Why More Confidence Isn’t Always the Answer

Sep 10

We talk about confidence as though it’s the answer to almost everything.

Speak up more. Stop doubting yourself. Believe in yourself. Walk into the room like you belong there.

And while confidence can absolutely make a difference in how we move through the world, I think we sometimes ask it to solve a problem it was never designed to solve.

Because you can be confident and still deeply question your worth.

You can be good at your job, comfortable speaking in front of a room, capable of making difficult decisions, and outwardly very sure of yourself while still depending heavily on achievement, approval, relationships, appearance, or other people’s opinions to feel okay about who you are.

That distinction between confidence and self-worth is something I explore in Episode 35 of Unravel, Why Reassurance Doesn’t Always Make You Feel Better — Part 1. In the episode, I look at some surprisingly counterintuitive research on self-esteem and why compliments, reassurance, and even positive relationships don’t always change how we feel about ourselves.

PODCAST EPISODE: Why Reassurance Doesn’t Always Make You Feel Better — Part 1.

Confidence and self-worth aren’t quite the same thing

I like thinking about confidence as a form of trust.

It isn’t necessarily believing that everything will work out perfectly. It’s trusting that you’ll be able to meet what happens, even when you don’t know exactly how things are going to turn out.

That kind of confidence often grows through experience. You do something difficult, survive the discomfort, learn something, and gradually develop more trust in your ability to handle it next time.

Self-worth is a little different.

Self-worth has more to do with the value we assign to ourselves in the first place.

And that’s where things can get complicated.

If your sense of worth has become closely connected to being successful, attractive, liked, needed, productive, chosen, or impressive, then maintaining that feeling about yourself requires a lot of outside evidence.

You don’t just want to do well because doing well feels good. You may need to do well because failure starts to feel like it says something about you.

You don’t simply enjoy being liked. Someone disliking you can feel strangely threatening.

You don’t just appreciate reassurance from the person you love. You may find yourself needing it repeatedly because the reassurance doesn’t seem to stick for very long.

Why reassurance can feel good... and still not be enough

This is what originally got me interested in this topic.

We usually assume that if someone feels insecure, the solution is more positive feedback.

Tell them they’re attractive. Remind them they’re loved. Reassure them that they’re doing a good job. Give them enough evidence that they’re worthy and eventually they’ll believe it.

Except human psychology isn’t always that straightforward.

Positive feedback has to interact with the beliefs we already carry about ourselves. When someone says something that fits our existing self-image, it’s relatively easy to absorb. When it contradicts a deeply held belief, we may have a much harder time taking it in.

This is why a compliment can sometimes make someone uncomfortable rather than confident.

You’ve probably seen this happen.

Someone says, “You look amazing,” and instead of receiving the compliment, the other person immediately responds with something like, “No, I don’t. I look exhausted.”

Or someone praises their work and they explain why it actually wasn’t very good.

It’s tempting to think they simply need more compliments.

But sometimes the more interesting question is: Why is the positive information so difficult to believe?

What are you using to determine your worth?

This is the question I keep coming back to.

If I asked you to rate your self-worth from zero to ten, you could probably give me a number fairly quickly.

But what did you use to come up with it?

Maybe you thought about your career, your relationships, your body, how productive you’ve been lately, whether people seem to like you, how much money you make, whether you’re married, whether you have children, or how your life compares with the people around you.

That tells us something important.

Because if our worth is being calculated from variables that are constantly changing, then our relationship with ourselves becomes pretty unstable.

Careers change. Bodies change. Relationships change. We succeed at some things and fail at others. People approve of us and then sometimes they don’t.

If every one of those changes becomes evidence for or against our value, we end up needing the outside world to keep giving us a favourable verdict.

And there is no amount of reassurance that can permanently guarantee that.

The problem with comparison

Social media has made this particularly interesting.

