Confidence: Is it really a skill? And Why?

Many people are a firm believer that confidence is a skill in which we can learn confidence through experience. But is it really true that confidence is a skill? What if it is actually innate? I researched this topic from the topic of self-confidence as a skill, to what type of skill confidence is, and why is confidence a skill. In this article, we are going to go deeper into this topic and I would like to start this article by giving you the answer immediately. Is confidence really a skill?

Confidence is a skill. This means that confidence can be learned and acquired through experience and learning. A person who projects confidence usually developed their confidence through deliberate practice of their work until it became something they are proud of.

This means that confidence is really a skill. But we still need to know a lot more information. For example, what type of skill is confidence. We also need to be more specific in why confidence is a skill. We are going to learn about this topic in this article.

Is confidence a skill?

Confidence is really a skill because it can be learned through time. However, the mode of learning confidence is not something specific. Confidence that can be acquired through learning comes from mastering other skills which ultimately lead to confidence.

People usually wonder if confidence is actually a skill.

This is because some people are just inherently born with it. We usually see people who are confident ever since they were young.

But there is a bigger picture we need to see.

Confidence is actually both innate and learnable. This means that there can be a person who is just confident in his or herself just because it is their personality.

There are also people who are not born with this confidence and should learn to get more confidence through hard work in making themselves better in their craft.

I am the one with no inborn confidence. For example, when I first had my lecture in front of 200 students, I felt really cold because of self-doubt. I am not really confident in my own skills to teach them.

But through hard work in creating a lesson plan, practicing what I’m going to say in lectures repeatedly, I was able to gain a little confidence.

But the true confidence came when I started to talk in front of my students.

As you can see, I have experienced a lot of moments where I doubted my own abilities. I am not someone who just had self-confidence without any hard work.

This includes my website where I am not confident in making my own. In fact, it took me 4 hours in writing my first article which is only 800 words long.

Right now, I have written close to a hundred articles and I’m not counting anymore. But my confidence in both teaching and writing came from multiple experiences in building my skills.

That is why self-confidence is a skill. It is a learnable skill.

I talked more about this topic in my other article where I discussed if self-confidence is a personality or an ability trait. It is a good read especially if you are building your confidence. Is self confidence a personality or ability trait?

“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.”

Aristotle

I hope you got my point that confidence is a skill. It is like you are building confidence by building yourself.

This is because building confidence is never specific.

Let me explain this in a more detailed manner.

Some people will say that to be confident, you have to do the confidence pose and look in the mirror with different affirmations to build your self worth.

Does these work in building confidence? Yes. Does this build actual confidence? No.

The difference between these two is that the first one is only a confidence booster. It is easily affected by emotions and can easily go down with ease. If you are looking a type of confidence that will last a very long time, we need to build the other one.

Interested? I will explain it further in the next section.

What kind of skill is confidence?

Confidence is a kind of soft skill. Soft skills are skills that are non-specific which means that they can affect many aspects of our life. This is because a confident person will usually have not just better skills, but also a better quality of life.

It is different from hard skills which is very specific to a certain skill set. Confidence is not a hard skill.

This can easily be explained with an example.

When you are confident, many aspects of your life can be changed with confidence. It can be your ability to work on hard tasks, your ability to learn new things, and many more.

These skills will affect almost all aspects of your life.

While hard skills are more specific.

One such example of hard skill is Coding. In coding, it is a useful skill if you are a developer, but it won’t affect all aspects of your life. It is specific to your work.

Confidence along with other soft skills can be used in almost every aspect of your life. More examples of soft skills are: Social Skills, Punctuality, and Listening.

I actually made a really good guide for building social skills. Along with confidence, it is a good soft skill to develop as an individual. If you are an introvert like me, you will also find it extremely useful since I am also an introvert. For an extrovert, well you can also find that it gives good tips to improve social skills. There are 25 tips Social Skills tips in there for you to learn: How to Improve Your Social Skills and Confidence

“In fact, the confidence of the people is worth more than money.”

Carter G. Woodson

Now, let us discuss what I mean by confidence being significantly affected by emotions.

It is a lot easier to explain this with an example.

Suppose that you are having a basketball match against someone who you think is a beginner. So you are confident that you are going to win the match.

A few minutes go by and you’ve found out that your enemy is way better than you. He looks weaker but he is very accurate and it soon turned out that you can’t win against that person.

In just a few minutes, you surely lost your confidence in winning the game.

That’s the problem with confidence as an emotion. It will easily be affected by emotion and can go down in a matter of seconds.

The problem with confidence that came from methods such as affirmations and standing in the mirror with confidence pose is that it can easily be broken.

In my example, it is a type of confidence that came from practice since it is a sport. But it still went down because of emotion. It took a few minutes but it went down.

Now, let’s go back to fake confidence where you are doing a confident stance and suddenly someone bullied you. This time, it can only be a matter of seconds and not minutes.

In seconds, you might lose that confidence.

Now let’s look at this the other way, my confidence came from my deliberate practice in writing and writing for more than a hundred thousand words on the internet.

Even if you tell me that my writing is still bad, I do not mind, trust me I already know that. I’ve learned a lot through my career as a blog writer and I know that I am still improving.

Even if I don’t consider myself good writer, I still and always know that I can improve.

That is the difference. The confidence that came from practice is knowing that you might not be perfect or the best, but you know that you can improve and you trust your abilities.

“The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.”

Aristotle

Why is confidence a skill?

Confidence is a skill because we can develop confidence as we become better in any skill set. A person who is getting better in their skill level through hard work will also have better confidence overall in their specific craft. Thus, the improvement of confidence with effort makes it a skill.

It is no wonder right now that confidence is not only something you are born with, but something you can develop upon.

Confidence is not something that you can specifically develop by doing confidence stance and a lot of affirmations.

Confidence comes from your practicing the skills you want to develop. The better you become, the more confident you become.

And the confidence that will come from that is something hard to brake.

That is because confidence from practicing will let you realize how long your journey will still be.

There might be people that might break your confidence by telling your skill is not enough. But with enough practice in the craft and building confidence, you already know that all of us has a long way to go.

As Aristotle said, “The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.”

So the point is this. Confidence is a skill. You build confidence not by building it directly, but by building it indirectly through building your skillset. The more you practice, the more you get better, the more your confidence. This type of confidence is the true confidence people are looking for in life.