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Cultivating Confidence
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Think about the last time you held back from raising your hand in a meeting, sending that pitch email or speaking up in a room full of people you respected. Chances are, you were waiting to feel ready or to feel certain. In other words, you were waiting, as most of us do, to feel confident. That wait, according to decades of psychological research, may be the very thing keeping confidence out of reach.
Confidence is one of the most misunderstood constructs in all of psychology. We tend to treat it as something that either arrives or doesn’t; something that we’re either born with or permanently lack. But this framing might be backwards. Confidence, the research consistently shows, is not a prerequisite for action. It is a product of it.
The Myth Of 'Feeling Confident'
The passive model of confidence might sound something like this in your head: “First, I’ll feel confident, then I’ll act.” To most of us, that framing sounds reasonable. In fact, it might even feel responsible. Why charge into a situation you’re not ready for?
The problem is that confidence doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t descend upon us from above once we’ve waited long enough or prepared sufficiently. According to psychologist Albert Bandura, whose research on self-efficacy remains among the most cited in the history of the field, the single most powerful source of confidence is what he called mastery........