Why Confidence Comes and Goes: How It Is Actually Built — an article by Carl Argent

The short answer

Confidence comes and goes because it was never one solid thing in the first place. What most of us call confidence is a running estimate of whether we can handle what is in front of us, and that estimate is rebuilt many times a day from recent experience, from how the body feels, from what other people seem to think, and from what we have been telling ourselves. Move any of those and the estimate moves with it. That is not a flaw in you. It is how the system works.

The kind of confidence that lasts is built from a different material. It grows from doing slightly difficult things and finding you can, from having more than one route to what you want, from treating your own setbacks with the same steadiness you would offer a friend, and from starting with what you already do well rather than what you fear. None of that requires you to feel confident first. In fact it tends to work the other way round. In coaching, the useful question is where you want to act differently and what makes that difficult for you. We can start there, even while confidence feels uncertain.

When it goes, it goes quietly

It rarely announces itself. On Tuesday you spoke up in the meeting and it was fine. On Thursday you had something to say and let the moment pass, then spent the rest of the afternoon wondering what had changed. Nothing had, as far as you could tell. The same job, the same people, the same you. And yet the ground felt different underfoot.

You may know the shape of it in other places too. A message you drafted and did not send. An application you opened and closed. A conversation with your partner where you knew what you needed and somehow asked for something smaller. Later, the second wave arrives: not just the missed moment but the judgement about it. Other people do not seem to have this problem. You used to be better at this. What is wrong with you.

If any of that is familiar, the first thing worth saying is that the judgement is the least reliable part of the whole experience. It feels like a verdict. It is closer to a symptom. Confidence tends to dip most in exactly the conditions that make harsh self-assessment more likely: tiredness, uncertainty, a recent knock, a comparison you did not choose to make. The dip and the verdict arrive together, which is why the verdict feels so true.

Confidence is not one thing

Part of the confusion comes from the word itself. We use it as if it were a single quality, like height, that a person either has or lacks. Psychology tends to be more precise, and the precision is useful.

The belief that you can carry out a particular task in a particular situation has a name of its own, self-efficacy, and one of its defining features is that it is specific rather than general (Bandura, 1977). You can be sure of yourself in a kitchen and lost in a spreadsheet. You can hold a room of strangers and freeze in front of your own family. This is not inconsistency. It is what confidence actually looks like when you stop expecting it to be uniform.

Self-esteem is something else again: a broader sense of your own worth, less tied to any one task. The two get tangled because when confidence in one area falls, it is easy to read the fall as a statement about your worth in general. Keeping them apart matters, because they are built differently and they fail differently. A skill you have not yet practised is a gap. It is not a diagnosis of who you are.

Once you see confidence as many small, local beliefs rather than one big one, a few things follow. It becomes reasonable that it varies from day to day and from room to room. It becomes possible to work on one area without waiting to feel good about everything. And it becomes clear that the question is not “how do I become a confident person” but “what would make me more able to handle this particular thing”.

Why it comes and goes

Those local beliefs are fed by four main sources: what you have managed before, what you have seen people like you manage, what others say to you about your ability, and how your body and mood happen to be at the time (Bandura, 1997). Each of those can change quickly. A rough night reads as evidence. A single offhand remark reads as evidence. A week without practising something reads as evidence. Your sense of what you can do is being updated constantly, and the updates are not always fair.

There is a second reason the ground moves, and it is more personal. Many of us attach our sense of worth to particular outcomes: being liked, being right, being productive, looking competent. Where that is the case, worth rises and falls with those outcomes, and every ordinary setback in that area lands as a threat rather than as information (Crocker and Wolfe, 2001). Confidence that depends on continuous good results is fragile by design, because results are not continuous for anyone. Self-esteem that is high but unstable tends to be more defensive and more easily shaken than self-esteem that is quieter and more secure (Kernis, 2003).

The third reason is the one most within reach, and the one that quietly does the most damage. When something feels uncertain, the natural move is to avoid it: postpone the call, keep quiet, take the smaller option. Avoidance brings relief, and relief teaches. Each time you step back, the thing you stepped back from stays untested, so the belief that you could not have managed it stays untouched. Over months, this is how confidence in an area does not just dip but slowly drains. Not because you failed, but because you stopped generating the evidence that you could succeed.

What actually builds it

If avoidance drains confidence, the reverse is also true, and it is the most reliable finding in this whole area. Of the four sources of belief in your own ability, the strongest by some distance is direct experience of managing something (Bandura, 1997). Not being told you can. Not visualising it. Doing a version of it and noticing the result.

The version matters. Confidence is not built by leaping at the hardest thing and surviving. That tends to produce relief, and relief is not the same as belief. It is built by stepping just outside what currently feels comfortable, far enough to be a real test, near enough that success is likely, and then doing that again from the new edge. The successes need to be earned, or they teach nothing, and they need to be noticed, or they are wasted. Most people are far better at logging what went wrong than what went right, so the noticing often has to be deliberate.

This is where the difference between moving towards something and moving away from something becomes practical. Goals framed around approach, such as speaking to two people at the event, tend to hold attention on what you want and to leave a memory of having done it. Goals framed around avoidance, such as not making a fool of yourself, keep attention on the threat and leave nothing behind even when they succeed (Elliot, 2006). Same evening, very different evidence.

Seeing someone comparable to you manage the thing helps too, more than most of us expect, and so does honest encouragement from someone whose judgement you trust. What tends not to help, and can quietly make things worse, is reassurance from people who would say it whatever happened. Confidence built on that has nothing to stand on.

