like that sportsperson in the previous episode who was trying too hard, trying to force the shot and becoming agitated. You become aware that you’re doing that, and you drop back and focus on the ball, on the shot—in this example of the phone call, that means you focus on the details of what you want to say, and on the outcome of what you want to achieve. As soon as you put your attention back on the details, you’ll calm down. And guess what? To the person on the other side, you’ll appear confident. Even if you did get a bit shaky, you’ll earn respect if you pull yourself together and perform, which will happen naturally because you’re applying the principles for getting into the flow state.

How to gain confidence when giving a talk

You can apply that same process when you’re giving a talk. To my clients who are looking to feel confident for a talk, I say, “Focus on the message and the content of your talk and not on your performance.” They stare at me blankly and I have to explain all this. Then I point out that when you focus on your performance, that’s when feelings of doubt arise. If you try to fight them, you’re back on that street corner trying to chase away poor people by flashing your gold. It’s a bad strategy for being left alone. The more effective thing to do is to shift your attention.

Instead of focusing on your performance, focus on the subject matter. Focus on the one single message that you want to land in your talk. Make that your anchor and keep coming back to it. That will pull you back to where you need to be and, before you know it, you’ll be in the flow state—and amaze people with how confident you appear. Only you’ll know the truth of what’s going on inside. Though I’ll venture to bet that you’ll surprise yourself with how confident you actually feel by the time you finish!

Confidence can be as simple as managing attention

You can see, then, that confidence can be about managing your attention, rather than trying to convince yourself that you’re good enough by fighting content with content—by flashing gold to get rid of beggars. You can see, too, that this has walked us right into the halls of mindfulness. Which is good news, because the science has shown that with long-term meditation practice, you can train your brain to reflexively shift attention away from your thoughts and feelings and onto the mind’s chosen subject of focus. So there’s you clue to what comes next. Meditation practice.

The real reason for doing a breath or a mantra meditation, is not to relax. That’s secondary. The primary reason is to learn to recognise when your attention has wandered and bring it back to your chosen subject of focus. I’ll be you never saw that coming, meditation as a way to build confidence!  That is indeed what I’m saying, and there is science to back it up. Read The Science of Meditation by Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson.

Summary of key points

To sum up, then, here are some key points to remember:

• You don’t need to feel confident to appear confident.
• Fighting the negative content of your mind with positive content is like trying to chase away beggars by showing them all the gold coins in your pockets.
• Your ability to act is independent of your thoughts and feelings.
• Focus externally on the goal and the details of the activity; do not focus internally on your thoughts and feelings.
• When giving a talk, keep your attention on the message and not on the performance.
• Confidence is about where you put your attention, it’s not about changing thoughts or feelings.
• Meditation is the key to training your mental muscle for focusing your attention.

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