Confidence Requires Maintenance

If you had asked me ten years ago to describe someone who has earned their Ph.D., owns a successful private practice, and runs 100-mile ultramarathons I might have described that person as successful, competent, accomplished, knowledgeable. I probably would have thought that person had an extraordinarily robust set of mental tools and a resilient mindset. I likely would have thought that through those accumulated experiences and achieved milestones, uncertainty would have faded and confidence took its place.

While I am more confident in certain ways than I was 10 years ago, I’ve hardly “reached” or “arrived” at this confident version of myself. Instead, most days I have to actively remind myself why I should feel confident, to choose a new more adaptive habit over an old one that no longer serves me, or to intentionally challenge an unhelpful belief I thought I had rid myself of long ago.

Maybe the reality – or at least my reality – is that confidence requires ongoing maintenance and is not simply a destination you arrive at. Confidence is less like a rock and more like a tree. I’ve often imagined confidence as something solid and permanent, as though one day I'll become confident and remain that way forever. But confidence only survives if it’s nurtured. It grows through experience, stretches toward challenge, and develops deeper roots through adversity.

Another way I’ve come to think about confidence is viewing it as a trail that can lead you through the woods. But tails don't stay clear on their own. Left unattended, branches fall, weeds grow, and sections wash out after storms. The path only remains navigable if people continue to walk it, maintain it, and return to it over and over again. Confidence is built and maintained through repeated acts of courage, competence, and trust in yourself. Every difficult conversation, every challenge you face, every time you show up despite uncertainty, you're clearing the trail a little more. And when life throws a storm your way—as it inevitably does—you don't start over from scratch. You simply return to the path and begin walking it again.

Here are a few lessons I’ve learned, unlearned, and returned to time after time that have shaped my confidence.

Your Relationship With Yourself Sets the Ceiling for Everything Else

Let me share an uncomfortable truth: achievement cannot compensate for a poor relationship with yourself. If your inner dialogue is relentlessly critical, no amount of success is going to allow you to feel confident. Take a look at the conversation happening inside your own head. For many high achievers, it sounds something like: "You should be doing more," "You're behind," "That wasn't your best," "Don't get comfortable," or "Other people are doing better than you." The problem is that many people mistake self-criticism for accountability. Yet if a leader managed their team this way— never acknowledging wins, constantly moving the goalposts, and focusing exclusively on shortcomings— we would expect morale and performance to suffer. Your mind works much the same way. Many successful people assume this type of thinking drives their performance, but in reality it often creates chronic stress, hesitation, burnout, and a tendency to become paralyzed by mistakes rather than learning from them. When every outcome is evaluated through a lens of “could have been better,” it becomes nearly impossible to internalize progress or build trust in your own abilities. One simple exercise is to ask yourself: "Is this thought helping me perform better, or is it simply punishing me?"  Confidence is built through honest feedback and accountability, not relentless self-attack.

Confidence is Built on Evidence

One of the biggest misconceptions I see in therapy, in business, and in endurance sports, is the belief that confidence comes before action. We tell ourselves, "Once I feel more confident, then I'll apply for the position, have the difficult conversation, start the business, sign up for the race, or put myself out there." But confidence rarely works that way. Confidence is built on evidence, and evidence is gathered through action. Every time you do something difficult, tolerate uncertainty, recover from a setback, or keep a promise to yourself, you collect data that says, "I can handle this." Most of the confident people I know and have met weren't confident before they started— they became confident because they started. If we return to the metaphor that confidence is like a trail, then every courageous action clears the trail a little more. Every time you successfully navigate a difficult experience the route becomes more familiar, easier. Eventually, what once felt intimidating begins to feel natural because you've accumulated enough evidence that you know how to move through it. If you're waiting to feel confident before taking action, consider flipping the equation. Instead of asking, "How do I become confident enough to do this?" ask, "What action would a confident version of me take?" Then start with the smallest version of that action. Confidence is not built through thinking, planning, or waiting. It is built through repeated experiences of showing yourself that you can act even when certainty is absent.

Confidence Is a Skill, Not a Personality Trait

If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably gathered that I believe confidence is not a personality trait that someone does or doesn’t possess, it is a skill set that can be trained over time. I often hear people describe themselves as “just not a confident person,” as if confidence were something static like the color of their eyes. But I believe confidence is learned. It is trained and develops through repetition, feedback, and experience. Just like building strength or endurance, it grows when you consistently put yourself in situations that stretch your current ability and then reflect on how you handled them. From a skill-based perspective, one way to build confidence is to deliberately keep a record of times you handled something difficult, uncomfortable, or uncertain and survived it more effectively than you expected. Another is to practice graded exposure: intentionally breaking down intimidating situations into smaller, repeatable actions so your nervous system learns, over time, that you are capable of navigating them.

Self-Doubt is a Belief, Not a Fact

Self-doubt often shows up sounding definitive, assuredly stating “I can’t do that”, “That’s not really me”, or “I’m not the kind of person who succeeds at this”, but these statements are rarely objective truths. More often, they are interpretations that have been reinforced over time, sometimes by a single experience of failure or discomfort. These beliefs come to feel like absolute truths because they are familiar, not because they are accurate. Instead of accepting a self-doubting belief as fact, frame it as one small data point on the scatter plot. Explore other evidence, importantly, ask yourself “what evidence do I have that this belief could be wrong, inaccurate, or missing part of the picture?”