Hope is the quieter engine

Underneath confidence sits something less discussed and probably more important. Researchers who study hope define it not as optimism but as a combination of two beliefs: that there are workable routes to what you want, and that you are able to travel them (Snyder, 2002). People who score higher on those two beliefs tend to persist longer, cope better with obstacles and reach more of their goals, and the two parts can be strengthened separately.

This explains something that confidence on its own cannot. You can feel capable and still be stuck, because you have one route in mind and it is blocked. You can feel far from capable and still move, because you can see several ways forward and one of them is small enough to try today. In practice, confidence often returns not because you talked yourself into feeling better but because the number of visible routes went from one to three.

The second part, the belief that you can act, responds well to a simple form of planning. Intentions written as “when this happens, I will do this” are considerably more likely to be carried out than intentions written as “I will try to” (Gollwitzer and Sheeran, 2006). The plan does some of the work that confidence would otherwise have to do. You do not need to feel ready at the moment of choice, because the choice was already made when you were calm.

Being on your own side

There is a common belief that the way to build confidence is to be tough on yourself, and that kindness would make you soft. The evidence points firmly the other way. Treating your own mistakes and shortfalls with warmth, a sense that struggling is a shared human experience, and a steady rather than dramatic attention to what happened, is what researchers call self-compassion (Neff, 2003). It is not the same as letting yourself off. It is closer to being a good coach to yourself rather than a bad one.

Two findings matter here. First, self-compassion is associated with a sense of worth that stays steadier over time, and that depends less on comparing well with other people or on things going right, than self-esteem on its own (Neff and Vonk, 2009). Second, people who respond to a failure with self-compassion tend to become more motivated to improve, not less, and more willing to try again (Breines and Chen, 2012). The harsh voice that promises to keep you sharp mostly keeps you avoidant.

For confidence, this is the missing piece. If every setback is a referendum on your worth, then each attempt carries too much, and the safest thing is not to attempt. If a setback is information, treated with some care, then attempts become affordable, and confidence gets the raw material it needs.

Start from what already works

Most attempts to build confidence begin with a list of weaknesses. It is a natural place to start and a poor one. The person doing the work is already discouraged, and the list confirms it.

There is a stronger starting point. Everyone has a handful of qualities that come more easily to them than to most people, and that they can draw on under pressure: a particular kind of curiosity, a way with people, persistence, honesty, humour, care. People who find more ways to use those qualities in daily life tend to report rising wellbeing over the following months, in a way that is not explained by how they felt at the start (Wood, Linley, Maltby, Kashdan and Hurling, 2011). Strengths also travel: a quality that works well in one area of your life can often be carried, deliberately, into an area where confidence has gone missing.

If you would like a clearer view of your own, the Strengths Across Life Profile is a free questionnaire I use with clients, which looks at how your strengths show up across different parts of your life and sends you a written report. It is a better first move than most confidence exercises, because it starts from evidence rather than aspiration.

Try it this week

Choose one situation where your confidence has been going missing. Write down the smallest version of it that would still count as a real test, something you are about eighty per cent sure you can manage. Then write one sentence beginning “When…, I will…” that says exactly when and how you will do it. Do it once. Afterwards, before your mind moves on, write down one thing that went better than you expected. That last step is the one most people skip, and it is where the confidence is.

Quick answers

If you want to take this further

Perhaps you know the moment when confidence leaves you: a meeting, a decision or the conversation you keep rehearsing. In coaching with me, we can look at that moment, the strengths you bring and a small step you would be willing to try. You do not need to feel confident, or arrive with a completed strengths profile, to begin. You can book a free introductory conversation with no obligation to book sessions, or read more about coaching with me.

If anxiety, shame or earlier experiences sit beneath your loss of confidence, individual counselling in Southend-on-Sea and online may offer a more suitable space to explore them. We can talk about what you need without requiring you to set a goal or push yourself into action. A free counselling conversation is a chance to consider whether working together feels right.

Sources and further reading

Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215.

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: the exercise of control. New York: W. H. Freeman.

Breines, J. G., & Chen, S. (2012). Self-compassion increases self-improvement motivation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(9), 1133–1143.

Crocker, J., & Wolfe, C. T. (2001). Contingencies of self-worth. Psychological Review, 108(3), 593–623.

Elliot, A. J. (2006). The hierarchical model of approach-avoidance motivation. Motivation and Emotion, 30(2), 111–116.

Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: a meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119.

Kernis, M. H. (2003). Toward a conceptualization of optimal self-esteem. Psychological Inquiry, 14(1), 1–26.

Neff, K. D. (2003). Self-compassion: an alternative conceptualization of a healthy attitude toward oneself. Self and Identity, 2(2), 85–101.

Neff, K. D., & Vonk, R. (2009). Self-compassion versus global self-esteem: two different ways of relating to oneself. Journal of Personality, 77(1), 23–50.

Snyder, C. R. (2002). Hope theory: rainbows in the mind. Psychological Inquiry, 13(4), 249–275.

Wood, A. M., Linley, P. A., Maltby, J., Kashdan, T. B., & Hurling, R. (2011). Using personal and psychological strengths leads to increases in well-being over time: a longitudinal study and the development of the strengths use questionnaire. Personality and Individual Differences, 50(1), 15–19.

You might also be interested in

Why Knowing Your Strengths Matters More Than Fixing Your Weaknesses

Imposter Syndrome 101: Why Success Doesn’t Feel Safe

Why We Have To Be The Best At Everything, Even Being Bad

Becoming Yourself: When Your Life No Longer Feels Like Yours

When Motivation Disappears: What Is Missing From Your Day?