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How to Rebuild Your Confidence
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Building and reguilding confidence
Rebuilding confidence is not the same as building confidence.
- When building confidence, you're trying to do something you're not sure you can do.
- However, rebuilding confidence means you used to be good, but failed at some point. Getting back is much harder to do.
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Confidence is essentially about expectations
You think you'll excel, but considering the probability of success and feeling confident is not that easy.
Framing effects happen when the same thing looks different when the context change. If you're a good student in a mediocre class, you feel smarter than if you're a good student in an elite class.
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Relearning confidence
When practicing a skill that you have forgotten, you may lack the confidence to pick it up again.
However, those doubts are exaggerated. Not remembering is normal, and relearning happens faster than you may expect. Yet, you may still lack self-confidence, which will undermine your self-image and motivation.
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Play over Performance
When we improve in a skill, our mindset will start to shift from play to performance. Rebuilding confidence requires you to relive that initial play mindset.
- Make failures painless. Your first practice should have zero consequences. Do warm-up exercises for low stakes before you put on pressure to perform. However, if you review your skill but continue to get everything wrong, it is a signal to stop.
- Expect frustration and failure. When you expect failure, it won't bother you so much when performance suffers. Set the bar lower.
- Trust the rebuilding process. You don't need confidence that you will excel, just confidence that you'll eventually rebuild your confidence.
- Reframe your expectations. You have no responsibility to live up to other people's expectations of you.
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Note-taking: a powerful tool for learning
- Notes extend your memories: writing can be seen as an external enhancement of your brain, allowing you to think more complicated thoughts and solve harder problems.
- Not...
Figure out your purpose
Ask yourself why are you reading:
- What am I trying to remember?
- How am I going to use this information? (e.g. on a test, cited in an essay, etc.)
- What do I plan to do with the notes later? Will you be studying off of them extensively? Or maybe you’re just taking notes to stay focused, and it’s highly unlikely you’ll look through them after?
Strategies for note-taking
- Jot notes in the margin. These aren’t particularly searchable, but they allow you to reiterate the main idea.
- Keep a small notepad on the side, take breaks each section to jot down the main ideas.
- Create flashcards. In the rarer situations where memorization of details is important, then a simple strategy can be to just create flashcards while you take notes.
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Retrieval is more effective than passive review
We are all apt to forget things we have learned in the past. Even memories of important events will eventually decline in accuracy.
If we want to remember things, research tells us that ret...
Maintenance struggles
The person who uses their foreign language skills occasionally is reminded how much they've forgotten. Setting up a maintenance schedule where you practice your skills once a week may help, but few have the time to prioritize maintenance.
When you choose to specialize, remembering knowledge is less of a problem. The opposite situation is that knowledge is so well-maintained that the routines can lead you into a rut, making improvement more difficult.
Relearning as a strategy
It means accepting that your knowledge of old subjects will decline and that there will be a period of hard effort before they're usable at their previous level.
- Relearning tends to be much faster than initial learning.
- Relearning is a form of spacing practice.
- Relearning prioritizes useful knowledge. If something is more useful, you'll find opportunities to practice it. Less useful knowledge will decay more.
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Key Ideas
The limits of habits
Habit-building is a powerful tool for self-improvement. But the power of the tool can also create some overreach. In one way, habits will fail to form.
In other circumstances, habits are no...
Not all behaviors can be easily automated
Many habits are simply routines, but not all of them. For example, there isn't a habit for a hard workout at the gym - you won't become absent-minded midway through a benchpress.
- Habits are behaviors that flow automatically from a set of prompts.
- Routines are behaviors we repeatedly do but involve many deliberate actions done with some effort and thinking.
Habits aren’t commitments
- A commitment is a rule you've added for yourself. "I must exercise five times per week." But if you break that commitment, it can result in a backsliding effect.
- A habit is that behavior that happens automatically from a triggering situation.