Confidence, Without The Hype

Most advice about confidence sounds great until you try it and nothing changes. We cut through the noise with a practical, evidence-led path that treats confidence as something you build, not something you wait to feel. After 27 years working with teams and leaders, John Walsh shares why belief follows behaviour—and how small, repeated acts of slight courage create the proof your brain can’t ignore.

We start by separating confidence from self-esteem, then map three levels of development: foundation for unshakable basics, application for a life that fits who you are, and excellence for deliberate stretch. You’ll hear three grounded case studies—Sarah learning to assert in meetings, Marcus tracking uncomfortable business development actions, and Janet staircasing from internal talks to industry keynotes. The common thread is simple and demanding: track actions, not outcomes; start embarrassingly small; repeat until fear becomes background noise.

We also unpack six forces that make this hard: early neural wiring, the vicious circle of low confidence, the social comparison trap, the confidence–competence disconnect, genetic sensitivity without destiny, and the hidden bottleneck of boredom tolerance. Then we get specific about survival tactics for the boring middle bit—making repetitions meaningful, recording completions to reveal invisible progress, using social accountability, and building boredom tolerance like a muscle. Expect to spot where confidence truly matters day to day: at work, in relationships, and in personal disciplines no one sees. The takeaway is clear and actionable: evidence beats affirmations, and the ledger of proof grows one small act at a time.

If this resonates, subscribe, share with someone who needs a quiet nudge, and leave a review telling us the one small action you’ll repeat this week.

Chapters

• 0:10 Why Typical Confidence Advice Fails
• 0:31 John Walsh’s Background And Purpose
• 2:18 From Dry Workbook To Living Story
• 3:21 Defining Confidence Versus Self-Esteem
• 4:38 Three Levels Of Confidence Development
• 5:18 Practice Over Positivity
• 5:21 Case Study: Sarah’s Assertive Steps
• 6:46 Case Study: Marcus And Action Tracking
• 7:38 Case Study: Janet’s Stretch To Excellence
• 8:30 The Shared Pattern Behind Growth
• 8:48 Six Reasons Confidence Is Hard
• 15:50 What Actually Works In Practice
• 18:05 Surviving The Boring Middle Bit
• 20:25 Where Confidence Shows Up Daily
• 22:13 Expect Boredom And Keep Going
• 24:02 Two Types Of Boredom Tolerance

