If you’re working hard and taking chances in life, here’s an
uncomfortable truth: You will fail from time to time, and certainly more
than the average person. The cost of confronting your limitations, of
course, is your sense of confidence, the one quality we need to succeed
and risk losing when we fail. Understanding how to restore confidence
when it dips is an essential skill, and it depends on three core
components: attitude, knowledge and experience.

By working within those three domains, we can learn to rebuild and
sustain confidence through its natural ebbs and flow. Adopting the
powerful principle of “as if” and tending to our wounds helps us develop
the attitude necessary for authentic confidence. Reframing our failures
as growth opportunities allows us to expand the knowledge that
underpins confidence. And refusing to quit while celebrating small wins
feeds the life experience that underlies true and lasting confidence.

This constellation of capabilities — attitude, knowledge, and experience, which together make up AOC’s CAKE formula
— is the formula for true and sustainable confidence. That’s what this
article is about: How to restore your confidence when it takes a hit —
in an authentic, meaningful, and lasting way.


Act “As If”
As with most cliches, “Fake it till you make it” has an inkling of
truth to it. Sometimes, “faking” your way through an activity — which
means going through the motions of life as a stepping stone to
reengaging — turns an obstacle into a reality.

Author AJ Jacobs is a great example of that principle. In an old piece, he writes openly about working amidst his despair over a particularly heavy book project:

My solution? Deception. I tricked my brain. I’d force myself to act in an optimistic way…

And after a couple of hours, it worked. My mind would catch up with
my actions. I would start to feel optimistic. It’s astounding how much
the outer can affect the inner, how much behavior can affect your
thoughts.

Research confirms Jacobs’ experience. A study from Harvard, published in Psychological Science, shows that body language can influence how confident you feel, as Amy Cuddy highlights in this TED talk. (Here’s a working copy of that paper.) As we teach here at AOC, the body follows the mind, and the mind follows the body.

In that view, confidence isn’t something we have, it’s something we do.
Acting “as if” should never be a permanent solution to dips in
confidence, but done right, it won’t need to be. Once we trick ourselves
into going through the motions, our true selves — that is, our
confident selves — take over. And that’s what restoring confidence looks
like in action.


Tend to Your Wounds
True confidence isn’t about suppressing pain or pretending that
failure doesn’t hurt. On the contrary: true confidence comes from
accepting blows to our ego, allowing ourselves to acknowledge the
associated feelings, and finding ways to stay in the game.

So an important component of restoring confidence is allowing
ourselves the time and energy to tend to our wounds. We don’t need to
dwell on them or give them more importance than they deserve (tending to
your wounds can become a full-time job — and another seductive way to
avoid action!), but we do need to acknowledge them in order to move
forward. Remember, vulnerability is the most profound form of strength.

If your confidence has taken a hit, don’t expect the recovery to be
instantaneous. A professional, personal, or creative setback will take
time to properly process. Your wounds might not fully heal for some time
(or ever, in some cases), but they will eventually become more
bearable. More importantly, if you stay in the game, those wounds will
morph into something more profound: a reminder that confidence, like a
muscle, only grows through challenges. As Andrew Solomon helped us
realize, the worst moments in our lives can make us who we are.

So how can you tend to your wounds and use them to restore confidence?

Spending time with loved ones is important. The people you care about
can lend an ear and empathize when you need it most. Discussing your
challenges and processing your feelings is a highly therapeutic process
in the right company. Friends, accountability partners, family and
significant others are excellent partners for that conversation.

Travel is also a powerful way to heal. Sometimes, getting out of your
immediate surroundings (even for a day trip) will give you the space
and clarity to reflect. It can also remind you how vast and exciting and
significant the world is, which is easy to forget when your confidence
dips.

Journaling is another important process. Self-reflection (in whatever
form) gives us the time and perspective to process events as they
unfold. Writing them down gives them a degree of objectivity and safety,
and helps us realize that our wounds are not always as deep as they
seem. Journaling also creates a record of your growth for you to
revisit, so you can track your wins along the way. The entire process is
both therapeutic and motivational.

But more important than how you heal is that you heal — that you allow yourself to authentically process your feelings, accept them, and forge ahead.

Remember: Tending to your wounds is a crucial step in restoring
confidence, but it’s not an end in and of itself. Ignoring a blow to
your confidence is just as dangerous as overindulging in self pity.
Recognize the urge to either repress or sulk, which are really two
different ways of avoiding action. (In fact, you can think of those two
extremes as desirable forms of quitting!)

Like all good therapy, the goal here is to get back to the business
of being you — to the process of building your confidence by checking in
with yourself, staying in the game, reframing your setbacks, and
remembering that beautiful paradox: that by risking your confidence out
there in the world, you ultimately contribute to its growth.








Reframe Your Failure
There’s a famous story from IBM.
An executive there once thought he was going to get fired after losing
$10 million of the company’s money, only to have the CEO surprise him.


“Fired? Hell, I spent $10 million educating you. I just want to be sure you learned the right lessons.”


The price of failure is a lesson learned with pain. Perhaps you’ve
been embarrassed, dumped, or fired. Maybe you’ve spoken out of turn or
blown a deal. These setbacks can keep you on the sidelines, make you
feel defeated, and brand you as a failure.


