Exploring Twyla Tharp’s book, The Creative Habit, I came across this gem:
“Confidence is a trait that has to be earned honestly and refreshed constantly; you have to work as hard to protect your skills as you did to develop them. This means vigilant practice and excellent practice habits.” –Twyla Tharp1
While you can pretend to be confident, false-confidence won’t get you very far. What really works – what we all want – is true confidence, and true confidence can’t be faked. When she says that it has to be “earned honestly,” she’s hinting at the notion that true confidence is self-efficacy.
Self-efficacy is your belief in your own ability to handle life’s challenges. It is the reality-based belief that you are an effective person, resilient person. And the recipe for increasing your self-efficacy is simple: Acquire knowledge, skills, and experience. Such things are, of course, pragmatically useful. But they also stack up in the mind as evidence of your effectiveness, and that is what creates true confidence.
The second reminder Tharp offers is that the skills, knowledge, and experiences that lead to self-efficacy have to be “refreshed constantly,” or they’ll slip away.
When she notes that “you have to work as hard to protect your skills as you did to develop them,” Tharp is highlighting the neuroscience principle of “use it or lose it.” In short, this means that knowledge you don’t use will be quickly forgotten, and skills you don’t practice will be quickly lost.
So, having honestly earned true confidence, you must then maintain it through regular practice.
1 Tharp, Twyla. The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life. Simon & Schuster, 2005.