The Confidence Myth
First published on March 15, 2018
What if this whole confidence thing is a myth? Because I think it might be.
There's a story we're told, of the clear, confident person setting out to achieve things and then... well... achieving those things. And for most of us, with that myth in mind, "I don't feel confident enough" is a thought that sounds rather familiar.
It certainly does to me, and yet sometimes I think any success I have had has been built on a story not of confidence but a story of carrying on despite not being confident.
I have been reflecting recently on the power of a part of my adolescence and early adulthood which dominated my life, my friendships and so much of my experience. Ever since I took part in a school play aged 10 or 11, playing the part of a WW1 soldier in the Christmas truce in 1914. Since that, and since after that Mr Leeming invited me to take the lead role in the next play, I practiced this strange art. I took part in 10s of productions over the next 15 years or so. And there are two things that come to me now: one is that there were almost always moments in each production when I thought it was going to be terrible, I was going to be terrible. And the other was, those moments rarely came the moment before I stepped out onto stage.
So one question is, was I a confident performer? And the answer is that by the end I was. Indeed, I still am. But was I confident the whole way through? No, not in the least. Many a bonding session with a cast was over the soon-to-be-disaster of the production we were in. The terrible leadership. That person who just didn't get it. But, mostly those productions weren't terrible.
And I learnt to carry on. To carry on trying to get better. And, when it came to the moments of truth, to go on anyway.
And of course, on stage, most of the time, I looked confident. I was playing the game by then. But up until that point, sometimes until the final rehearsals, sometimes even during the productions, I was full of doubts.
And what I learnt over 15 years was that it would be OK. That it was usually better than I thought it would be. That other people (mostly) looked beyond the doubts I had. And that those people who just criticised, criticised, criticised I didn't have much time for anyway.
A few months ago I wrote elsewhere about how, really, confidence is just a belief that you can make happen the things that you want to happen. And that is what I did through those years. I learnt, starting somewhere early on, and then becoming more and more embodied as I saw it over and over again. The worries I had were there to help. They would spur me to find the way to make the character work, to speak up to a director, to speak to a fellow actor to try to make the whole thing better. And over time I learnt that even when the worst happened, it was rarely as bad as I imagined. And I learnt that as long as I didn't stop, things would happen. I would make things happen.
Later, I met Rich Litvin, who introduced me to his much quicker way of saying something very similar, and perhaps easier for you to remember: Confidence is a result, not arequirement.
So what am I really saying here? I'm saying that the confident feeling that you want won't magically appear in the places you want it. I'm also saying, why not focus on all the areas that you are confident: you are confident you can climb the stairs to your flat, that you can make your bed, that you can write and send an email, that you can find what you need to via Google. There are hundreds of thousands of places in your life where you are - deservedly - confident. You believe - through experience - that you can make happen the things you want to. You have the result.
And it's almost impossible to remember now the first time you climbed stairs, or made a bed. But even then, you didn't know you could do it. You probably didn't do it well first time. A fall, or a tangled duvet, almost certainly happened. But you didn't stop. You just tried again next time. Maybe you learnt a little. And, over time, the confidence emerged.