Till You Make It
How to Be Confident About Anything You Attempt
Today’s Shelf Life is for the people who say, “I want to write but I don’t think I’ll be good at it and don’t have the confidence to begin.” I know people say this because a lot of people say this to me.
Today’s Shelf Life does not have tried and true advice, but it does have trite but true advice. Not the best kind of advice, but it’s a kind of advice. I’m going to try to be brief today (because I’m tired), a thing I am not always good at. Admitting I am not good at something when I’m really not good at it is a sign of my healthy confidence level. Sometimes I admit I’m not good at something and the people around me will say, “Oh I’m sure that’s not true you’re probably great at it!” Their confidence in me may be too high, but I can always borrow somebody else’s confidence in me to bolster my own.
Today’s Shelf Life, like so many Shelf Lifes before it, is about writing but could be applied, by the reader, to other endeavors. I specify “by the reader” because this advice has not been FDA approved for anything but writing. Apply this advice to other than writing at your own risk. I am not saying you should, only that you could.
The trite-but-true advice is that to gain confidence you have to “fake it till you make it,” which people are fond of saying but no one is fond of explaining how to do. “Just fake it and eventually you’ll feel confident!” is going to work well for some people and in some situations and then for other people or in other situations it will end in tears. Today I am going to write about why this is and how to build real confidence—not just a rich bank of Impostor Syndrome—using the fake-it-till-you-make-it.
Impostor syndrome is a phenomenon that happens when a person underestimates their abilities, expertise, and skills, such that while their performance at something indicates they are good at it, they believe they are worse at it than they actually are. A near-opposite of this is the Dunning-Kruger Effect, a phenomenon in which someone has a small amount of knowledge or competence at something but incorrectly overestimates their abilities, expertise, and skills such that while their performance indicates they are not good at it, they believe they are better at it than they actually are. High ability, low confidence equals Impostor Syndrome. High confidence, low ability equals the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Impostor Syndrome is what you get when somebody told you to “fake it till you make it” and you made it but you think you are still faking it. Ideally, a person experiences neither Impostor Syndrome nor the Dunning-Kruger Effect and instead has an accurate mental assessment of their ability to do things; but this is almost never the case.
Anyway let’s talk about confidence. As far as I can tell, confidence comes from, and is proportional to, the unshakableness of your belief that the endeavor you undertake will succeed. If you strongly believe that the thing you’re trying to do will succeed, you have high confidence in your ability to do that thing. If you believe that you will fail in the thing you try, your confidence is low. If you have an unshakable belief in your ability to do all kinds of stuff generally, then your personal confidence overall is high.
My friend’s washing machine broke and she watched a five-minute YouTube video on how to fix a broken washing machine and then bought a $0.99 rubber seal at Home Depot and fixed her washing machine. This is the level of confidence to which I personally aspire. I have more of an “I can get a repairman to come out today”-type confidence.
There’s more than one way to arrive at the unshakable belief that the thing you try will be successful. Some people are born to parents who tell them every day that they can do anything they put their mind to, be anything they want to be, and create anything they can imagine. These people are colloquially known as men. I’m just kidding, sorry, I couldn’t resist. I’m a woman and I was raised this way, so I have a predisposition to believe that I’ll be able to succeed in my endeavors. In fact, when I don’t succeed in an endeavor, I’m often puzzled, then frustrated, and then flat out angry that I didn’t succeed. It’s like, “Hold on. I was told I could do anything. Get me the manager of ‘doing anything.’”
Some people are born in our society with more options open to them from the get-go because of skin color, language and nationality of origin, and generational wealth (among other things). If you grow up with the experience of having more doors open to you than not, then you’re going to naturally believe, and feel confident, that the doors you encounter in the future will be open to you too. Some people become perfectionist or self-hypercritical due to the environment they grow up in or the environment they work in. Those folks, regardless of how well they do at something, will undermine their own confidence with critical self-talk.
This is all to say that not everybody begins at the same base confidence line when the starting pistol fires. Imagine two people come to the table to try something neither of them have tried before, and both bring with them all the necessary skills to do the thing correctly. They should have the same amount of confidence in their ability to do whatever it is, but they almost certainly will not. There’s just a ton of factors at play before they even get to the table that affect whether they think they’ll be able to nail a new thing on the first try, or do it adequately, or completely fail at it.
In my considered opinion the best way to grow your understanding of your ability to do something is to do it and see what happens. When you attempt something, you will generate a result. The result will demonstrate some level of success or failure:
I attempt to give a presentation. → My presentation is well received. → Success.
I attempt to write a short story. → I complete a draft of a short story. → Success.
I try to hit a hole-in-one at mini golf. → I am unable to hit a hole-in-one. → Failure.
Sometimes there’s not a serious consequence if you fail. No matter how many times I lose at mini golf, it doesn’t matter. The objective was to have fun playing mini golf and there’s no punishment if I’m not good at it. Sometimes, though, there may be a negative consequence of a failure:
I attempt to give a presentation at work. → My presentation is poorly received. → Failure. → The proposal I presented is rejected.
And likewise, when something succeeds there may be a positive consequence of that success:
I attempt to give a presentation at work. → My presentation is well received. → Success. → The proposal I presented is approved.
