Building Confidence: A Step-by-Step Guide
Building Confidence: Neuroscience-Backed Methods for Self-Assurance
Confidence, it turns out, is not something that some people are born with, but rather a skill that can be learned and honed. This revelation comes from the field of neuroscience, which has been studying the brain networks that generate confidence for years.
Dr Stacie Grossman Bloom, a neuroscientist at New York University, serves as the Chief Research Officer, Vice Provost, and Vice Chancellor for Global Research and Innovation at the university. Her work, along with that of many other researchers, has shed light on the ways in which confidence can be cultivated.
One approach supported by neuroscience is bold, authentic action and emotional healing. Engaging in real-life actions that reflect your true self rewires your brain to build authentic, lasting confidence. This method avoids pretending or pushing through fear superficially and instead rewires neural pathways over time for enduring self-assurance.
Another key approach is self-affirmation and positive feedback. Practicing self-affirmation activates your brain’s reward circuits, strengthening follow-through and increasing self-efficacy. Positive feedback reshapes brain circuitry to reduce self-doubt and increase belief in your abilities, which enhances performance and motivation.
Visualization and mental rehearsal are also important methods for building confidence. Regularly visualizing future success with emotional believability creates new predictive models in the brain, signaling safety and readiness. This repeated mental rehearsal subtly rewires thought patterns, posture, and choices to align with confidence before external behaviors change.
Daily confidence practices, such as journaling, visualization, goal-setting, and focused affirmations, build the "mental muscle" for confidence by reinforcing new neural pathways supporting focus, self-discipline, and calmness in stressful situations.
Feedback loops and transferability are crucial aspects of building confidence. Reflecting on successes and failures in a structured way helps your brain trust itself and transfer confidence from one context to others, making self-belief more flexible and robust.
The brain's reward system and the neurotransmitter dopamine play a crucial role in confidence. Acting confident can activate 'success mechanisms' in the brain, according to clinical psychologist Prof Ian Robertson. Faking confidence can feel fake at first but becomes more natural over time. Regularly challenging oneself in small, achievable ways can train the brain to associate effort with success.
Confident people tend to be healthier, happier, and more resilient. The hippocampus, the brain's memory hub, helps reactivate the brain networks involved in past successful experiences, reinforcing belief in future success. On the other hand, low confidence is associated with the fear of judgment, poorer mental health, and a higher likelihood of engaging in criminal behavior.
Post-event anxiety can trigger the release of noradrenaline, impairing the ability to think clearly. Prof Ian Robertson suggests that if you came across as composed and self-assured in a social interaction, you should not overthink it and beat yourself up.
A YouGov survey found that only 16% of people describe themselves as 'very confident'. Neuroscience-backed methods for building confidence offer a promising solution to this issue, leveraging neuroplasticity—the brain's ability to form new neural connections—to create lasting changes in self-belief and behavior.
- Dr Stacie Grossman Bloom, a neuroscientist, emphasizes bold, authentic action and emotional healing as a neuroscience-supported method for building lasting confidence.
- Self-affirmation and positive feedback, as practiced, activate the brain's reward circuits, leading to increased self-efficacy and reduced self-doubt.
- Regular visualization and mental rehearsal create new predictive models in the brain, signaling safety and readiness, and subtly rewire thought patterns for increased confidence.
- Daily confidence practices fortify the "mental muscle" for confidence by reinforcing new neural pathways, supporting focus, self-discipline, and calmness in stressful situations.
- Reflecting on successes and failures in a structured way helps the brain trust itself, making self-belief more flexible and robust, and transferring confidence from one context to another.
- The hippocampus, the brain's memory hub, plays a role in reactivating the brain networks involved in past successful experiences, reinforcing belief in future success and leading to overall health, happiness, and resilience.
- Post-event anxiety can impair the brain's ability to think clearly, but Prof Ian Robertson suggests not overthinking interactions and instead embracing the idea that acting composed and self-assured can train the brain to associate effort with success.
