Building Self-Trust: How Action Creates True Confidence

Feel free to skip this blog if you feel confident all of the time. In fact, if you have figured out how to feel confident all of the time, please reach out to me because I would love to hear how you did it. I certainly do not. In fact, I don’t believe we are meant to feel confident at all times. 

We all want confidence though, don’t we? We want it for ourselves and we want it for our kids. We hope they raise their hand to ask the hard questions, stand up for themselves when their values are challenged, put themselves out there, take the risks and control their life with the confidence we wished we had when we were their age! And it hurts to watch them struggle. It is painful to see their fear taking over and to witness them backing down. 

“Just be confident” 

I have even caught myself saying it. It’s not that simple though is it? See, an interesting thing about confidence; Action is required to build confidence, but our lack of confidence holds us back from taking that very action. That is why I believe we might benefit from shifting our focus from being confident to building trust in ourselves. One of the reasons why action builds confidence is because of experience. The misconception is that we need confidence to take action. Where I believe we can all benefit is understanding the important role that experience plays. When we make the decision to take the action, the next thing that happens is experiencing whatever the thing is that we are doing. However it goes, that experience is valuable to us. It is valuable because we learn from it. We learn what went well from taking the action and we learn what did not go well when we took the action. Both of those are important and valuable lessons for us. We also learn, most often, that it was not as scary as we thought it would be. 

Picture yourself, or your child, in school. The teacher is explaining the assignment and you are not following. You are not sure if you missed some of the instructions or if you are just simply not understanding, but you know if you don’t figure it out, you are going to have a problem. The question is in your mind, it is basically on the tip of your tongue. The only thing standing in your way of understanding what your assignment, is a simple action: raising your hand. If you are standing on the outside looking in, it is obvious isn’t it? You are screaming at them to raise their hand and ask the simple question. To us, it is simple. Take the small action and you will learn what you need to know to have confidence in your assignment. To the person debating the action, there is something else at play: FEAR.

“What if it is a stupid question?”

“What if the teacher already explained this?”

“What if? What if? What if?”

The interesting thing about fear… It does not teach us much. It’s all hypothetical. Where all the learning comes is after action and in experience. Let’s say they do take action and raise their hand. They learn a lot about that situation. They learn how the teacher responds to questions, whether they need to start paying closer attention to the teacher, how their peers react to them asking questions… Oh yah, and they gain clarity on what their assignment is! What’s more important than all of that though? They are going to begin to build trust in themself and their ability to take action. We place so much glory on being confident, as if it is something we can just be. We can’t, we have to build it. And the result is learning to trust yourself more. When you trust yourself more, you have less barrier to the first step which is action. As I mentioned before, these things don’t just happen. They take practice. Small steps. Those small actions, built over time, become life changing characters. 

That is why I build this into the foundation of what I teach in our martial arts classes. Students are consistently challenging themselves, often without even realizing it. Learning a new movement, answering a question in front of the class, stepping up to perform in front of their instructor and peers, and taking a risk during a sparring match. Every time, teaching themself that they can trust themself to do the hard thing and build their confidence. Martial arts is unique to this type of personal growth. While we train as a community, so much of what students learn and develop is done through the practice of taking action, learning to take the experience as an opportunity for growth, and ultimately building trust in self. I still compete in martial arts and I can tell you that when I do, I don’t always feel confident. Fear, doubt, and disbelief all still creep in. What I have built over the years of training is trust in myself. I trust that regardless of how it goes, I will grow from the experience. I will be okay. And that has served me well in my life outside of martial arts also. I have felt the fear of putting myself out there to build a new connection or to go in for that new job interview with the trust in myself that I will be okay no matter what happens. When the relationship ended or I didn’t get the job I wanted, I had confidence that I could keep going. That type of trust and training doesn’t come to you overnight.

Confidence is not something that you have or don’t have. We can’t just BE CONFIDENT. We have to practice it.

Written by: Kyle Craik