Confidence is a Superpower (And Most People Lose it Before They Even Know They Had It)

Part 1: How We Lose What We Were Born With

There are people walking through life with abilities they have never fully tested, opinions they rarely express and ambitions they have quietly reduced to something safer. They are not necessarily lacking intelligence, talent or opportunity. In fact, some are exceptionally capable. What they lack is something far less visible, yet powerful enough to influence almost every decision they make: confidence in themselves and in their right to step forward.

Confidence is a superpower, not because it makes someone fearless, loud or certain of everything they do, but because it changes what they are prepared to attempt. It allows a person to enter a room without immediately wondering whether everyone else belongs there more than they do. It permits them to speak before every sentence has been rehearsed internally, to risk being wrong, to recover from embarrassment and to keep moving when somebody else’s opinion is less than favourable.

The tragedy is that many people lose this natural freedom long before they understand what has happened. There is rarely a single morning when someone wakes up and announces, “Today I stopped believing in myself.” Confidence is usually worn down much more quietly. Experience follows experience, criticism follows criticism, and eventually a person starts adjusting themselves to avoid the discomfort they have come to expect.

Psychology gives us a useful way of understanding part of this through self-efficacy, a concept developed extensively by psychologist Albert Bandura. Self-efficacy describes our belief in our ability to organise ourselves and take the actions necessary to deal with particular situations. It matters because what people believe they can handle can influence whether they approach a challenge, avoid it, persist when things become difficult, or abandon the effort altogether.

A large meta-analysis by Stajkovic and Luthans examined 114 studies involving more than 21,000 participants and found a significantly positive relationship between self-efficacy and work-related performance. The researchers reported an average correlation of .38, although the strength of the relationship varied according to factors such as task complexity. Confidence alone therefore does not guarantee achievement, but believing that you are capable of acting matters considerably because it influences whether your ability ever gets the opportunity to show itself.

A child enters life without an adult understanding of status, embarrassment or social comparison. They reach for things, fall, get up, ask questions repeatedly and make mistakes without initially attaching those mistakes to their worth as a human being. Much of what comes later is learned through interaction with the environment and through the way significant people respond to curiosity, failure, emotion and effort.

Consider two children struggling to learn the same thing. One hears, “Take your time. Try it again. You’re getting there.” The other hears frustration in the adult’s voice: “How many times do I have to show you this?” The immediate problem may last only minutes, but the messages being absorbed are very different. One child is learning that difficulty is part of learning; the other may gradually begin associating difficulty with embarrassment.

This does not mean that every criticism wounds a child permanently, or that parents must somehow provide flawless childhoods. Children need correction, limits, disappointment and challenge. What matters is the emotional pattern surrounding those experiences. There is an enormous difference between being corrected while still feeling secure and repeatedly being made to feel that mistakes reveal something defective about you.

Over time, children become remarkably skilled readers of their environments. They notice facial expressions, silences, changes in tone and the emotional temperature of a room. A raised eyebrow may mean nothing once, but when ridicule, impatience, comparison or unpredictable anger become repeated features of life, a child may start organising their behaviour around avoiding them.

That is where something important can begin to change. The child who once spoke freely starts checking the room first. The one who once volunteered an answer begins waiting for somebody else. The child who naturally experimented becomes increasingly concerned with getting things right. Nobody announces that confidence is disappearing because, from the outside, what is happening may simply look like growing up.

It is often the little things said and done over time that slowly build into something destructive. A raised eyebrow when you speak, a sarcastic comment when you try, being laughed at for a mistake, rushed while you are learning, constantly compared with somebody else, or made to feel foolish for asking a perfectly reasonable question can seem insignificant when considered separately.

Many may not see any of this as emotional damage. Sometimes it genuinely is not. Human beings tease one another, lose patience and occasionally say things badly. But frequency, intensity and context matter, particularly when the recipient is young and the criticism comes from people whose approval and protection matter deeply to them.

A single drop of rain will not make a river, but given enough rain and enough intensity, water can become the flood that washes away the bridge to the person you might otherwise have become.

The danger is not simply that someone remembers being criticised. The deeper problem comes when the criticism becomes internalised. Long after the parent, teacher, relative, school bully or former partner has gone, their voice can remain. A person can eventually become their own critic, questioning themselves before anybody else gets the opportunity.

