Why Building Confidence First Has the Order Backwards

Introduction: Looking for Confidence Before Moving

Before setting out, I must first build some confidence. A great many people feel this. So they search for ways to build it, try morning declarations, work at clearing whatever is said to be blocking them. And while searching, the confidence does not arrive, and only the hours spent blaming themselves increase.

Habits for building confidence and ways of using language are already well documented. What this article takes up is the ordering. Does the sequence “build confidence, then move” even hold?

Here is the conclusion first. Confidence is not the premise of action but its result. And the explanation that you cannot change because confidence is lacking is not a diagnosis of your character; it is the output that a particular design of explanation — one that narrows the cause to a single place — necessarily produces.

Measurement That Returns No Purchase

Start with the scene in which confidence fails to grow.

You take on a successful person’s morning habits. For the first few days there is real purchase. Mornings previously spent loosely become deliberate time. The very fact of doing the same things feels like evidence that you are changing.

Yet as weeks and months go on, something odd happens. The days you keep the habit are, if anything, the days the mind settles least.

Search for the reason and you reach a mechanism. Copying a model presses on you, each time you do it, the fact that you are not yet that person. The motion of closing the distance to the model becomes, each time, the motion of measuring that distance again. The closer you try to get, the more you confirm you have not arrived.

This is the opposite of a bathroom scale. Someone stepping on a scale receives the falling number as real progress. The person copying a model has no corresponding number. What they have instead is the standard “am I becoming like that person,” which they can never declare met. A scale lets you step off at “target reached.” From this standard there is no stepping off, ever.

Nothing wears a mind down like measurement that returns no purchase. And a worn-down mind seeks the cause of that exhaustion not in the apparatus of measurement but, once again, in its own inadequacy. The purchase is missing because the standard is hollow — and it gets reread as: the purchase is missing because I am still immature.

The Endless Censorship Created by “Erase the Negative”

Another instruction is handed out frequently. Let go of your negative assumptions about money. The moment the thought “I cannot do this” appears, extinguish it — monitor the weakness in your mind and delete it on sight.

This instruction creates a new job inside the practitioner’s mind. The job of continually watching your own thoughts. All day you patrol your own head, housing within yourself a censor who polices unsuitable thinking. Far from lightening the mind, it is labour without a moment’s rest.

And a paradox attends the censorship. As Wegner and colleagues showed, trying to suppress a thought makes that thought harder to be rid of [Wegner et al., 1987]. The more firmly you order yourself not to think about the anxiety, the further forward into consciousness it comes. The force trying to extinguish it summons the very thing it wants gone.

Something else is easy to miss. The thoughts ordered deleted often include the person’s accurate perception of reality.

“At my present income the future is uncertain.” “This spending does not match my situation.” These are not necessarily distorted assumptions. If anything they are healthy sensors, reading a situation calmly. As the nerves that register pain protect the body from danger, the sensation of anxiety is an important signal about the precariousness of one’s own reality.

Ordering it deleted as weakness risks blocking the very eye that sees your own reality. It is like removing a warning light, bulb and all, because it is a nuisance. The anxiety as feeling can be held down, but the reality producing it stays untouched.

▸ Why copying surface habits does not last is taken up in why copying a morning routine does not copy the results.

Why the Failure Comes Back to Your Own Interior

Now the central question. When things do not work, why is the failure always sent back to the practitioner’s own interior?

The answer is in the design of the explanation. This kind of discourse put only one element on the stage as the determinant of wealth: the disposition of the mind. Capital, timing, birth, era — all placed outside the frame.

Then, logically, this follows. If the mind alone determines wealth, the result of not becoming wealthy can mean nothing except that the mind was defective. With only one candidate cause left standing, responsibility for the failure collects automatically on that candidate — your mind.

This happens not because the practitioner’s character is weak, but because the explanation was designed that way from the start.

The structure wounds most deeply those most cornered. For someone with room, a book of this kind may be weekend reading; if it fails, there is no injury. For someone holding their head over this month’s payments, who must change their situation somehow, it is a hope worth grasping at. The more desperate believe more deeply, put in what they have, and when nothing changes, take the explanation “because my heart is still lacking” fully to heart.

Let me be clear here. This harm has no visible face behind it. The people who wrote the books and the people who recommended them are mostly acting in good faith, sincerely encouraging. Even so, the structure of placing the cause of wealth in the mind alone operates through that good faith, and as a result loads the heaviest self-blame onto those in the weakest position. What deserves blame is not the individual speaker but the framework that makes the speech possible.

Putting the Standard Back in Your Own Hands

So how does one step off this circuit? The key is not to increase confidence but to check where the standard doing the measuring came from.

The voice saying “your mindset is lacking” could strike so hard because we were measuring ourselves by a standard borrowed from outside. Measured by a borrowed standard, a self that falls short is always “a self that is lacking.” So the voice always lands.

But for a person walking at their own pace towards their own goal, that voice no longer lands. They are not living by fitting themselves to a definition of success someone else set. The voice pierces only those who have internalised an external standard.

Do not mistake what follows. A self that does not collapse is not a hard self, unmoved by anything. If anything the opposite: an ordinary self that stumbles and gets low. The only difference is that after getting low, the low is not made into evidence of a defect in the person as such.

That something did not go well, and that you are without worth, are two different things. Living by a borrowed standard glues them together. A single failure spills straight into a rejection of the whole person. With the standard in your own hands, a failure stays a failure and remains there.

Concretely, when you stumble, ask this again: “whose standard did I fall short of?” If that standard was borrowed from outside, there is no need to make falling short of it a reason to punish yourself. Of course you fell short. It was never yours to begin with.

Conclusion: Confidence Is a Result, Not a Premise

The reason “build confidence, then move” has the order backwards is that the real source of confidence lies not in declarations or dispositions but in having actually carried something out with your own hands [Bandura, 1977]. So long as you try to prepare it as a premise, confidence will always be insufficient — you are trying to assemble, before acting, the thing that accumulates as a result of acting.

And feeling short of confidence now is not a flaw of character. Measure yourself long enough by a standard that returns no purchase and anyone arrives at the same place.

Swap the question and the order unwinds by itself. Not “how do I get confidence?” but “whose standard am I walking towards?” From the moment the standard returns to your side, a small step stops being a motion that re-measures the distance to a model and becomes experience that genuinely accumulates.

The whole picture is gathered in why copying a millionaire mindset does not make you rich.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Wegner, D. M., Schneider, D. J., Carter, S. R., & White, T. L. “Paradoxical Effects of Thought Suppression” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(1) (1987)
• Bandura, A. “Self-Efficacy: Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change” Psychological Review, 84(2) (1977)
• Sheldon, K. M., & Elliot, A. J. “Goal Striving, Need Satisfaction, and Longitudinal Well-Being: The Self-Concordance Model” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(3) (1999)