What is Confidence and Why is it Essential?

Confidence isn't being the loudest person in the room or the certainty of being better than others. It's a private sense of certainty about our own ability, earned through deliberate work, that lets us stop second-guessing our actions and who we are. It’s a direct contrast to arrogance, which it’s easily mistaken for, yet is something else entirely that has different roots and consequences.

It's Memorial Day, and much of what we are able to do today is possible because of people who were able to push human limits and keep functioning under conditions designed to make functioning nearly impossible. They made decisions, led others, and held the course when every signal in their nervous system was telling them to do something else. 

This largely comes down to confidence. While it has many definitions, some more accurate than others, we’ll rely on Dr. Nate Zinsser’s decades of work on the topic. Confidence is a trait we can often get wrong or don’t have an accurate mental model of. We might mix it up with arrogance or with the absence of doubt. Dr. Zinsser and those he works with understand it as something nearly the opposite of what we might picture.

How Do We Define Confidence?

Confidence is a sense of certainty about an ability but not the loud, obnoxious kind. True confidence is the internal kind that allows us to stop telling ourselves what to do and trust the work we’ve already done. The definition that emerged from forty years of training service members at West Point started with a football coach and a colonel asking whether the things people call intangible, like “staying loose under pressure” and “executing without getting in our own way,” could be trained the same way any other skill is trained. The answer, after thousands of training sessions and a couple of generations of cadets, is a resounding yes.

Being confident is what makes the difference between a person who knows how to do something in theory and a person who can actually do it when the moment arrives. Many of us have likely had the experience of choking in a situation or on a problem we knew how to solve. In retrospect, maybe we question why we couldn’t execute despite being so “confident” we’d complete the task. Our mind needed certainty about our ability, but when it came time, we didn't actually have it.

As Dr. Zinsser put it, "Confidence is a sense of certainty about your ability, which allows you to bypass conscious thought and execute unconsciously." Bypassing conscious thought is absolutely crucial here. The hesitation we feel before a hard moment isn't usually a knowledge gap. It's our mind getting in the way of our body, and asking questions it doesn't need to ask. By the time those questions are in the forefront of our mind, it’s often too late. Confidence is the state where the questions stop and the work happens.

Mistaking Confidence for Arrogance

Arrogance and confidence look similar from the outside and feel completely different from the inside. Both involve a person who's not visibly second-guessing, and both can produce decisive action, but they come from opposite places. Arrogance is a superficial posture maintained at the expense of others. It requires comparison, and the certainty it gives us is often extracted from the act of looking down at someone else. Confidence is a posture maintained alongside others and doesn't require comparison. Our certainty is generated internally from work done in private, and it's the same whether anyone is watching or not.

The clearest test to see the difference isn't behavioral, it's relational. Arrogance gets louder when the audience grows and quieter when it disappears. Confidence is steady regardless of the situation. The arrogant person needs the eyes on them. The confident person doesn't, which is also why they tend to do better when the expectations get higher and tasks get harder. 

The confusion matters enormously because plenty of capable people undershoot what they're capable of because they don’t want to seem like the arrogant person they're actively trying not to become. We mute the inner certainty we actually need, and the cost is paid quietly in work that doesn't get done by people who could have done it.

What Confidence Does to Our Brain

The brain treats confidence and threat as competing inputs. When we walk into a high-stakes moment without internal certainty about our ability, the threat detection system registers the moment as a danger that has to be reasoned through. Cortisol rises, blood flow shifts toward large muscle groups, and the prefrontal cortex (i.e. the part of the brain that handles deliberate reasoning and planning) starts working harder while losing access to the smooth, fast pattern-matching often needed to tackle the situation. We might feel this as choking. Maybe it takes the form of forgetting the line, going blank on the play or saying the wrong thing in the meeting. 

Confidence interrupts that loop. When a person has trained their inner sense of certainty about an ability, their brain doesn't classify the moment as a threat that needs solving. The prefrontal cortex stays online to help manage the situation, and the amygdala doesn't take over and force the threat response. The same body that would have been frozen now executes flawlessly.

Study after study have found that self-confidence reliably predicted not only athletic performance, but performance in any craft, passion, or career. Confidence doesn't guarantee outcomes, but it plays a massive role in shaping the conditions under which outcomes get produced.

How Do We Build Confidence?

Confidence is built the same way muscle is, that is, through deliberate repetition of a specific kind of work. The work isn't motivational or visualization-based in the mainstream sense. It's the discipline of logging and remembering the evidence that already exists in our lives. The mind, without conscious guidance, has an asymmetric memory, meaning it holds on to failures and embarrassing moments much better than our wins and triumphs if we don’t actively guide it. This leads to the good days and the steady accumulation of progress fade into the background, where they don't get recalled in the moments we desperately need them.

Dr. Zinsser’s answer to this is what he calls a mental bank account, which is a daily practice of deliberately “depositing” our memories of effort, success, and progress into a personal store our mind can draw from. 

The deposits are primarily three things: 

1. Effort - because the thing we did well today is evidence of who we are even when the outcome didn't go our way. 

2. Success - because however small the win, it happened, and the brain needs to remember it.

3. Progress - because the line is moving even when the absolute number doesn't look good. 

Over time, these deposits become the bank account our mind draws on when it needs to know whether it's capable. The person who has done this work doesn't have to talk themselves into anything because they already know it’s possible. The answer is already filed away and ready to fuel them.

On a day that honors people who had, and have, to operate at the upper end of what humans can ask of themselves under conditions designed to break them, there’s much to be grateful for and much to learn. Confidence isn’t bravado or the absence of fear. It’s something closer to a personal practice of keeping track of who we are, what we’re done, and who we want to be so that when the moment comes, we’re ready for the challenge. 

This is the same training that lets a quarterback throw to a covered receiver, a surgeon hold steady through a long surgery, a founder make the decision that dictates whether the company survives, a service member keep us safe despite life-threatening conditions…and many more.

The job for us isn't to find more confidence. The job is to stop confusing it with something else and to start building the bank account that actually allows us to do the work.

References

1. Zinsser, N. (2022). The Confident Mind: A Battle-Tested Guide to Unshakable Performance. Custom House (HarperCollins).

2. Lochbaum, M., Sherburn, M., Sisneros, C., Cooper, S., Lane, A. M., & Terry, P. C. (2022). Revisiting the Self-Confidence and Sport Performance Relationship: A Systematic Review with Meta-Analysis. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(11), 6381. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19116381

3. Woodman, T., & Hardy, L. (2003). The relative impact of cognitive anxiety and self-confidence upon sport performance: A meta-analysis. Journal of Sports Sciences, 21(6), 443–457. https://doi.org/10.1080/0264041031000101809

4. Kenwood, M. M., Kalin, N. H., & Barbas, H. (2022). The prefrontal cortex, pathological anxiety, and anxiety disorders. Neuropsychopharmacology, 47(1), 260–275. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-021-01109-z

5. Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. W.H. Freeman and Company. ISBN: 9780716728504

6. Moritz, S. E., Feltz, D. L., Fahrbach, K. R., & Mack, D. E. (2000). The relation of self-efficacy measures to sport performance: A meta-analytic review. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 71(3), 280–294. https://doi.org/10.1080/02701367.2000.10608908