The Confidence Paradox: The Only Way to Be Confident & Build Self-Esteem

One of my favorite anecdotes is about an art teacher who split his pottery class into two groups. He told group one to spend the afternoon making "as many pots as possible." He told the second group to "make the perfect pot." Then, he had a group of people evaluate the pots. Which group do you think made the best pots?

That's right, those crafty SOBs who just churned those things out. The more they made, the better the pots got.

I love this anecdote because it provides a valuable framework for how to view failure, confidence, and growth.

Speaking with emerging leaders and new coaches, I often deal with challenges I'd categorize as a crisis of confidence—imposter syndrome, not knowing what to say or do, a fear of looking dumb or incompetent, losing a client or employee, not making a difference, and so on.

A big part of the problem is how we approach confidence as a society. I call it the Confidence Paradox.

The Confidence Paradox states, "We desire confidence and power so that we don't experience the negatives in life—embarrassment, fear, anxiety, uncertainty, failure—but only by experiencing (and even embracing) the negatives do we build confidence.

My favorite author and thinker, Mark Manson, always says that confidence is not about success but your relationship with failure. We grow and improve only by building a healthy relationship with the negatives.

• People who are confident in dating are comfortable with rejection.

• People who are confident in relationships are comfortable being vulnerable.

• People who are confident in business are comfortable with failure.

• People who are confident in hitting the game-winner are comfortable missing the game-winner.

The same applies to us as coaches, leaders, and managers. Confident coaches aren't the ones who know everything and make TikTok videos that make other people look foolish. Confident coaches are secure in the fact that they may not always have the right question to ask, the right remark to soothe stress or the right advice at the right time, but they show up anyway.

So, if you're dealing with a crisis of confidence, this one is for you. And it starts with a huge mindset shift around failure.

Embracing Failure

In a real-life study of the pots story, researchers took employees through a software training program. Half were taught to prevent errors from occurring, while the other half were intentionally guided into mistakes and weren't given any support to fix them.

The group guided towards mistakes had greater feelings of self-efficacy (i.e., some swag in their job) because they faced and overcame challenges and performed better in their actual jobs. They were also far faster and more accurate in using the software later on because they had learned to figure their way out of mistakes.

There is a slew of research showing that people who deal with perfectionism—those who are intolerant of failure and refuse to accept mistakes—are far more susceptible to a range of disorders: low self-esteem, eating disorders, sexual dysfunction, depression, anxiety, OCD, alcoholism, social anxieties and disorders, procrastination, and difficulties in relationships.

Ironically, by avoiding whatever it is you're afraid of or anxious about, you are actually making your confidence crisis worse. Elbert Hubbard once said, "The greatest mistake a man can make is to be afraid of making one." Research by Richard Bednar and Scott Peterson found that the best way to overcome failure and improve self-esteem is simply by experiencing it.

So, step one is to not only accept some type of failure but to actively engage with it, embrace it even.

When we become comfortable with failure, we're more likely to experiment and take risks, allowing us to learn and grow. A trove of studies shows that when we can conceive of failure as an opportunity for growth, we are all the more likely to experience that growth.

A study from the University of Arizona (Bear Down, baby) found that there is actually an ideal "failure rate."

If you're perfect and never fail, you're likely not challenging yourself to grow and improve. You're also uninspiring and make a terrible guest at a dinner party.

If you fail all the time, you'll feel demoralized and lose the energy to try anything new.

When you're doing something you don't feel confident in, you should expect your efforts to result in error about 15.87% of the time.

Run Out Into The Storm

Author Jim Loehr, who is a bit of a professional crush of mine, says, "Storms are the training ground for character.. absent the stress of the storm, character strength neither grows nor is revealed."

The lesson, of course, is to head out into the rain. The only way to even see what you're made of in the first place is to experience the negatives head-on.

The self-esteem movement took off in the 1990s, and hot take: they got the concept right—self-esteem is a hugely important factor of a healthy, functioning adult. A focus on self-esteem isn't inherently a bad thing. What we got wrong was how self-esteem develops.

Self-esteem is not a birthright. It's not developed through participation trophies or giving a child free reign to run the household.

Self-esteem must be earned.

According to Loehr, healthy self-esteem is built on two factors:

1. Energy expended to build character strengths. This means actually engaging in the storms and showing up despite how you feel.

2. Alignment of energy and actions with highly specific personal values. Basically, it's how you behave while you're in the storm.

And you can actively improve at both aspects every single day. If you're struggling with this—the idea of actively embracing failure—it's helpful to remember that failure doesn't hurt nearly as much as we'd think.

Daniel Gilbert, author of "Stumbling on Happiness," has performed several studies showing this:

• College students overestimate how devastated they would feel at the end of a romantic relationship.

• Professors think that being denied tenure will lead to unhappiness, when in fact, professors denied tenure do not experience this at all.

• Even extreme examples of lottery winners and paraplegics provide evidence that our fear of consequences is nearly always worse than the consequences themselves.

Conclusion

I’ll end by reminding you of where we started—the Confidence Paradox. If you truly want to feel confident and powerful, you have to begin by embracing, even pursuing, failure, challenges, and risk. Only through the storms that suck do we actually grow, improve, mature, and become confident.

Mark Twain once wrote, “The weakest of all weak things is a virtue which has not been tested in the fire.”

So, embrace the fires this week and try to be a “wee bit” better (as the Irish say) within those fires.

Be a tad more patient, a little bit more courageous in your communication, and take a bit more risk. 

Don’t worry about how “perfect” your pot is. Focus on how many you can make, and then stand up tall and deal with wherever the chips fall.