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:10

Let's talk about confidence. Episode 1. Why most confidence advice doesn't work. If you've ever read a confidence book, watched a motivational video, or attended a workshop that told you to believe in yourself and think positive, and then felt exactly the same two weeks later, this episode explains why. Welcome to Let's Talk About Confidence. I'm John M. Walsh and I've spent the past 27 years working with organizations on behavioural change. What I've learned is this confidence isn't about believing harder, it's about doing harder things repeatedly until they become less hard. And nobody tells you how boring that actually is. In this first episode, I'm going to explain what confidence actually is, why most people struggle with it, and what genuinely works to build it. Not theory, evidence from 27 years and over 180 organizations. In future episodes I'll be talking to founders, leaders, and people who have had to build confidence through pressure and consequence. But today let me show you why this podcast exists. In early 2025, a long-standing client asked me to run a series of workshops for his staff. He'd worked out what I'd been seeing for years. The performance failures weren't about capability, they were about belief. His people, new starters and veterans alike, skilled and unskilled, were stumbling not because they couldn't do the work, but because they didn't trust themselves enough to ask the difficult question, to push back when needed, to claim their place at the table. So I did what I always do. I wrote what I thought was a sensible business book, stages, exercises, evidence based frameworks. When I finished the final draft, I knew immediately it was wrong. It was dry, worthy, forgettable. Everything I'd sworn I wouldn't create, and yet there it was, another manual gathering dust on a shelf. Then I looked up. My wife and I live in a fence where our day room overlooks twenty eight miles of open sky. We've come to know the birds that visit our garden, not just the species, but their habits, their personalities, and their return each season. And somewhere between watching a small bird test its wings and a bee working methodically through summer blooms, the answer arrived. People don't need another workbook. They need to see themselves in a story. They need to understand what building confidence actually feels like, not just what it looks like on a competency framework. So the book Little Bird Was Born from the work that showed me the problem and from nature that showed me how to solve it. Little Bird worked because it showed what building confidence feels like, the uncertainty, the small attempts, the boring repetition, the setbacks. Not a workbook, a mirror. But here's what the fable couldn't do. Explain why people struggle with confidence in the first place and give them the specific practices that work. That's what this podcast is for. Let's start with the basics. Confidence isn't self-esteem. Self-esteem is about how you evaluate your worth as a person. Confidence is about believing you can generally accomplish what you set out to do in the future. And here's the crucial bit. Confidence can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Those without it may fail because they lack it. Those with it may succeed because they have it, rather than because of any inn ability or skill. This means confidence creates its own evidence, which is both the problem and the opportunity. Now in my work I've identified three levels of confidence development. Foundation level, what I call unshakable confidence. This is building basic self-belief, learning to trust yourself enough to attempt things. The application level, this is what we call the confident life. This is designing a life that actually fits who you are, not who you think you should be. And the third level is excellence level. We call it unthinkable confidence. This is reaching what Maslow called self-actualization, becoming everything you're capable of. Most people think confidence is something you either have or you don't have. And that's wrong. It's a behavior you develop through specific practices. It's not positive thinking, it's not affirmations, it's accumulated evidence that you can handle what comes. And that evidence comes from one place only. Doing things repeatedly that require slight courage until they require less courage. I'll show you what this looks like in practice. I'm going to walk you through three people at different stages of building confidence. All from a consultant work. Listen for where you recognise yourself. First let me tell you about Sarah. She was at the foundation stage. Sarah had been at her consultancy for six years when they promoted her to lead the infrastructure team. Twenty people now reported to her. She was thirty-four, well respected, known for being thorough. But she had a problem. In meetings she'd agree to things she knew were wrong. Timelines that weren't realistic, approaches that would cause problems later. She'd sit there thinking this won't work and say nothing. She told me once I spend half the meeting composing what I want to say in my head. By the time I've got it perfect, the moment's passed. Then I spend the rest of the day angry at myself for staying quiet. Here's what she did. Started with one small assertion per week. Week one, I need to think about that before deciding. Week two, I have a concern about the timeline. Week three I disagree with that approach and here's why. There was nothing dramatic, but by week twelve she was naturally asserting boundaries, not because she felt confident, because she had twelve examples of surviving disagreement. The evidence changed her behavior, and the behavior built confidence. The second example is Marcus. He's at the application stage. It was a career change. Marcus had left finance to start a consultancy. He was confident in banking, terrified of business development. He'd put off calls, overcomplicate proposals, and apologise for his fees. His practice make three uncomfortable business development actions per week call email, follow up call, price and conversation, and track them on a spreadsheet. Not the outcomes, just the actions. Six months in he noticed something. He was still nervous before calls, but he made them anyway. That gap between feeling nervous and acting anyway, that's real confidence. Not the absence of fear, the presence of action despite it. A third example is Janet. She was at the excellence stage. She was an executive, and Janet was already a confident leader, but she'd plateaued. Everything felt competent but uninspired. She wanted to reach what Maslow called self actualization, becoming everything she was capable of. Her approach deliberately choose one project that terrified her. Public speaking at industry conferences, that was something she'd avoided her whole career. And she started small with internal presentations, then small events, and then keynotes. Two years later, she sought after speaker. Not because speaking got easier, it didn't. Because she accumulated so much evidence of surviving discomfort that the fear became irrelevant. Notice what all three have in common. They started small, they tracked their practice, not the outcomes. And they tolerated that boring middle bit and built evidence systematically. They didn't wait to feel ready. That's the pattern. Now let me explain why most people struggle to do what Sarah Marcus and Janet did. There are six reasons why people struggle with confidence. I'm going to go through them quickly, because understanding why you struggle matters, not for blame, but for direction. Reason one, your brain was built this way. More than one million neural connections form every second in your first few years of life. These