How to Gain Confidence: 3 Steps to Build Self-Confidence Through Action

What if you don’t need to feel confident before you start? What if starting is actually how you become confident?

A lot of us spend years waiting for confidence to arrive. We tell ourselves we’ll apply for the opportunity when we’re more confident. We’ll share our work when we believe in ourselves more. We’ll speak up when we aren’t so nervous. We’ll start the business, try the new hobby, make the first move, or put ourselves out there when we finally feel ready. But there’s a problem with waiting for confidence to come first: You may be waiting forever.

Confidence isn’t always something you find somewhere inside yourself before taking action. Often, it’s something you build because you take action: You try something that makes you uncomfortable. You discover that you can handle it. You learn something from the experience. You do it again. And eventually, the thing that once felt terrifying becomes familiar.

That’s the process I want to explore in this article.

What Is Confidence?

Before we talk about how to build confidence, it’s helpful to understand what we’re actually talking about.

In everyday language, confidence generally refers to a belief in yourself, your abilities, or your capacity to handle something.

Psychology gives us a closely related concept called self-efficacy. The American Psychological Association describes self-efficacy as a person’s sense of confidence in their ability to put in the necessary effort and successfully follow a path toward accomplishing a goal.

This is important because confidence isn’t necessarily one giant, all-encompassing feeling. You might feel extremely confident speaking about something you know well but have almost no confidence walking into an unfamiliar situation. You might be confident in your ability to write but not confident enough to publish your writing. You might feel confident at work but struggle to speak up in relationships.

In other words, confidence can be specific to a situation, skill, or challenge. And that means you don’t necessarily need to become a universally confident person. You can start by building confidence in one area at a time.

Why Waiting to Feel Confident Can Keep You Stuck

Imagine you want to do something that scares you.

Maybe you want to:

• Start a business
• Share your art
• Ask someone out
• Apply for a new job
• Speak in front of people
• Go somewhere alone
• Set a boundary
• Try a new sport
• Post your work online
• Start creating content
• Make a major life change

But you think, "I don’t have enough confidence to do this." So you don’t do it. And then, because you don’t do it, you don’t get the experience of doing it. And because you don’t get the experience, you don’t have much evidence that you can handle it. And because you don’t have that evidence, you continue to doubt yourself. It’s a viscous cycle.

But the good news is that you can reverse the cycle. If you take action, you gain experience. If you gain experience, you gain evidence. If you gain evidence, you increase your confidence. If you increase your confidence, it becomes easier to take another action.

This idea has roots in psychological research on self-efficacy. Albert Bandura’s work emphasized the importance of mastery experiences—actually performing a behavior and experiencing yourself as capable—in developing self-efficacy. In other words, sometimes you don’t think your way into confidence. You act your way into it.

Our 3-Step Confidence-Building Process

If you’re wondering how to gain confidence, here’s our simple three-step framework:

1. Start Small and Start Today

Step one is simple, and yet can be difficult to do. Simply put: just do something small. Notice that I didn’t say, "Do something huge." Taking the biggest possible leap may be the opposite of what you need. Instead, find one small action that is slightly outside your comfort zone.

For example, if you want to become more comfortable speaking publicly, you don’t necessarily have to give a 45-minute presentation tomorrow. Maybe you start by speaking up once in a small group. Or, if you want to share your writing, you don’t have to publish an entire book in a month. Maybe you share one paragraph with one friend or family member. Or, If you want to start exercising, you don’t need to commit to an intense six-days-per-week workout program. Maybe you take a 10-minute walk today.

The goal with step one is to give yourself an experience of taking action despite the discomfort. Oh, and there’s another important part: Start today. Don’t let “someday” become another way of avoiding the thing. Ask yourself, "What is the smallest version of this that I could actually do today?" Then do it.

2. Take Note of What Happened

This is the step people often skip. You did the scary thing and survived it. Maybe it even went well. And then you immediately move on.

Instead, you should stop and notice what happened. There are two kinds of evidence I want you to pay attention to. (1) Your internal environment and (2) your external environment. I would even suggest you take out a pen and a journal and write about it. Use the following questions:

Internal environment: How did you feel before? Were you nervous? Embarrassed? Excited? Convinced something would go wrong? Then answer what happened once you actually did the thing. Did the anxiety decrease? Did you feel relieved? Did you feel proud? Did you realize that the anticipation was worse than the actual experience? Did you discover that you were more capable than you thought?

External environment: Did people react the way you feared? Did someone encourage you? Did you receive positive feedback? Did the opportunity turn out to be less intimidating than you imagined? Did absolutely nothing terrible happen?

All of this will provide you with information and help you gain knowledge about yourself. Plus, the more evidence you consciously notice, the easier it becomes to remember: "I’ve done this before. I can handle discomfort. I figured it out last time. Maybe I can do it again."

And know that you don’t need every experience to be positive for it to build confidence.  Sometimes you try something and it doesn’t go well, and that's okay. You may learn that you need more practice. You may discover something isn’t actually for you. You may figure out what you want to do differently next time.

Step 3: Repeat

This is where real confidence begins! Doing something uncomfortable once might give you a little boost of confidence, but doing it repeatedly creates familiarity, experience, and a full collection of evidence.

So, you have to repeat. Take a small step. Record the evidence. Then do it again. And again. And again. And...when the small step starts feeling comfortable, take a slightly bigger step. That's how you gradually expand your comfort zone.

What If You Don’t Feel Confident Yet?

You might be reading this thinking, “Okay, but I genuinely don’t feel confident at all.”

Well, friend, that’s exactly why you don’t have to start big. Start with something almost laughably small. If being seen makes you uncomfortable, let yourself be seen doing something silly. If talking to strangers makes you nervous, give someone a genuine compliment. If asking for things feels uncomfortable, make one small request.

In fact, we have created just the thing for you: All With Heart's 7-Day Confidence Builder. It offers relatively simple, low-stakes activities designed to help you practice being seen, speaking up, taking action, and doing things outside your comfort zone. You can get it on our homepage. It will pop up in the bottom left corner. Sign up for our email list and it will get delivered straight to your inbox.  

If you’re interested in more tools for self-reflection, personal growth, creativity, and intentional living, explore All With Heart's offerings or coaching programs. And, be sure to check out our Youtube video on building confidence.

We believe in you! And please let us know how this three-step confidence building process goes. 

With love and pumping blood,

All With Heart