We live in a culture that likes to sell confidence as a luxury item.
We are told that confidence is something you acquire after you get the promotion, after you lose the weight, after you find the perfect partner, or after your bank account hits a comfortable five figures. It’s basically like the shiny trophy waiting for us at the finish line of a successful life.
But I am here to tell you that the confidence born from comfort is fragile – a house of cards. True, unbreakable confidence isn’t built when everything is going right. I know this because I didn’t find my confidence at a high point in my life. I found it when I was flat on my back. When I was entirely broke, freshly dumped, and really quite lonely.
It was the unholy trinity of adult misery.
Building confidence isn’t about making everything perfect
When you lose your money, your relationship, and your social circle all at once, every single external prop you’ve been using to support your self-esteem gets stripped away.
So, you can no longer hide behind a partner’s validation or distract yourself with retail therapy or expensive dinners out. You can’t numb the sting of isolation by pretending you are too busy being a social butterfly. Essentially, when that happens, you are left entirely alone with yourself in a quiet room, forced to look into the mirror and reckon with who is looking back (kind of like the Ouroboros for any ACOTAR fans out there).
It’s terrifying when everything falls down like that
It feels like a funeral for the life you thought you were supposed to have. Trust me, I know because I spent my fair share of nights staring at the ceiling, wondering how a person could feel so completely invisible and hollowed out. I felt like a failure by every metric society uses to judge a human being’s worth.
But then, the panic starts to subside, and a weird kind of clarity takes its place. You look around and realise that the things society always taught you to fear happening have happened – you are broke, single, and lonely – and yet, your heart is still beating. The world didn’t end. You woke up today, you breathed in, and you are still standing.
That is the exact moment I think we tend to realise that we have a choice in what happens next. I stopped waiting for someone to come rescue me and started to look for ways to do that for myself. I learned that confidence is a practice. That it’s rooted in self-trust
Confidence rooted in self-trust won’t fail you
The confidence I have today doesn’t depend on a relationship status or a bank balance. It isn’t contingent on whether people like me or whether a project succeeds. It is rooted in a deep sense of self trust that means I’ll have my back no matter what life throws at me. It’s also much more present in my life because I have simply learned how to build it. I know what undermines it. I know the daily habits, thought processes and actions that will create it.
You have to stop waiting..
And, critically, I have stopped waiting for it. Because I’ve learned the biggest lesson about confidence – you don’t feel confidence before you start doing stuff. You do the stuff and that’s what builds the confidence. That action has to happen without any feelings of confidence present. Do it scared. Or uncomfortable. Do it drowning in uncertainty. But just do it.
And after you’ve done it? Both your mind and your nervous system learn that you can do more than you thought was possible – without believing that before you began. And so confidence builds. Regardless of what’s going on in your life at the time.
You may be in the trenches right now, and it sucks. Validate that pain. But do not let it make you helpless. This is the blueprint of your comeback. The version of you that is about to emerge from this winter is going to be absolutely unfuckwithable. Rock bottom isn’t your gravesite. It’s your launching pad.
Confidence is buildable – start today with my 45 min Confidence Session.