Research gives us reason to take these long-term effects seriously without pretending that everybody responds in exactly the same way. A 2024 longitudinal analysis using data from the Midlife Development in the United States study examined pathways from retrospectively reported childhood parental abuse to adult psychological difficulties. The researchers found evidence that lower self-esteem was one mechanism linking some childhood abuse experiences with later mental-health symptoms over an 18-year period.

The important point is not that an unhappy childhood automatically produces an unconfident adult. Human development is far more complicated than that. Temperament, relationships, later experiences, culture, education, opportunities and supportive people can all alter the course of a life. The point is simply that the environments in which people repeatedly learn who they are can leave fingerprints on the way they eventually see themselves.

One of the reasons low confidence remains misunderstood is that it does not have a single appearance. The person lacking confidence is not always sitting quietly in the corner. Some become perfectionists. Others become chronic people-pleasers, overworkers, relentless achievers or the person who makes everybody laugh while carefully avoiding anything that would reveal vulnerability.

Someone may build an impressive career and still live with the unsettling feeling that one serious mistake will expose them. Another person may repeatedly seek reassurance in relationships, not because they are demanding by nature, but because reassurance temporarily quietens a much older question: “Am I really enough for you?”

Another may avoid opportunities altogether. They tell themselves the timing is wrong, the competition is too strong, they need another qualification or they will start when they feel more prepared. Sometimes these explanations are sensible. Sometimes they are fear wearing respectable clothes.

This is where confidence becomes consequential. A lack of confidence does not merely change how you feel about yourself. It can change the opportunities you pursue, the relationships you tolerate, the salary you negotiate for, the ideas you contribute, the boundaries you enforce and the ambitions you allow yourself to entertain.

Low confidence can therefore create a strange contradiction: you can possess ability without experiencing yourself as able.

Research on self-esteem offers another part of this picture. Sowislo and Orth analysed longitudinal evidence from 77 studies examining depression and 18 examining anxiety. Their meta-analysis found stronger evidence that low self-esteem predicts later depression than the reverse pathway, although relationships between these variables are complex and low self-esteem should not be treated as a simple cause of mental illness.

That distinction matters because confidence, self-esteem and mental health are related but not interchangeable. Someone can be confident in one area and deeply uncertain in another. A gifted surgeon may fear public speaking; a charismatic business owner may privately struggle with self-worth. Human confidence is not an on-and-off switch. It is shaped by experience, context and the evidence we have accumulated about ourselves.

Childhood can conceal low confidence because adults make many decisions for us. Adulthood removes that shelter. Suddenly life begins asking questions that require us to choose: What do you want? What do you believe? Will you apply? Will you speak? Will you leave? Will you lead? Will you risk rejection for something you genuinely want?

This is where some people first discover how little they trust themselves. They can be academically qualified, hardworking and intellectually capable, yet ordinary professional situations create enormous internal pressure. They overprepare for conversations, rewrite simple emails repeatedly, struggle to challenge somebody more senior and interpret normal criticism as evidence that they never belonged there in the first place.

Then comes comparison. You watch someone with less experience speak confidently while you remain silent despite knowing the subject better. You see someone pursue an opportunity you had already talked yourself out of. You begin wondering why other people appear able to move through the world without carrying the same internal weight.

What you cannot see, of course, is everybody else’s private struggle. Confidence should never be confused with performance. Some people disguise insecurity extremely well, while others who speak hesitantly possess considerable inner strength. Nevertheless, there is a profound difference between occasionally doubting yourself and organising much of your life around the fear of being exposed, rejected or found inadequate.

Left unchallenged, that fear can become expensive. Not necessarily in money, although sometimes that too, but in years.

Years of almost applying, almost starting, almost leaving, almost speaking, almost becoming.

And eventually the question becomes uncomfortable: How much of the life you could have lived has been negotiated away because you did not trust yourself enough to attempt it?

Sowislo, J. F. & Orth, U. (2013). Does low self-esteem predict depression and anxiety? A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Psychological Bulletin, 139(1), 213–240. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0028931

Stajkovic, A. D. & Luthans, F. (1998). Self-efficacy and work-related performance: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 124(2), 240–261. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.124.2.240