What Breaks Confidence?: Exploring Confidence Series #3
Welcome back to the Exploring Confidence Series!
When you think of losing confidence, how does that happen?
In Part 3 of our Exploring Confidence mini-series, we will discuss why we lose confidence and what happens when our confidence falters.
What is Confidence? & What Creates Confidence?: A Brief Review
In Part 1 we defined confidence as: the “quality of being certain of your abilities or of having trust in people, plans, or the future.” We discussed self-efficacy, where confidence comes from, and the fact that everyone needs it!
In Part 2 we expanded these ideas and discussed two important factors that create confidence: support from our network and taking risks & succeeding.
Confidence matters because it creates a more positive mindset, allows for better interactions with others, and creates an easier path to success.
Confidence is made up of a combination of inner strength, willingness to be wrong, and the knowledge that you can get back up when you fall down.
Why Do We Lose Confidence?
We know what confidence is, and where it comes from, which is great! We are all human, though, so we know that not every decision or every day is a confident one. We can sometimes question whether our actions will lead to where we want to go, or lose trust that everything will be alright in the end.
Who here has had a day where they felt defeated and all confidence is just gone? I know I have!
There are several factors that can cause our confidence to dwindle:
Lack of Support Network Although our support network can be greatly helpful in creating our confidence, sometimes we find ourselves without a support network. These individuals can’t help us build confidence if they’re not present, or not willing to be present, in times of seeming defeat.
There are two types of “missing” support network:
First, the physical absence of anyone you have a meaningful relationship with. For instance, if you have a small family and your last remaining relative passes away. You’re not in a relationship, you don’t have children, and you’ve spent the last few years being a caretaker, so you have been distanced from close friends. In this example, you are seemingly alone in the world without a support network because there literally isn’t anyone in your life to turn to.
Second, there are people around you, but the relationships are weak and/or not responsive to the relationship. For instance, if you have a large family but aren’t close with anyone in particular. Perhaps you only see them once every few years, and you don’t really correspond or keep in touch in between, even when there are joyous or terrible events. In this situation, you have a network, but the relationships are not such that they create support for you.
In either situation, we don’t have a “safety net” of supporters rallying our spirits and building our confidence.
In either situation, we don’t have a “safety net” of supporters rallying our spirits and building our confidence. We feel like we are alone in the world, and so we wonder how we can possibly succeed if it’s us against the entire world. That mindset can severely lessen our confidence.
Harmful “Support” Network On the other hand, just because we have a network doesn’t always mean it’s healthy or supportive. Sometimes we get into situations where the people we think are going to support us go the opposite direction and that can really take a toll on our confidence.
Our “support” network can be verbally, emotionally, or even physically harmful. Many times, our network uses more than one of these kinds of harmful behavior together. All of them are dangerous, and if you are facing one of these relationships in your life, you should seek help immediately.
When individuals in our network are verbally harmful, they say they are our allies, but then speak to us in a way that degrades our relationships and confidence. This might be a parent saying they believe in you but then telling you you’ll never make it. It could be a friend mentioning a scholarship you would love but then saying, “But I don’t know if it would be the right fit for you, you know you struggle in that area.”
All of these behaviors are dangerous, and if you are facing one of these relationships in your life, you should seek help immediately.
When individuals in our network are emotionally harmful, they behave in ways that make us doubt our decisions and actions. There are multiple ways this can occur, but one of the most common is guilt tripping. For instance, if you try to end a toxic relationship with someone and they threaten to commit suicide if you go through with it. This behavior is meant to manipulate you into feeling bad about the decision, and therefore not making it. It’s also a control tactic that can be used to influence you into doing things you wouldn’t otherwise do by creating or affecting extreme emotion.
When individuals in our network are physically harmful, they behave in ways that hurt us physically, which leads to a feeling of weakness and helplessness. They physically block doors when we are leaving, or sometimes even lay hands on us in an attempt to break our confidence enough that we stay where we are and let them control our actions. The individual may act out with or without apology. Sometimes abusers use all three kinds of harm to meet their ends but then later try to apologize. They say things like “I didn’t mean it” or “I’ll never do that again, I swear.”
Never Fully Developed Our confidence isn’t always about others, though. After all, we are our own individuals! Sometimes confidence can break more easily because it never really developed all the way to begin with.
This might be related to our environment growing up, or our unique personalities. It might also be that we were hesitant kids who weren’t willing to take risks. As we learned in Part 2, risk-taking is one of the major ways we build our confidence. It’s kind of hard to do that when you’re not taking any!
If you’re confidence is low, think for a moment: what was a time where you were fully and unabashedly confident?
If you’re confidence is low, think for a moment: what was a time where you were fully and unabashedly confident? If you are having trouble, it could be that your confidence was there, but not as fully developed as you thought.
Bad & Failed Experiences Probably the biggest way we lose confidence in ourselves is when we have bad experiences, including failure. We have all had experiences where things didn’t go as planned and ended differently than we expected. Sometimes this means the outcome is poor, but sometimes it’s just different. In either circumstance, it’s not as “good” as we would have liked, so we feel disappointment.
