Confidence, Courage & Recovery | Building Resilience

How to build confidence often comes down to acting before you feel completely ready: try something new, see what you are capable of, and let that proof make the next try easier. In this video, mental resilience coach Janey Brown explains why confidence and competence feed each other, why courage is the through line, and why trusting yourself to recover from failure is what makes taking risks possible.

Key takeaways

• Confidence and competence are "bidirectional." Confidence gets you to try, and trying shows you how competent you are.
• Courage connects the two. It's hard to gain confidence in something without the courage to try it first.
• The most useful kind of confidence is trusting that if you fail or make a mistake, you'll recover. That is where resilience comes in.
• The cycle builds on itself: more risks lead to more competence, which leads to more confidence, at work, in relationships and in anything new you want to try.

What Janey Brown says

"Confidence and competence are bidirectional," Janey says. The more confidence you have "to put yourself out there, to take risks, to try something new, the more you learn how competent you are at it." Neither one appears on its own. Each grows from the other.

What links them is courage. "It's hard to gain confidence towards something without having the courage to then try," she explains. You don't wait until you feel confident to start. You find enough courage to take the first step, and the confidence follows.

The deeper point is about recovery. Janey describes a kind of confidence that has less to do with succeeding and more to do with trusting yourself through setbacks: "the more confidence you have in yourself to take care of yourself through failures, through mistakes, through hardship, the more willing you'll be to try new things." When you trust yourself to "catch yourself when you fall," you take more risks, discover more of your own competence, and reach "new levels in your career and new levels in relationships." In her words, "the cycle goes on and on."

How do you build confidence when you don't feel confident?

Start with action, not feelings. Psychologist Albert Bandura's influential work on self-efficacy, your belief that you can handle a task, identified personal mastery experiences, actually doing the thing and seeing that you can, as one of the most dependable sources of that belief (Bandura, Psychological Review). That lines up with the cycle Janey describes: competence you see for yourself is what makes confidence stick.

A few ways to put that into practice:

• Make the first step small. Pick something just outside your comfort zone, not miles past it. Small wins are still proof.
• Plan your recovery, not just your success. Before you start, decide what you will do next if it goes badly. Having an answer makes the risk feel safer.
• Keep track of what you've done. Write down attempts and what you learned. It's easy to forget your own evidence.
• Notice how you talk to yourself after a mistake. Harsh self-talk makes the next try harder. Treat yourself the way you would treat a friend who is learning.

Is confidence the same as resilience?

Not quite, but they work together. Confidence is your belief that you can do something. Resilience is your ability to recover when things don't go as planned. Janey's point is that the second strengthens the first: when you trust that a failure won't break you, you are far more willing to try. If self-doubt is tied to ongoing anxiety or low mood, a therapist can help you work through it.

For quick, practical ideas, watch Quick Confidence Boosts: Self-Esteem Hacks You Need, and if a harsh inner voice keeps holding you back, read how self-criticism affects you and why we do it.

Video transcript

Transcript (lightly edited for reading):

Confidence and competence are bidirectional. So the more confidence you have to put yourself out there, to take risks, to try something new, the more you learn how competent you are at it. And this requires courage. That's the through line of both competence and confidence, I would say. It's hard to gain confidence towards something without having the courage to then try. But the more confidence you have at trying something, and at very least confidence in yourself that if you fail or if you make a mistake, you'll recover, which is where resilience comes into play, the more confidence you have in yourself to take care of yourself through failures, through mistakes, through hardship, the more willing you'll be to try new things, take risks. That will then show you that you're competent at those things, which will then increase your confidence for the next time you try. The more confidence you have in yourself to catch yourself when you fall or when you fail, the more you're going to take risks, the more you're going to try, the more you're going to put yourself out there. And the more you do those things, the more you're going to see your own competence at new things that you want to try, and new levels in your career, and new levels in relationships. And the more competence you have will then increase your confidence. And the cycle goes on and on. So competence and confidence are bidirectional, and both of those things require courage.

Common questions

How can I increase my self-confidence?

Do small things that stretch you, then notice that you did them. Confidence grows from evidence, so each attempt, even an imperfect one, gives you more to stand on. Pair that with kinder self-talk when things go wrong.

What causes lack of confidence?

It often comes from a mix of past experiences, harsh self-criticism, comparison with others and avoiding challenges. Avoidance is the sneaky one: the less you try, the less proof you have that you can handle things, so confidence shrinks further.

How do I fix my lack of confidence?

You don't fix it all at once. Break the avoidance cycle with one small, doable step, and plan how you'll take care of yourself if it doesn't go well. As Janey puts it, the cycle "goes on and on," and it can work in your favor. If low confidence is affecting your daily life, talking with a therapist can help.

About the expert: Janey Brown is a mental resilience coach, founder of Fearce Academy and author of Fear To Fearce, with an education in psychology and 100 hours of trauma studies.

Related: Resilience vs. Perseverance: What's the Difference?