We now have almost endless opportunities to compare our lives with other people’s careers, homes, bodies, relationships, vacations, pregnancies, parenting, businesses, achievements and beautifully lit breakfasts.

Most of us know intellectually that we’re seeing a curated version of someone’s life.

And yet comparison still gets in.

We see someone succeeding in an area where we feel uncertain and suddenly our own progress seems less impressive. Someone receives an opportunity we wanted and we start wondering what we’re doing wrong. A person who appears more confident, attractive or accomplished becomes a measuring stick we never consciously agreed to use.

The issue isn’t that comparison makes us terrible people. Comparison is incredibly human.

The problem comes when someone else doing well begins to mean something about our own value.

Their success doesn’t actually reduce ours.

But when self-worth is fragile, it can feel as though it does.

Sometimes achievement becomes reassurance too

Reassurance doesn’t only come from other people.

Sometimes we create it ourselves through achievement.

Finishing the project gives us a hit of I’m doing okay. Being productive makes us feel useful. Reaching the next goal briefly quiets whatever uncertainty we were carrying.

And then the feeling wears off.

So we set another goal.

This is one reason outward confidence can be misleading.

The person accomplishing the most isn’t necessarily the person who feels the most secure internally. Sometimes achievement comes from genuine curiosity, ambition and enjoyment. Other times, it becomes a very sophisticated way of continually proving something to ourselves.

Often it’s a mixture of both.

The question isn’t whether achievement is good or bad.

It’s whether your accomplishments are something you’re proud of, or something you continually need in order to feel worthy.

That’s a very different relationship with success.

What stronger self-worth can look like

I don’t think healthy self-worth means becoming completely unaffected by other people.

Of course reassurance feels good. Compliments feel good. Being chosen, loved, successful and recognized matters to us. We’re relational beings, and pretending we shouldn’t care what anyone thinks isn’t particularly realistic.

The difference is whether those experiences add to our sense of self or are responsible for holding it up.

When our worth isn’t entirely dependent on getting the right response from the outside world, there’s more room for flexibility.

Someone can be disappointed in you without that automatically making you a disappointment.

You can make a mistake without turning the mistake into an identity.

You can receive criticism and decide whether there’s something useful in it without immediately questioning everything you know about yourself.

And you can enjoy praise without desperately needing it to settle an argument you’re having internally.

Maybe the goal isn’t to feel confident all the time

There’s a version of confidence that I find much more useful than trying to eliminate insecurity.

It’s the ability to move forward while uncertainty is still there.

You can feel nervous and still speak.

You can wonder whether someone will approve of your decision and still make the decision that feels right for you.

You can enter a room without knowing exactly how you’ll be received and trust that you’ll be okay regardless.

To me, that’s much more interesting than trying to manufacture certainty.

And perhaps that’s part of the difference between confidence and self-worth.

Confidence says, I trust myself to meet this.

Self-worth says, However this goes, the outcome doesn’t get to decide my value.

What are you asking the outside world to keep proving?

I ended this episode with a question that I think is worth sitting with:

What are you asking the outside world to keep proving to you about yourself?

Maybe that you’re attractive enough, successful enough, wanted enough, smart enough, or doing enough.

The point isn’t to stop enjoying reassurance or suddenly become completely self-sufficient. I don’t think that’s the goal.

But it can be useful to notice where reassurance has become something you repeatedly need because the belief underneath it hasn’t changed.

Sometimes we don’t need another person to convince us a little harder.

We need to become curious about why their reassurance keeps disappearing the moment it arrives.

Listen to the full episode

In Episode 35 of Unravel, Why Reassurance Doesn’t Always Make You Feel Better — Part 1, I go deeper into the difference between confidence and self-worth, why positive feedback doesn’t always land the way we expect, and what research on self-esteem can teach us about the beliefs we carry about ourselves.

Listen to the Episode

This is Part 1 of a larger conversation. In Part 2, I’ll go deeper into how these patterns form and what may actually help them begin to change.