Practice is what breeds competence and competence builds confidence.
To become a commercial Pilot the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) requires a minimum of 1,500 flight hours to get at least a commercial pilot license. This includes hours of practice in aircraft simulators where a lot of scenarios are practiced. From bad weather to emergency situations like stall, thunder strike, bird strike/attack, etc., and what the appropriate response should be.
Lots of different situations, under different conditions, are simulated and practiced for. These practices help to build competence and confidence in the student before actually training with a powered aircraft.
If you spend a lot of time doing something, practicing a skill over a long period of time you develop enough knowledge to iterate. And with iteration comes a high level of competence at that thing which is further accompanied by the self-confidence that if you are asked to do a similar thing, you will be sure about your ability to do it, and do it well.
Professional Boxers prepare for their matches by training and practicing with their team. And they rely on those training and practice to win the match. Training does not mean that they’ve had a replica of the match they are going for, but it is a preparation that builds their ability and confidence to win the match.
So it is with school when done right. You are prepared for the world outside not by practicing every possibility that you’re likely to face out there. But good educational systems will help you make experiences that you can edit, duplicate and use in other situations. But next to that, you will be taught how to think and not what to think. You will be trained on learning how to learn. So that when you are faced with a problem out there that requires a solution you do not know, you are well equipped with the methods and tools that make you competent enough to develop a strategy that helps you in solving that problem. You have the knowledge and skills to learn about new stuff and perform what is expected of you. Such that even when faced with something you have never solved before you are well equipped to tackle it. And in there is also the power of repetition.
In this article, I explain how self-confidence is a skill that can be learned through practice, repetition, and iteration which is a short way of describing deliberate practice with feedback.
Self-confidence
Self-confidence is a feeling of trust and belief in oneself about your abilities to accomplish any task. A belief in your qualities and of yourself.
It is a strong belief in your qualities and a balanced view of yourself – taking pride in your abilities while recognizing and accepting your flaws. 1 While Iteration is repetition but with a slight change every time for improvement or to achieve a specific goal. Repetition often provides the information you require to iterate.
Two important things required to build healthy self-confidence are a good (positive) mindset and iteration.
A good (positive) mindset
Having a good and positive view of yourself boosts your self-confidence and influences how you think of yourself and how knowledgeable you are about yourself.
As a rule of thumb, assume the best in yourself and in people until proven otherwise. But be realistic and patient, knowing that a single event does not define you.
Repetition
Especially when it comes to building a skill, learning how to do something and to be better at it, how to be competent at that specific thing, repetition and persistence are key.
Of course, when it comes to being the best at something, what is required goes beyond mere repetition of a task or regular practice of a skill. But even in the complexities required for these high-end goals, an element of repetition is right there at the heart of deliberate practice. And for building confidence, repetition is often the start and a really good start which provides the necessary information for iteration.
What comes from Repetition
Repetition is the recurrence of an action or event. The act of repeating the same thing over and over again. And a few good things come out of repetition:
You learn to fail and realize what failure is.
You develop a sense of what should be improved and what you’ve already improved at.
Repetition provides insight into what we know about a skill and what we don’t. It initially makes our level of competence obvious. It is also very informative on the elements and components of a skill that we should pay more attention to, what we should give more deliberate practice. It reveals what we know and don’t know about a skill, builds self-awareness which is a big factor in self-confidence.
Repetition provides valuable insight into the ins and outs of a skill which can help us properly channel deliberate practice into areas that we should master, and it can easily be used to measure, or it can provide us the data to measure our level of mastery of an area or component.
Using the information from repetition and deliberate practice can provide valuable feedback that with a coach or teacher this feedback can be well structured for further improvements which all end up in building our competence level and by implication self-confidence.
Maintaining a healthy level of self-confidence
People will never rise above the opinion of themselves
– Peter Sage
If you look at professional athletes, experts, and those that excel at the top of what they do, you will find a sickening work ethic, deliberate practice, and a lot of rephrasing of feedback such that it propels them forward rather than put them down. Arnold Schwarzenegger during his bodybuilding days would train 5 to 6 hours, six days a week.
