Search for a command to run...
No comments yet. Be the first to comment.
Have you ever felt alone in what you want for your life? You share something you are excited about, or a new direction you want to take. But the people around you just do not seem to get it. Most of t
It is easy to feel trapped by your surroundings. Maybe your workplace feels draining. Maybe your home does not give you the space to think. Maybe the people around you are pulling you in a direction y
Have you ever kept putting off something that actually matters to you? Not the small, boring tasks, but the important ones. The ones you know could genuinely move your life forward. Most people assume
Have you ever felt like you are working hard but still not getting anywhere? You are putting in the effort. You know you are capable. And yet, something keeps you feeling stuck. When this happens, mos
Most of us believe that change starts in the mind. We imagine the person we want to become. We picture ourselves as more confident, more disciplined, or more free. And we assume that if we think about
There is a belief that holds a lot of people back without them realising it.
The belief that you need to feel confident before you can take action.
So you wait. You tell yourself that once you feel ready, once the nerves settle, once you feel sure of yourself, then you will go for it. The new role. The difficult conversation. The idea you have been sitting on. And so you stay where you are, waiting until you feel ready. But that moment never comes.
Here is what the research actually shows. Confidence does not come before action. It comes from it. Most people have it the wrong way around.
Psychologist Albert Bandura spent years studying this. He introduced the idea of self-efficacy, which is your belief in your ability to handle a specific situation. And what he found is that this belief is built mostly through what he called "mastery experiences".
In simple terms, you build confidence by doing something, seeing that you can handle it, and then carrying that proof into the next attempt.
Think about how this works in practice. Nobody learns to speak in public by waiting until they feel confident. They start small. They practise. They speak to one person, then a few, then a room. Each time they get through it, their belief grows a little. The confidence is not what allows them to start.
It is what builds as a result of starting.
This is true for bigger challenges too. A lot of people wait for complete certainty before making a move. They want to feel fully sure before they begin. But that certainty rarely comes in advance. It is built through the experience of taking small steps and realising, one step at a time, that they are more capable than they thought.
And over time, those small wins add up. Each one strengthens your belief in yourself. The confidence you build in one area slowly spreads, until it becomes a deeper trust in your ability to handle whatever comes your way.
But if this is how confidence actually works, why do so many people get it the wrong way around? You see, we tend to look at confident people and assume they were simply born that way. But that is rarely how it happened. What we are seeing is the result of many small actions built up over time. We notice the confidence. What we do not see are all the uncomfortable moments that came before it.
That misunderstanding is what keeps people stuck. They compare their internal nervousness to someone else's external confidence and conclude that they are not ready. But that confident person was very likely just as nervous when they first started. The difference is they did not wait for the nerves to go away before taking action.
There is another side to this that is worth looking at, though it does come with some debate. Some research has looked at how your physical state can influence how you feel. For example, we usually think we smile because we feel happy. But research suggests it can also work in reverse. Sometimes the simple act of smiling can actually make us feel a little happier.
Social psychologist Amy Cuddy explored this through what became known as power posing. Her early work suggested that standing in an open, confident posture could even change certain hormone levels. Later studies challenged some of those findings, and the topic has been widely discussed and debated ever since.
But the broader idea still holds up. When you carry yourself as though you feel capable, it can actually help you feel more capable. If you have a big meeting coming up and you feel nervous, standing tall, speaking clearly, and making eye contact does not just project confidence to others. It can quietly shift how you feel on the inside too. Your brain takes cues from your behaviour and adjusts accordingly.
What this all points to is a simple but important shift in how we think about change. We tend to believe that the internal feeling has to come first, and then the action follows. But often it works the other way around. You take the action first, and the feeling catches up.
In the 6P™ Transformation Model, this connects to what we call "Persona." Your Persona is the identity you are stepping into. And the way you step into it is not by waiting until you feel like a different person. It is by acting like that person, in small ways, until it starts to feel true.
If you want to become someone who is confident, you do not wait around to feel confident first. You start doing the things a confident person would do, even while the doubt is still there. And each time you do, you give yourself a small piece of evidence that you are capable. Over time, that evidence builds into something solid.
This is not about pretending or forcing yourself into situations you are not ready for. It is about understanding that courage comes before confidence, not after it. You act first, even when it feels uncomfortable, and the confidence follows.
It also helps to start with steps that are small enough to feel manageable but still stretch you a little. You do not need to make a dramatic leap to begin building confidence. In fact, making a big change overnight can sometimes work against you. If they do not go well, they can shake your belief instead of strengthening it. A steadier approach is to take steps that push you slightly beyond your comfort zone. You succeed at them, and that success gives you the momentum to take the next one.
So if you have been waiting to feel ready before you make a change, it might be worth letting go of that idea. The readiness you are waiting for is usually built on the other side of action, not before it.
Start with one small step. Then another. And pay attention to how your belief in yourself grows each time you prove to yourself that you can.