Building and rebuilding confidence

Rebuilding confidence is not the same as building confidence.

• When building confidence, you’re trying to do something you’re not sure you can do.
• However, rebuilding confidence means you used to be good but failed at some point. Getting back is much harder to do.

Confidence is essentially about expectations

You think you’ll excel, but considering the probability of success and feeling confident is not that easy.
Framing effects happen when the same thing looks different when the context change. If you’re a good student in a mediocre class, you feel smarter than if you’re a good student in an elite class.

Relearning confidence

When practising a skill that you have forgotten, you may lack the confidence to pick it up again.
However, those doubts are exaggerated. Not remembering is normal, and relearning happens faster than you may expect. Yet, you may still lack self-confidence, which will undermine your self-image and motivation.

Play over Performance

When we improve in a skill, our mindset will start to shift from play to performance. Rebuilding confidence requires you to relive that initial play mindset.

• Make failures painless. Your first practice should have zero consequences. Do warm-up exercises for low stakes before you put on pressure to perform. However, if you review your skill but continue to get everything wrong, it is a signal to stop.
• Expect frustration and failure. When you expect failure, it won’t bother you so much when performance suffers. Set the bar lower.
• Trust the rebuilding process. You don’t need confidence that you will excel, just confidence that you’ll eventually rebuild your confidence.
• Reframe your expectations. You have no responsibility to live up to other people’s expectations of you.

reference

https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2020/07/20/rebuild-confidence/