Hello, and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Corey Mascara, and in today's episode, we're going to talk about confidence.

More to come on that in a moment. First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so confidence, big topic, big personal growth topic.

As a teacher, here are a lot of people talking about their struggles with confidence,

and a common question is how to develop confidence.

And the undertone of that, or the presupposition, is often that I need to be confident in order to create a beautiful life,

or to even just do things that I want to do.

And I'd like to push back on that.

One, I think trying to develop confidence in order to do things that we want to do or achieve is a bit like putting the cart before the horse.

Most forms of confidence, most of the confidence we develop in life comes from doing things,

failing a lot, making a lot of mistakes, and then developing a certain proficiency at that thing.

Adam Grant, the organizational psychologist, talks quite a bit about that in his own personal life and through the research.

And chances are, if you look at areas of your life where you do have confidence, it is because you've put a lot of time into that thing.

Rarely is there going to be a sense of proficiency going into something that is new or that we're mediocre at.

So there's something to be said for the process of just doing something over and over and over and letting confidence be a byproduct.

That's more related to, we could say, performance type things. I think a lot of people, when they think of needing confidence,

it's more the sense of need to have a higher self esteem. I need to feel better about myself.

I need to feel optimistic and energized and positive to show up for XYZ thing in my life.

And there's something about that, that I already feel tense, just thinking about it.

I could totally associate into that and times in my life when I felt that as well.

But the thing I think that makes me feel tense is it has a bit of this bypassing quality or a fake it till you make it, which I'm not that opposed to.

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