When you try to do something and you generate a result—anywhere on the spectrum of success to failure—the result becomes empirical evidence: I attempted and I succeeded, or I attempted and I failed. If there is an additional consequence that proceeds from that success or failure, that will only reinforce that evidence in your mind. Importantly, if you do something and nothing bad happens as a result, that will directly affect your confidence in your ability to do it next time. Even if not on a conscious level. You have a memory of doing this and there was no negative consequence. This is how you get to Bonnie and Clyde. They robbed a bank and nothing bad happened. The rest is history.
Real confidence comes from building up empirical evidence of doing something successfully. If you have done something ten times before and it turned out great every time, you will probably have high confidence that on the eleventh time it will turn out great, too. That is confidence you earned through doing something successfully ten times.
Likewise, if you fail at something multiple times, your confidence to succeed on the next try could shrink. It needn’t necessarily, though, if you remind yourself that a failed attempt is still practice at whatever you attempted.
Fact: Past successful attempts at something mean your future attempts are likely to be successful (because you got practice and experience) but past failed attempts at something also mean your future attempts are more likely to be successful (because you got practice and experience).
Considering the above, attempting things really is win-win. However, and here comes the part about faking it: You have to have some degree of self-confidence to attempt something in the first place. Most people, I think, will not attempt something if they don’t have a reasonable belief that they can do it (on the first try, or with practice), unless they’re being made to attempt something under some kind of duress (I took many a math test in school that I would rather not have attempted).
Let’s say you want to become good at giving presentations. You have to have some amount of confidence in your ability to give that first presentation, unless someone is making you stand up in front of your communications class and give a presentation because otherwise you will fail this course that you need to graduate from college. If no one is forcing you, then you have to drum up a little fake confidence to get yourself started. After you give that first presentation, you can evaluate whether you succeeded or failed in a number of different aspects. For instance:
My goal was to give a presentation and I gave a presentation. I succeeded, regardless of how it was received.
My goal was to give an engaging presentation and I got feedback from some of the audience on how it could have been more engaging. I succeeded, but I could improve my skills in the future using the feedback.
My goal was to give an entertaining presentation and some of the audience told me it was boring. I succeeded in giving a presentation, but not an entertaining one.
Think about how you can apply this to writing. A lot of writers, somewhere in our hearts, believe that we will write that first draft, send it to one agent, and get an immediate offer of representation because our work is just that good—and that if we do not get that result then we failed in our endeavor and our confidence is undermined for next time. Consider this sequence of events.
I write a complete manuscript.
I send it to an agent.
The agent rejects my manuscript.
That is not an account of a failure. That is an account of two successes and a failure. If you wrote a complete manuscript, you already had a success. If you sent your manuscript to an agent, that’s also a success. Some folks want to look only at the ultimate end result of a long string of events and say, “oh my endeavor failed,” without acknowledging their successes. I am once again speaking to the perfectionists in the room.
To start building confidence, as I said, you may have to drum up a little confidence from nowhere to take the first step. That said, not all steps are created equal. Some steps are baby steps and some steps are giant leaps for mankind. If you want to gain confidence in presentations, it’s easier to come up with the confidence needed to make a presentation to a small group than it is to speak on a stage in front of hundreds of people. If your goal is to stand on a stage and present to hundreds of people, that doesn’t mean your first successful endeavor in presenting has to be on a stage in front of hundreds of people. Look for an opportunity to present to five people. Or ten people but you know all the people. Record yourself (with the permission of the others present!) and watch it later. Ask your audience for feedback. Next time present to twenty people.
If you’re looking to gain confidence in your writing, the first step is to come up with the confidence to write something. If you’ve already written something then you’re literally already past the faking it part. If you have not—remind yourself that no one but you ever needs to see the thing you write. That’s the truth. You may share it later if you want to but you don’t have to. The first thing you write could be just for your eyes.
Once you’ve written something, you can begin to have confidence that you can write—after all, you’ve done it once. You’ve written something, and therefore, you have empirical evidence that you can write something. Write another thing. And another. Is the writing good? Who cares, we’re not at that part yet. We’re at the part where we’re writing something. Writing good comes later. (When does the writing good happen? Ell-oh-ell, I will let you know; I’m not there yet.)
Once you’ve built up some confidence and gotten some practice, you can start thinking about sharing your writing with someone else. It doesn’t have to be an all-at-once, dive-into-the-deep-end sort of situation. You can send a page or two to a trusted friend. Or to a stranger—you can connect with tons of people on the internet to swap beta reads. Who cares if they don’t like it? They’re a stranger.
You carry this on to submitting pieces, querying agents, and so on. For me, I consider every submission a victory and it increases my confidence in my ability to submit pieces in the future. It doesn’t matter if they don’t get accepted. Right now I’m just trying to build my confidence in submitting. When I get a rejection and I don’t quit, that’s a successful outcome of this endeavor. I got a rejection but I rolled with that punch and kept going. That builds my confidence that I can submit more and better work in the future because I know I can emotionally handle a rejection.
All this is to say: You might need to fake a small amount of confidence to begin an endeavor however you should not need to continue to manufacture fake confidence for yourself after that. Get started, and see your wins for wins and your losses for also wins. Nobody gets good at anything without practice. Nobody is born good at anything but sucking and crying. That’s just how it is, I don’t make the rules.
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