Confidence

Why does everyone else seem so much more confident than I feel?

Confidence is one of those things we tend to imagine other people have naturally. You know the ones. They walk into a room without appearing to wonder where to stand, speak up in meetings without rehearsing the sentence three times in their head, make decisions without polling six friends first and somehow seem completely at ease with themselves. Meanwhile, you can be outwardly getting on with life perfectly well while privately wondering whether you are good enough, interesting enough, successful enough or, frankly, doing any of it quite right.

The strange thing is that confidence rarely looks the same from the inside. I have met people who appear enormously confident and accomplished but privately question themselves all the time, and people who are incredibly capable yet seem almost unable to see in themselves what everybody around them can see. We often think confidence is something we were either lucky enough to be born with or somehow missed out on. I don't think that's true. Confidence develops through our experiences, our relationships and the messages we have absorbed about ourselves along the way. Which also means it can change.

Where does our confidence go?

Sometimes people come to therapy saying they have lost their confidence, and occasionally there is a very obvious reason why. A relationship has ended, someone has been unfaithful, they have been made redundant, become a parent, gone through the menopause, changed career or spent years in a relationship where they gradually stopped feeling like themselves. Life can knock our confidence in ways we don't always recognise at the time.

But sometimes there isn't a single event. You may have grown up feeling that getting things right mattered a great deal, or that being easy, successful, attractive, clever or useful brought approval. Perhaps you learnt to keep other people happy, not make too much fuss or quietly compare yourself with the people around you. These things can become so familiar that we don't even notice them anymore. We just assume that the voice saying don't make a fool of yourself or everyone else is better at this than you is telling us the truth.

Of course, adulthood gives that voice plenty of new material. Work, relationships, parenting, ageing, dating and social media can all make us feel as though everybody else has been given a handbook we somehow missed. We see the friend whose marriage looks effortless, the colleague who seems completely at home in their success, the woman who appears to have sailed into motherhood, midlife or a new career without once wondering what on earth she is doing. What we don't see is what happens in their head at three in the morning.

We are comparing everything we know about ourselves with the small amount we can see of somebody else. It is hardly surprising that we sometimes come off badly.

When you secretly feel like a fraud

Imposter syndrome has become such a familiar phrase that we can forget how uncomfortable the actual experience is. You get the job and wonder whether they have made a mistake. Someone compliments you and you immediately explain why you don't deserve it. You achieve the thing you were convinced would finally make you feel good enough and almost immediately move the goalposts.

There is often a slightly painful irony here. The more capable we become, the more we may have to lose. If everyone thinks I'm good at this, what happens when I get something wrong? If people think I have my life together, what happens if they discover that I don't always feel that way? So we work harder, prepare more, second guess ourselves and become increasingly reliant on reassurance. We tell ourselves that when we are thinner, more successful, more experienced, more loved or finally have our lives sorted, confidence will arrive. Except there is always another hurdle waiting.

The ways we make ourselves smaller

Low confidence isn't necessarily obvious. It can look like perfectionism, people pleasing, procrastination or being the person who is exceptionally good at everything because getting something wrong feels unbearable. It can mean staying quiet when you have something to say, not asking for what you need in a relationship, turning down an opportunity or remaining somewhere you have long since outgrown because the familiar feels safer than finding out whether you could do something else.

We sometimes call this self sabotage, but I think that can sound unnecessarily blaming. It is often more interesting to ask what the behaviour might be protecting us from. If I don't apply for the job, I can't be rejected. If I don't tell you what I really want, you can't say no. If I don't allow myself to hope too much, perhaps disappointment won't hurt quite as badly. There is usually some logic to the things we do, even when that logic belongs to an earlier version of ourselves. Therapy can help us understand it rather than simply telling ourselves to stop doing it.

Confidence isn't thinking you're wonderful

Perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions about confidence is that it means feeling good about yourself all the time. I don't think it does. Truly confident people aren't necessarily the loudest people in the room and they certainly don't believe they are brilliant at everything. In fact, confidence can be remarkably quiet.

It is being able to say I got that wrong without turning it into there is something wrong with me. It is accepting that someone may not like you without immediately trying to change their mind. It is saying no without producing a lengthy explanation, accepting a compliment without batting it away and allowing yourself to try something before you are certain you will be good at it.

And yes, it is still feeling nervous. Confidence doesn't magically remove fear, embarrassment or self doubt. It simply means those feelings don't always get to make the decision.

So how can therapy help?

Therapy isn't going to turn you into somebody who strides into every room feeling fabulous. Nor should it. What it can do is give you somewhere to understand why certain situations make you doubt yourself so much and why your internal voice may be considerably less kind to you than it is to everybody else.

We might become curious about where your ideas about yourself came from, why another person's approval matters so much, why criticism can feel devastating or why you find it difficult to believe the good things people say about you. We can look at the relationships in which you make yourself smaller, the opportunities you avoid and the expectations you place on yourself that you would never dream of placing on somebody you love.

Understanding doesn't change everything overnight, but it can create a little space between what you feel and what you automatically believe. You begin to notice an old pattern without necessarily following it. You say what you think and discover that the world doesn't end. You set a boundary and survive somebody being disappointed. You try something without knowing whether you'll succeed. You make a mistake and realise that you are still perfectly okay.

And that, for me, is where confidence really begins. Not with becoming fearless or endlessly believing in yourself, but with trusting yourself enough to know that you can cope with being human. You will sometimes get things wrong. Some people won't like you. There will always be somebody cleverer, younger, more successful or apparently more certain than you. Confidence isn't winning that comparison. It is gradually feeling less compelled to make it. The goal isn't to become a more confident version of somebody else. It is to feel more comfortable being yourself, to take up a little more space in your own life and to stop waiting for somebody else to give you permission to do it.