Quick summary: Confidence usually develops after you act, rather than before, because the nervous system updates its expectations from completed actions rather than from affirmations. Relabelling physical arousal as readiness or excitement tends to support performance better than trying to force calm, since the body is already mobilised for effort. Choosing one small visible action while still unsettled builds agency, and that record of coping is what later feels like confidence in work, relationships, and mental health.
Many people wait to feel confident before they apply for the job, speak up in a meeting or start a difficult conversation. Much of the advice they receive encourages this. Visualise success, quieten the doubts, correct the inner voice, and walk into the room once you feel certain. The difficulty is that this treats confidence as something you must have first, when the research suggests it usually develops after the action, as a result of it.
What the body is doing before you act
Before a high-stakes moment, the body mobilises whether or not you feel ready. Your heart rate rises, your hands may turn cold or clammy, your attention narrows and your stomach can feel unsettled. The mind then tends to interpret these sensations, and the interpretation many people reach for is “I am not ready”. Yet the same physical state can reasonably be read as nervousness or as readiness to perform, because the physiology itself is the same in both cases.
Alison Wood Brooks, a researcher at Harvard Business School, tested this idea in tasks including public speaking, karaoke singing and difficult maths problems. Participants who told themselves “I am excited” tended to perform better than those who tried to tell themselves “I am calm”. Calming down means pushing against a high-arousal state, which is difficult to do under pressure, whereas relabelling the arousal as excitement fits with what the body is already doing.
Challenge and threat
Stress research draws a related distinction between challenge and threat states. In both, the body prepares for effort. What differs is how a person weighs the demands of the situation against the resources they believe they have. When demands seem to outweigh resources, people tend to experience threat, which is linked to narrower attention and poorer performance. When people feel they have something to draw on, they tend to experience challenge, which is linked to a more efficient cardiovascular response and better performance. Reappraisal appears to work through these mechanisms and is more than a pleasant thought.
Why acting changes the picture
Predictive processing offers a useful way to think about what happens next. On this view, the brain continually builds models of what situations mean, what the body can cope with and what is likely to happen. If someone repeatedly avoids situations that make them aroused, the brain keeps learning that those sensations signal danger and that retreat is the sensible response. If the person acts while aroused and the feared outcome does not occur, the model is updated with new evidence. Affirmations rarely achieve this, because the brain is weighing what actually happened and gives little weight to what you told yourself beforehand.
This is why confidence so often shows up after the speech, the application or the hard conversation. It can be thought of as the accumulated record of times you acted and coped. A person who describes themselves as confident is often describing a history of going ahead while uncertain, and that history tends to be sturdier than a good mood, which can disappear when circumstances change.
Agency as a starting point
The useful concept here is agency, meaning the ability to pick a direction while your body is still unsettled. It asks much less of you than confidence does. You do not have to feel powerful or to have silenced your doubts. You have to make one decision, such as sending the email, raising your hand or saying the first honest thing you intended to say. It is also more widely available than confidence, which often depends on earlier successes and on other people’s approval.
A practical sequence follows from this. Start by describing what is happening in plain terms, for example “my heart is racing and my body is getting ready to act”, without adding a prediction of disaster. Next, decide on the next visible action. Then reduce that action until it is small enough to carry out under pressure, so that writing a book becomes writing one paragraph, and becoming charismatic becomes asking one honest question. Finally, let the outcome count as evidence, because the nervous system learns from what was completed more readily than from encouragement.
A caution about positive reframing
Reframing works best when it accompanies action. Telling yourself you are excited while staying entirely passive is unlikely to shift anything, since the new interpretation never meets any evidence. Brooks’s participants were, after all, performing a task while they reappraised.
It is also worth noticing that a racing heart or a shaky voice often accompanies things that matter to the person. The sensations do not show that you are unprepared or out of place, and a calm, indifferent state would tell you rather less about how much the moment means to you. A more useful question than “do I feel confident enough?” is “what can I do right now, feeling as I do?” Confidence tends to follow once there is something for it to be based on.
Jordan Bridger is a behavioural scientist and social psychologist with a PhD in psychology. He is the founder of Emerge Creative and the Human X consultancy system.
