The key ideas

The Confidence Gap: A Guide to Overcoming Fear and Self-Doubt

Russ Harris, 2011

Many of us wait to feel confident before we finally begin. Russ Harris, a doctor and therapist, explains why you could wait for that moment your whole life. He shows how to act alongside fear, step back from thoughts about your own worthlessness and lean on your values, so that the feeling of confidence arrives after the first steps.

Who it is for

For anyone who has spent years putting off an important step until it stops feeling scary. And for everyone whose loud inner critic gets in the way of speaking up, meeting people, asking for things and trying something new.

It is not fear that holds you back. It is how you relate to it.

Between "I want to" and "I will"

Picture Timur. For three years now he has been meaning to pitch his project to his boss. The idea is good, and he knows it. But every time the right moment comes, a chill rises inside him, and his mind whispers: "Not now. First you need to feel more confident." Timur waits for that feeling the way you wait for a bus at an empty stop. The bus never comes.

Russ Harris is an Australian doctor and therapist. He practises an approach called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, created by the American psychologist Steven Hayes in the 1980s. In 2011 Harris published a book about why people get stuck exactly where Timur is stuck. He has a name for the space between where you are now and where you want to be: the confidence gap.

The central idea of the book sounds almost cheeky. The problem is not that we lack confidence. The problem is that we wait for it to show up, and put our lives on hold until it does. Fear and self-doubt will not disappear on request. But you can relate to them differently, and then they stop making your decisions for you.

Ahead of you: Nelson Mandela admitting he was afraid; your worst thought about yourself, sung to the tune of "Happy Birthday"; a pizza that explains what values are; and a question worth asking yourself on the evening after a failure. By the end you will see how the road to confidence works, and with which step you can start on it this very week.

The word "confidence" has two meanings

Harris starts with the word itself. Usually we use "confidence" for a feeling: calm, and a sense that things will work out. But the word has an older meaning too. It comes from a Latin root meaning "with trust". In that sense confidence is not a feeling but an action, an act of trusting yourself.

The difference is huge. You cannot switch a feeling on by willpower. In the morning it is there, by the evening it is gone, and right before an important conversation it is nowhere to be found. Action, though, is always available. You can act confidently without feeling confident: look the other person in the eye, speak in a steady voice, take the step while your heart is pounding.

This gives the first and most important rule of the book: actions first, feelings later. If you wait for the feeling before you act, you stay where you are. If you act, the feeling comes in time, because now you have something to stand on.

Back to Timur. He is waiting for confidence to arrive and nudge him into his boss's office. Harris says the order is the other way round. First the conversation, even with a shaky voice. The calm will come after the tenth conversation like that, not before the first. And Harris does not promise that fear will vanish completely: what grows is trust in yourself, while the nerves before something important may stay close by.

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About the author

Russ Harris is an Australian doctor and therapist, and one of the best-known trainers in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy worldwide. He is the author of the bestseller The Happiness Trap.

All books by this author: Russ Harris

Terms from the book

  • Self-esteem
  • Flow
  • Hayes
  • Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
  • Defusion
  • Expansion
  • Values
  • Mandela
  • Fight or flight
  • Affirmation
  • Fusion
  • Self-acceptance
  • Confidence gap: An image from the book, not a scientific term: the space between where you are now and where you want to be, which you hold back from crossing while you wait to feel confident.
  • Robben Island: An island off the coast of Cape Town that held a prison for political prisoners. Mandela spent 18 years there.
  • Stengel: Richard Stengel, an American journalist and editor of Time magazine, who worked with Mandela on his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom.
  • Confidence cycle: The author's model: practise a skill, apply it for real, assess the result and adjust, then go round again. According to Harris, this is how real confidence grows.
  • Engagement: In Harris's book: your attention fully present in what you are doing right now, without drifting into judgements and doubts.

All terms

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