Confidence usually shows up after you act, not before. In the 1970s, Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura found that people with an intense fear of snakes built more belief in themselves by working up to holding a snake one small step at a time than by watching someone else do it. The confidence you’re waiting on gets built by doing the thing in small pieces.
It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and the email to your biggest client about next year’s rates is still sitting in your drafts. You’ve rewritten the first line four times. You open it, read it, and close it again. You tell yourself you’ll send it once you feel a little more sure about the number. Maybe next week. Maybe after the holidays.
Or maybe it’s the call to the person who could refer you a dozen clients, or the post you’ve written and never shared, or the price on your website you’ve been meaning to change since spring. Whatever it is, you already know how to do it. You’re waiting for the part where you feel ready.
Here’s what I see with my clients over and over: the feeling doesn’t come first. One of my clients told me recently that it felt like she was building the staircase while she was climbing it, and she meant it as a bad thing. I think it’s just how it works.
The snake study
Albert Bandura spent his career at Stanford, and in the 1970s he was trying to answer a simple question: when people get over something that scares them, what actually changed?
He and his colleagues worked with adults who had an intense fear of snakes. In a 1977 study with Nancy Adams and Jean Beyer, one group watched a therapist work through a series of steps with a boa constrictor, starting with simply walking up to it and building up to holding it. A second group did those same steps themselves, one small step at a time, with the therapist right beside them helping. A third group got no treatment at all. Before and after, everyone rated how confident they were that they could do each step.
The people who did the steps themselves came out with a stronger belief in their own ability than the people who only watched, and that belief carried over to situations they hadn’t practiced, including a different snake. Watching helped some. Doing helped more. And the confidence ratings themselves turned out to be a very good predictor of what people would actually do when it was time to try.
(Fair warning: these were lab studies with small groups of people who were afraid of snakes, not business owners, and some researchers have argued that what Bandura measured as confidence is partly just what people expect to happen. Still, his idea, which he called self-efficacy, has become one of the most studied ideas in psychology, and the basic pattern has held up.)
Where confidence actually comes from
Bandura said our belief that we can do something comes from four places: doing it ourselves, watching someone like us do it, someone telling us we can, and how our body feels in the moment. Of those four, doing it yourself is the strongest by a long way. Being told you can do it is one of the weakest, which is a little humbling for a coach to admit, since a pep talk is the easiest thing in the world for me to give.
Most of us go after confidence in the reverse order. We listen to one more podcast, read about someone else who did the scary thing, ask a friend if we’re ready, and then wonder why the feeling never shows up. Those things aren’t bad, they just can’t do the heavy part of the job.
I wrote about something close to this in Be a “finisher,” don’t just “finish things”, where the point was that a label doesn’t change who you are and evidence does. This is the same idea pointed at a different problem, which is the feeling of being ready.
Small steps, with someone close by
The detail I keep coming back to is how the doing group got there. Nobody was handed a boa constrictor on the first day. They got there in small pieces, and they had someone standing right next to them for the early steps. Each step was just a little bit harder than the one before, so every time they finished one, they had a new piece of proof that they could handle the next.
That’s the part most of us skip. We look at the whole scary thing at once, decide we aren’t ready for it, and wait. But nobody is ready for the whole thing. You only have to be ready for the next small step.
What this looks like in real life
Picture an owner of a small bookkeeping firm, we’ll call her Renee. She knows her rates are too low, and she’s known it since April. She has done the math, looked at what other firms near her charge, and told herself she’ll raise her prices in January, once she feels confident about it. Now it’s November, and she doesn’t feel one bit more confident than she did in the spring.
If Renee were one of my clients, I wouldn’t give her another pep talk about what she’s worth. We would build her a ladder. Rung one: say the new price out loud on our call, a few times, until it stops sounding strange coming out of her mouth. Rung two: quote the new price to the next new lead, someone who never knew the old one. Rung three: send the letter to her current clients with the date the new rates start, and put a deadline on her calendar for sending it.
Each rung is small enough to do in a single week. By the time she gets to rung three, she has already heard herself say the number to a real person and watched them not flinch. That is what builds the confidence, and it comes from the climbing, not from waiting at the bottom. I’d also have her rate her confidence from 1 to 10 before and after each rung, the same way Bandura’s participants did, so she can see it moving.
Don’t wait for January
This time of year makes the waiting easy. December is busy, January feels like a natural fresh start, and it’s tempting to park the scary thing until the new year and hope you’ll feel ready by then. You won’t feel any different on January 2nd unless you’ve done something between now and then. The first rung is something you can do this week.
Your homework
Pick the one thing you’ve been waiting to feel ready for. Write down three rungs, smallest first. The first rung should be small enough that you could do it in 15 minutes this week, like saying the price out loud, sending one text, or drafting the email and sending it to a friend instead of the client.
Before you do rung one, rate how confident you feel about the whole thing from 1 to 10. Do rung one. Then rate it again and write both numbers down. You don’t have to climb the whole ladder this week. You just have to get off the ground.
If you want someone beside you for each rung, asking how it went and what comes next, that’s what I do.
Planning your 2027? Get the workbook my clients use, $7.
Frequently asked questions
Where does self-confidence come from? Psychologist Albert Bandura identified four sources: doing the thing yourself, watching someone similar succeed, encouragement from other people, and how your body feels. Doing it yourself, which he called a mastery experience, is the strongest.
Should I wait until I feel confident before I take action? Usually not. In Bandura’s research, confidence grew as people completed small, gradual steps, so taking the first small step is how the confidence gets built.
How do I build confidence for something that scares me? Break it into at least three small steps, start with the smallest, and if you can, have someone with you for the first ones. Rate your confidence before and after each step so you can see it change.
Sources: Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215. · Bandura, A., Adams, N. E., & Beyer, J. (1977). Cognitive processes mediating behavioral change. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35(3), 125–139. · Bandura, A., & Adams, N. E. (1977). Analysis of self-efficacy theory of behavioral change. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 1(4), 287–310.
