There are how to articles on building confidence that list things to do to build up your confidence. That’s the scientific way. How does faith help us build our confidence? Can we build our confidence in a scientific manner while also considering the place of faith in building confidence? Let’s consider how to grow confidence through science and faith.

Lessons on Growing Confidence

In last week’s article I shared where I am in building my confidence through two very important insights. If you missed last week’s article you can read it now: Is There a Secret to Confidence? | Growing Confidence

In this week’s article I want to highlight a few practices from science and faith that can assist in building confidence.  In my experience, the faith practices that assist in developing confidence are those that help me persevere. The scientific practices I am just beginning to learn. I want to share what I am learning

Confidence: The Science

Let’s start with the science. You can get that list of ways to boost confidence if you just want some quick tips. Y’all know me though. I want the podcast that goes into detail on how to act on those scientific tips. I listened to a podcast the other day that interviewed a high performance psychologist Dr. Michael Gervais. The topic was performing under pressure and performing with confidence.

Dr. Michael Gervais works with top performing athletes, musicians, Olympians, and others that are faced with maintaining their confidence under pressure. This brings an interesting focus to building confidence. Dr. Gervais speaks of training our confidence, in a similar manner to how we train for a sport or activity that we love.

Train Your Mind

The emphasis is on training your confidence in low pressure, calm environments. You then work your way up to what Dr. Gervais calls progressively more aggressive environments. You might think that the process to actually doing this would be complicated. It’s not. It’s actually something I’ve been sharing with readers on this blog from the beginning. You need to rid yourself of your negative thoughts…they are holding you back .

According to Dr. Gervais, it’s not preparation or past success that affects your confidence. It’s those things that you tell yourself. If you don’t train and practice your confidence in the calm places, you might freeze under pressure when it really matters.

Take Steps

For several weeks now I have been considering how much I hold back when there are important things to say. I started to wonder if I could help myself by starting to say more of what I think even when it’s a small comment. I realized that I wasn’t practicing speaking out with the little things, so of course I lacked the confidence to speak out when it really mattered.

That’s what Dr. Gervais is talking about. For us to gain our confidence and keep it when things are more intense, we need to be working at it all the time. He suggests writing out the bad thoughts and replacing them with good thoughts. Those negative and limiting thoughts are important to address and replace. However, this article is looking at confidence through science and faith. What about faith practices?

Confidence: The Faith

How do faith practices fit into this athletic training image of how to work hard at building our confidence?

At first glance you might not see it. Let’s look back at my article that I wrote last week: Is There a Secret to Confidence? I share how taking action and perseverance are ways that help me grow more confident. This relates to the struggle of the athlete on the field and not shrinking back when the spotlight is on you or you find yourself in a difficult situation. In those places you have to take action and you have to persevere. Faith is the same way.

You start small and take small steps to practice your faith. But you have to build it up. If you stay at that first step, that starting level, you will not deepen your faith. If you give up when it gets difficult you will not deepen your faith.

Confidence in life comes from training our minds as well as training our hearts.

Train Your Heart

When I am working to train my heart I do it through prayer and building a community.

Prayer and building a community around you of those that share your faith are important for confidence building. I know that this is a different angle than you hear at church, but don’t worry. I understand that in terms of growing your faith prayer brings us closer to God and a community helps us grow closer to God also.

Yet look at it from the angle of how prayer and community building affects your inner being, which therefore affects your confidence.

Open your heart

If I am closed off to prayer or to the community around me, I might be so caught up in myself that I miss the message that I am to give to the world. If I open my heart, however, I can see the needs around me. I can see how my gifts can serve the world and I can act confidently.

Confidence through Science and Faith

From looking both at science and faith we can see that they work together to build confidence by building and training both the mind and the heart.

Where is your current focus, mind or heart, in terms of how you are working to increase your confidence?

Behavior Challenge: Take some time this week to decide how you can better train your heart and mind to improve your confidence.

This is just the beginning of my posts on science and faith. I’m excited to share that I will post about science and faith once a month. If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to my email list.

Listen to the Podcast: Your Ultimate Guide to Performing Under Pressure and Unleashing Confidence – Dr. Michael Gervais is BACK – Science of Success Podcast.

Around some people there is an air of confidence and around others the lack of confidence is obvious. Still others are somewhere in the middle. Is there a secret to confidence? When we are confident we are more likely to do the things we want to do. However, confidence isn’t as easy to grow in ourselves as it is to spot in other people.

The secret to confidence

I am working to grow my confidence. I say grow because it doesn’t happen overnight.

