How to Use Courage to Build Confidence

with guest Dean Graziosi #MakingBank S4E33

Confidence. Some people just seem to have it in abundance while others never seem to be able to muster any up at all. We all wish we were more confident, lamenting the universe for not providing us the right circumstances, genes, parents, or whatever else in order to instill the confidence within us that garners respect and propels us to great heights. 

While some people do happen to be naturally more confident than others, what doesn’t always meet the eye is that confidence can be worked on and can even take years to build. Sure, maybe that 6’2” guy with beautiful hair has an advantage, but confidence is like a skill or a muscle, and if you know how to improve it you can become the most confident person in any room you walk into. 

Take yourself as an example. There are probably certain people you feel more confident around and others you feel less confident around. There can also be time periods where we lose confidence and regain it later, depending on events that happen in our lives. You may be an incredibly confident tennis player, but match up against the same person in a golf match and the tables turn. We all go into a test more confidently if we have studied the material and know it inside and out. 

Considering these examples and examining yourself, it’s easy to see that confidence varies and changes based on your actions, so it follows that we can influence our own confidence to become better versions of ourselves. Today, we look at two different ways that we can become more confident and build the lives we want to. 

1. Stepping Out of Your Comfort Zone

It’s not an old adage, but it certainly should be: courage begets confidence. Why is Tarzan able to so confidently swing around the jungle that is full of dangerous creatures and plants? Because he’s lived there his entire life. He knows it, and he knows how to behave in order to avoid danger. 

Fictional characters aside, one of the quickest and most effective ways to build confidence is to step outside of our comfort zones and explore something new. Traveling to a new country where you don’t speak the language seems pretty daunting, but once you start to do it you quickly realize that it’s not such a big deal. Jumping out of a plane for the first time is terrifying and requires a great deal of courage, but after you do it several times you start to build confidence, get comfortable, and before you know it you’ll be doing flips in the air. 

If you want to build confidence, do something that scares you. Courage is proceeding through tension and fear because you want to grow. Confidence is staying loose and relaxed because you’ve been there before. 

Think about the last time you started a new job, or got a new promotion and had a higher level of responsibility. The first few days, maybe even the first month, were probably a bit nerve-wracking, but after a while that tension subsides and you become able to do your job with ease. Once you get that next promotion, those tensions come right back, but after you have gone through this process a number of times you will actually come to realize that you can handle bigger and bigger challenges and not see something new as so intimidating. Eventually, you will experience far fewer nerves about starting a new job or getting a new promotion, and that’s when your confidence has truly leveled up. 

Don’t be scared of new things. Instead, actively seek them out. Try to see them as something exciting, an opportunity to grow and come out better on the other side. 

2. Solving Bigger and Bigger Problems

On this path of building a career, whether it’s getting promoted, opening a new business, or going back to school, many people finally hit a problem they consider too big, get intimidated, and accept where they are. They get content and stop trying to improve. 

But, if you continue on, you realize that all problems are the same size relative to who you are now. You face a bigger problem only when YOU are bigger, so there’s really no difference between deciding where to go to college and deciding what type of business you want to open, who to hire, etc. When you’re facing a new problem that feels bigger than any problem you’ve felt before, try to think back to what some of those past hurdles felt before you soared past them, and how they feel now. 

Think back to how impossible writing a 10-page paper or completing a lab project once felt. That would be a piece of cake now, but it felt like a crushing impossibility to many of us at some point. 

Going through emotional and mental challenges is just like exploring new terrain or facing a physical fear. Once you solve the problem, it becomes easier to solve similar problems in the future. You’ve leveled up. 

When you’re hit with your next big problem and you resort to feeling upset, crushed, or like you’re under the weight of the world, try to shift your focus to what it will feel like when this problem is solved, and draw confidence from past obstacles that felt impossible to conquer before you ultimately succeeded. 

Life is nothing without problems. They are nothing more than our best opportunities to grow, find meaning, and change both our lives and the lives of others. Truthfully, we are lucky to have them, because without them life would be a boring, meaningless experience. Be grateful for the fact that you get to experience and solve your problems at all, no matter how impossible they may feel. Someday, you will never get the chance to experience them again.