Michael Jordan would stay two to three hours more on the basketball court to train even after his other teammates are gone. And as he mentioned in his hall of fame speech, he always knew he was the best and always wanted to prove that. These work ethics that is reflected in deliberate practice, combined with a healthy belief in one’s elf make the combination of the best. This is obvious in Muhammed Ali’s famous declaration of “I am the greatest,” “I am the greatest”.
Self-talk
We all have an inner voice and more than we think we can control what that voice will say and should say.
In a world where enough people are telling us that we can’t do something or that our dreams are not possible or achievable, we owe it to ourselves to tell ourselves that we can. That it is possible, that we deserve it and that we will achieve whatever we put our minds to. Learn to resist or avoid negative self-talk for they only move you in the opposite direction of where you want to be headed.
Enabling Environment
Our habits and intentions will always be beaten by our environment overtime – Peter Sage
The saying that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with is valid and has a lot of merits. For it is the foundational base of the law of conforming. Here is an example: if you’re in a group of say 15 to 20 people watching a comedy show and a funny joke comes up and then everyone starts laughing there is a chance you will laugh too even without getting the joke.
This is the same reason why sitcoms have laugh tracks to stimulate the audience to laughter and at the right time even without getting a joke.
Living in an environment or around people who encourage you to pursue your goals, who believe in you can contribute greatly to your view of yourself or shape it.
So, it is important to create a positive and enabling environment that reinforces the good in you while providing structured feedback that helps you get better.
I remember a few years back when I was still in high school and the year after I finished, I would listen to audios of Les Brown as I worked to achieve my goal of studying the one thing I was determined to; Aeronautical engineering. I would also tell people about it, and some would only see its complexity, but I always had the voice of Les in my head saying “It’s possible” “Will it be easy? Maybe not but is it possible, YES!” because I listened to him a lot.
And he made more sense than those who only saw it as an unattainable, unachievable dream, so I started to listen to Les more. And decided to listen to them less. (Pun intended)
I genuinely believed that it was possible and was willing to do what it will take to get that which I wanted and so decided to stay around and talk to those who believed this as well. Those who also believed, it was possible.
Interpreting feedback in a way that moves you forward.
A good coach or teacher will give you structured feedback that helps you to get better. Feedback in a way that helps you to move in the direction that you want to go.
But life is not always that generous and your mind will occasionally test you, it will give feedbacks, interpretations that do not help you in any meaningful way.
It will interpret feedback to mean you’re not good enough, to imply that whatever the goal you’re looking towards is not attainable. So, you must train your mind, and learn how to structure feedback in ways that propel you forward to see the positives in most feedback and to ultimately rephrase them in a way that pushes you up and does not put you down.
The confidence to fail
The other thing with repetition is that it makes you comfortable in taking the advantages that come with failure. It helps you see failure for what it is. You can fail with confidence and move forward with it.
Against popular opinion, don’t fake your way to success, rather fail your way to success. Because to fail is not final. And often, there are more lessons in failure than we could learn in success. These lessons don’t have to all come from your failures, but you can learn from those before you, and should.
“We have been fighting on this planet for ten thousand years; it would be idiotic and unethical to not take advantage of such accumulated experiences. If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.”
— General Jim Mattis
Conclusion
How you think about yourself and the effort to invest in deliberate practice will build your self-confidence in general and in a specific skill.
Repetition (deliberate practice through feedback) and repetition can be learned. So can the way you think about yourself be changed, but you have to first realize that there is a current way in which you view yourself. (Because many people seem not to realize this) And that there is an opinion that you have of yourself, the question becomes
“Is this opinion moving you in the direction you wish to be headed?”
PS: living your life based on the opinions of others is the easiest way to lose self-confidence and a crappy way to live your life. I hope you will do better for yourself.