I can’t say that I have the secret to gaining more confidence, but I’ve learned the importance of sharing where you are. So here is where I am in growing an attitude of confidence and discovering the secret to confidence.

It’s about perseverance and action.

The way to confidence through perseverance

As I was drafting my thoughts for this article, I realized that perseverance through difficult situations has influenced my level of confidence. There are several situations that I can pull up in my mind that have been trying situations through which I’ve persevered.

I’ve faced each of those trials without giving up as soon as it got hard. This gives me the confidence that I can face present and future trials confidently. It is the ability to persevere which grows my confidence.

The way to confidence through action

JUST ____.

I know you think I’m quoting Nike, but I’m not. Or maybe I am. In this case, however, you get to answer the fill in without the visual of the commercial.

Seriously, it took me months to regrow my confidence in the level of my writing skills after I started this blog.

JUST…whatever it is you need to do.

I had to JUST WRITE.

Even though I have always loved writing and have always done well in writing, picking it up again to start this blog meant that I had to shake the dust off my writing skills. I hadn’t written anything (I’d even stopped journaling!) and here I wanted to go public with my posts!

Those first few posts were difficult, because I lacked the full confidence in my skills that I once had. However, I regained my confidence in my writing skills by persevering through those first few drafts and posts….through those first few months.

I had to JUST WRITE.

In conclusion, I think that confidence is a muscle. You can work that muscle out and you can’t expect it to grow unless you do.

What’s your fill in answer? Today I need to JUST _____.

Behavior Challenge: Pick it. Do it. Answer the above fill in and do it.

Do we know how to handle fear? Do we really understand what our fears are telling us? Can we use our fears to promote growth and courage? These are topics that Kate Swoboda, author of The Courage Habit, writes and speaks about.  

Courage Habits versus Fear-Based Habits

The Courage Habit, as outlined by Kate, includes 4 researched behaviors, which I will outline below. I came across this information as she spoke about it on a podcast interview by Jenny Blake of the Pivot Podcast. The researched behaviors were found to increase confidence and bring about positive changes in behaviors.

If we know what these courage habit behaviors are we can stop ourselves while in the midst of fear-based behaviors. We can break free from acting out of habits that place fear at the center of our attention and instead engage in habits that build courage.

Ways that we handle fear that puts fear at the center of our attention

Kate Swoboda identifies 3 common ways we handle fear:

• Ignore/avoid
• Please it/placate it
• Attack it

The problem that Kate identifies is that we aren’t actually handling our fears and getting to the root of the problem when we handle fear in any of these ways.

I’ve run across these methods for handling fear in my own journey. I’ve given into my fear. I’ve tried to ignore my fear. I’ve found that some people in the personal development world suggest I attack my fears.

Yet Kate is right. When we handle our fears in these ways, we aren’t getting to the root of the problem.

All of the above methods for handling fear place fear at the center of our attention. We’re acting in response to our fear, not using our fear to promote growth or courage.

Kate Swoboda suggests that we instead embrace the courage habit.

What is the courage habit?

4 behaviors that make up the courage habit:

• Accessing the body
• Listening without attachment
• Reframing limiting stories
• Reaching out to create community

In the podcast explanation of these behaviors, Kate explained that accessing the body looks like noticing what your fear feels like and where you feel that fear. Listening without attachment and reframing limiting stories work together. Give your fear a voice, listen to it, but don’t hold on to the story that it’s telling you.

Reframing limiting stories might sound familiar as I wrote about reframing limiting beliefs here. It’s the same idea applied to working through your fears.

Here’s what really struck me about Kate’s call for reaching out to create community as a behavior that develops courage. She said that if we hideaway and don’t show ourselves -as we are- to others, that we can stop trusting ourselves in the process. It can become more difficult to bring others into our lives. That is a powerful way to look at the importance for cultivating relationships with those around us.

How to handle fear by developing a courage habit

After listening to the Kate Swoboda interview with Jenny Blake, I am interested in reading Kate’s book The Courage Habit and learning more.

Have you read the Courage Habit?

Which courage habit behavior comes easiest to you?

Which behavior is the most difficult?

Behavior Challenge: Learning about our fears.

Notice in what situations you feel fear. Write down the types of situations or circumstances where you feel fear.

This might typically be the time where you give yourself a hard time for being afraid of this or that, but think of it as research. If you know what situations or circumstances trigger your fear, you prepare yourself for the next time you are faced with that fear.

If you want to hear more from Kate Swoboda, listen to the podcast here: Cultivate a Courage Habit with Kate Swoboda.

Other posts on podcasts: How do you know you made the right decision?