Careers and relationships are often the biggest culprits of bad and failed experiences. These are areas we can see major wins and losses pretty easily because we spend so much time working on them individually and with others. Academics and schoolwork also falls within this realm, although there is a lot more middle ground where the bare minimum can be met but the expectations are not.
In terms of careers, if you’ve been on the job market recently, you have probably felt bad experience keenly. As a job seeker, you put in customized resumes and cover letters for jobs that would be an amazing fit with your skills and personality...only to receive no response whatsoever. To make things even worse, you are finally formally rejected via an error-riddled email 6 months later (when you’re still looking for a position).
This type of bad experience might not even have anything to do with you and your actions, but the sheer amount of qualified applicants in a process that lacks human interaction. Talk about a confidence buster, right?
Relationships with others can also lead to bad experiences or failure. When you’re in a serious relationship, or trying to be, you have to be willing to offer the best of yourself. The other person must do the same for the relationship to succeed because you both pull from the shared best well to succeed as a team. The problem is, sometimes you put your best in and the other person takes it out without putting anything in themselves. Sometimes you and the other person only put a little into the shared well. Sometimes there is no well and one of you is taking on the responsibility of being the well from which the relationship draws.
Any way the story ends, your confidence in future relationships will be diminished because of how draining the prior experience was.
Any way the story ends, your confidence in future relationships will be diminished because of how draining the prior experience was.
There are also times we are doing fine, but not as well as we’d hoped. One major place we see this is in school. You might start the semester striving for an A, only to have some crisis in the middle of the semester. You finish class with a “C” instead. This feels like a failure because you had high expectations, but the reality is, a “C” is passing. You did pass the class, you just didn’t perform as well as you wanted. It’s a double-edged sword because on the one hand, you passed, which is good and you can move on; but on the other hand, for many students a “C” feels terrible, like they did something really wrong.
Even though you couldn’t have controlled the crisis, your confidence can take the hit because you feel like you should have been able to control it and do better.
What Happens When We Lose Confidence?
When we lack confidence, it feels bad. Even if we are normally confident, surviving a bad support network or doing less than our best can take a toll on all areas in our life.
A few noticeable things occur when we lack confidence:
Afraid to Make Decisions When we get the feeling we can’t do something, or do it well, we become afraid to make decisions in our lives. This is especially true if we had a bad experience because of a specific decision we made.
If you tried to make a big career jump, but then it fell flat and wasn’t at all what you expected, you might be afraid to make another big jump, right?
Our experiences can be a big deterrent from making decisions because we feel like the same thing might happen again if we decide incorrectly.
Inaction on Our Big Dreams When our confidence drops, we make less or prolonged decisions. We’re afraid those choices will negatively impact where we’re going, so we try to avoid doing anything that could put our big dreams at risk. The problem is, without action, we aren’t getting to our dreams.
If you proposed to your significant other and they rejected you, maybe even ended the relationship, it’s going to be a lot harder to get to your dream of having a family. Would you feel confident enough to go back out and try to find another partner to start your family? Maybe, maybe not.
Our experiences can deter us from making decisions, and can also lead us away from taking action.
Our experiences can deter us from making decisions, and can also lead us away from taking action. Without action, you won’t be able to move forward toward your dreams.
Worry More When we lack confidence, we worry about things. Sometimes they are things that make sense, like how to make important decisions; but, sometimes they are things we didn’t used to worry about when we were more confident.
If you have always done well at writing in school, and then in your required college writing class you get a “C” on your first big project, you will definitely worry about doing better next time, right? Or worry that you’re not actually good enough to do well in class and college in general.
Even when we have the skills, and we make good decisions, not everything turns out how we expect. When things don’t go our way, we worry much more about the next time.
Feel Resigned & Stuck Most of all, when our confidence drops, we feel stuck. We feel like we’re in a hole we can’t climb out of, and sometimes we resign ourselves to just being okay with that thought. We remember a time when we were confident, but can’t get back to that point for whatever reason.
If you’ve completed your degree and taken a low wage job you don’t want in order to pay the bills, you probably feel a little stuck. Then, even though you had the best intentions of finding something better, you are still in that job for 5 years later because you can’t find something better. What’s taking the biggest hit? Your confidence, most likely.
When we’re afraid to make decisions, not taking any action on our dreams, and worrying about what feels like everything, that’s a recipe for feeling stuck.
When we’re afraid to make decisions, not taking any action on our dreams, and worrying about what feels like everything, that’s a recipe for feeling stuck. And when we’ve been stuck long enough, we might feel resigned to it - like nothing is going to get better. The “this is it” mindset.
What’s Next?
We’ve talked about why we lose confidence and what happens when our confidence falters. Tune in for the next and final part of our mini-series to read more about how to get confidence when we need it!
What have your experiences been with confidence? I’d love to hear about them! Drop a comment below or send me an email at rachel@capturingyourconfidence.com.