Or you can choose to see these moments as an opportunity to learn,
become better, and rebuild for the future. That doesn’t mean it won’t
hurt. It just means that your “failure” isn’t the full story. The rest
of the story is what you choose to learn and do by seeing the situation
differently.


This technique is called reframing (which we’ve touched on
previously), and this perceptual shift allows you transform the beliefs
that don’t help you achieve your goals (called “unresourceful beliefs”)
into ones that do, and create actionable steps to make change. Failure,
as we’ve said, is inevitable. How you process those failures is up to you.


As interviewer Zane Lowe once said to Kanye West, “You win or you learn.” Through that lens, total failure — in which you gain nothing at all — is actually an illusion.



Make It Difficult to Quit
There are few things as immediately gratifying as quitting. When you
quit a difficult project or avoid taking a risk, a sense of relief
replaces a sense of dread. You don’t have to fight any longer. You don’t
have to challenge your beliefs. You can rest. You can remain the same.
You get to enjoy a temporary refuge from the stress, anxiety, and
frustration of confronting your limitations. And let’s be honest: When
you’re feeling unconfident, quitting often feels like the only viable
option.


But quitting has long-term consequences that can far outweigh the
immediate rewards. Sidestepping or shying away from an opportunity
doesn’t remove your desire to grow; it only paints over it by postponing
your discomfort. It also keeps you stationary and stagnant, and denies
you the satisfaction of progress, which is the currency of confidence.
True gratification doesn’t come from avoiding blows to your confidence,
but from stick with the opportunities that challenge it. The key is to
stay in the game.


That idea has kept some of the greatest artists and entrepreneurs alive and engaged with their work. As Woody Allen once told Marshall Brickman, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” Simply being there is often the difference between unstoppable confidence and abject fear.


So how do you make it difficult to quit, when quitting seems like the only attractive option?


One solution is to use a simple accountability system that discourages you from dropping out. As Greek poet and soldier Archilochus
once wrote, “We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to
the level of our training.” Making commitments to partners (on
deadlines, deliverables or achievements) can create the accountability
we need to stick with our projects.


Another accountability technique is to add stakes, like financial punishment, to your goals (by using services like Stickk.com).
On the positive side, you can have friends keep you accountable, so
that anytime you quit your social network will know. You’ll be surprised
how far you’ll go to avoid social embarrassment or to honor a
commitment to a friend. Many find the combination of negative and
positive reinforcement insurmountable. They don’t quit because they
can’t — which makes them realize that they ultimately don’t want to.


Which isn’t to say that quitting is always bad, or that shifts in
strategy aren’t sometimes necessary. In fact, it takes intelligence and
honesty to know when to move on from a project or change your goals. But
it’s often our level of confidence that tells us when to quit and when
to stick around. And making it difficult to drop out can create the
conditions to remain connected to our confidence, even when it seems
like we’re failing.



Build Momentum with Small Wins
Most of us think of confidence as an all-or-nothing proposition. We even talk about it that way: We say that someone has confidence or lost confidence. We rarely say that someone is nurturing or piecing together confidence.
Even the phrase “building confidence” seems to suggest that there’s a
lack of it to begin with. Like attractiveness, health and success, we
tend to believe that people either have confidence or they don’t, which
is an unfortunate myth.


The truth is that confidence is less like a switch you turn on and
off, and more like something you build one brick at a time. As author
and journalist Charles DuHigg quotes in his book, The Power of Habit:

“Small wins are a steady application of a small
advantage,” one Cornell professor wrote in 1984. “Once a small win has
been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small
win.” Small wins fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny
advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements
are within reach.

My first year in college was also the first year I’d lived away from
home. My self control deteriorated quickly as I settled into my newfound
freedom. I was having a great time, except for one thing: I had barely
scraped by my midterms. At this rate I was going to flunk out of my
program and return home devastated. I was screwed. My confidence was
shot. If I couldn’t even meet my program’s scores, how was I supposed to
land my dream job?


Things only got worse as final exams loomed. My procrastination was
increasing, since I saw no point in studying. I could barely get up in
time to go to class. Realizing I needed help, my parents drove up to
school and helped me created a schedule to guide my studying. It wasn’t
rigorous — just six hours of studying at the library every day in two
three-hour sessions. I remember being skeptical. If it was that simple,
I’d have done it already. But I agreed to give it a try.


After the first day, an inkling of hope. By the end of the second
day, a breakthrough: I had gotten more studying done than I had the
entire previous week. Even better, I actually remembered course
material, which had been eluding me. After one week, I felt powerful,
like I had regained control of my marks and my sense of self. It was a
pebble of a foundation I could slowly build on. I was rediscovering my
confidence using the power of small wins.


Those small wins are available in every situation. If you’ve just
gotten fired, start your intimidating job hunt by sending out five
resumes. If you’re bouncing back from an old relationship, try talking
to three new people. If you’ve just stumbled on a creative project, pick
a section you can focus on over a weekend, and temporarily put the
bigger picture aside.


Every failure can be broken down into components. Those components
are the seeds of small wins. And small wins are the stuff of confidence.
If you work just an extra bit harder and smarter every day, your minor improvements will accumulate. Life really is a game of inches.


And a dynamic process of strengthening confidence by enhancing our attitude, knowledge and experience, one piece at a time.