early experiences shape your brain architecture, which provides a foundation for everything that follows. So when caregivers respond sensitively to a child's needs through what researchers call serve and return interactions, it builds neural pathways that support healthy self-concept development. Without responsive interaction, the brain's architecture doesn't develop as expected. If you didn't receive love, affection, and positive interactions in childhood, your brain may have wired itself for self-doubt. Now this isn't about blame, it's about understanding. Some people start with a brain that's been wired for confidence through hundreds of thousands of positive interactions. Others start with neural pathways that default to self-doubt. If you had a difficult childhood, you'll struggle with confidence. It isn't a character flaw. You're working against established neural patterns. The good news? The brain remains plastic throughout life. Change is possible. It just requires more deliberate effort. Reason two is called the vicious circle. Low confidence creates a self-reinforcing negative cycle. When you receive negative feedback, it interacts with your already negative state, causing you to become demoralized. This induces a self-defeating attitude that increases the likelihood of future failure. Each failure confirms the belief I can't do this, making the next attempt even harder. So people with low self-esteem tend to be hypersensitive. They're hyper vigilant to signs of rejection, inadequacy and rebirth, often seeing rejection even when there isn't any. Their internal radar constantly scans for threats to self-worth. Then there's inner critic. Your inner voice could constantly be telling you that you're not good enough, even if there's evidence to the contrary. The internal narrative becomes so habitual that you don't even question it. It just feels like the truth. Reason three, the social comparison trap. Humans are hardwired to compare themselves with others. A research review looking at six decades of studies found that people tend to make more upward comparisons to people doing better than downward comparisons, and in general, they feel worse after comparing upward. And here's the paradox. Research tells us that the lower our self-esteem, the more we tend to compare upwards. So the people who most need to stop comparing are the ones who do it most. Social media has turbocharged this into a confidence killing machine. You're constantly comparing yourself to carefully curated highlight reels. It's almost unavoidable. Reason four, the confidence competence disconnect. This is devastating. You avoid challenges because you lack confidence. Avoiding challenges means you don't develop competence. Lack of competence reinforces your belief that you can't do it, and the cycle continues. Self-confident people are more willing to examine evidence that both supports and contradicts their beliefs. People who are less confident prefer information that supports their existing views. So low confidence actually makes you defensive and less likely to learn, perpetuating the problem. The only way out of this trap is through it. Reason five the genetic component. Yes, genes do matter. In twin studies, genetics accounts for roughly 30 to 50% of the variation in self-esteem between people. But here's what's revolutionary. Genes don't determine destiny. Context is everything. The same genetic variant that makes someone vulnerable in one environment makes them resilient in another. Research shows that the so-called short version of the CERT gene has been linked to depression in high stress environments, but to greater resilience when paired with strong social support. Studies examining resilience in maltreated versus non-maltreated children found that genetic variants showed no main effects on outcomes. The genes only mattered in the context of environment. So, if you have confidence vulnerable genes, you're not doomed, you're sensitive. In harsh environments you'll struggle more, but in supportive environments with the right practices, you can build that equals or exceeds those with better genetic starting points. And reason six, the boredom's tolerance problem. Here's what nobody talks about. Building confidence requires a specific capacity that has nothing to do with intelligence, insight or motivation. It requires the ability to tolerate mind-numbing repetition without seeing immediate results. Our brains are designed to reward novelty and seek things not to sustain repetitive effort. Dopamine is actually more about anticipation and wanting than enjoyment itself. This explains why starting new projects feels intoxicating, but continuing them feels boring. Children from stressful environments struggle to tolerate the boredom of focused attention because their nervous systems have been programmed to constantly scan for new stimuli or potential dangers. Children who grow up in calm environments develop neural pathways that allow them to self-regulate and tolerate periods of lower stimulation exactly what they did to push through the boring phases of mastery. Now this creates a hidden inequality. Some people have been neurologically prepared to handle the boredom threshold. Others face an additional invisible hurdle. If you struggle to maintain repetitive practice, you're not lazy. You might be fighting against neurological wiring shaped by early adversity or different dopamine baseline functioning. The capacity to tolerate boredom can be trained, but training it requires enduring boredom, which is exactly what people with low tolerance struggle to do. It's a chicken and egg problem, but not an impossible one. So those are the six reasons. Now let me tell you what actually works. So those are the six reasons. Now let me tell you what actually works. Real confidence comes from one source, accumulated evidence that you can handle challenges. Not from positive affirmations, not from motivational speeches, not from understanding psychology, from doing hard things repeatedly until they become less hard. The process is simple. It's not easy, but it's simple. And start embarrassingly small. From little bird the first attempt is always awkward. Start with actions so small they seem ridiculous, then repeat them relentlessly. Why? Because repetition rewires the brain. Each small success strengthens neural pathways associated with confidence. Over time, these become the default patterns. Here's an example. Not confidence speaking in meetings. Start by making one comment, even if it's just agreeing with someone. Not confidence with fitness. Try five press ups in a day. The size doesn't matter, it's the repetition that does. Now here's where most people fail, the boring middle bit, that long stretch where progress is invisible, the activity isn't enjoyable, no one's watching, and there's no immediate payoff. From my work with over 650 teams, I found only 26% reach high performance. Why? Because 74% quit during the boring middle bit. They can't tolerate sustained effort with invisible progress. So here's some strategies for surviving the boring middle bit. Make it meaningful, connect each repetition to your larger purpose. Before each practice session, remind yourself specifically why this matters. Track invisible progress. Keep a record of every time you do the practice. The satisfaction comes from seeing the accumulation, not from each individual session feeling transformative. And use social accountability. Tell someone what you're doing and report progress regularly. People can tolerate more boredom when they're accountable to others. The final one start shorter than you think. If you plan to practice for 30 minutes but can't sustain it, start with five minutes. Build boredom tolerance like a muscle, gradually. Focus on your process, not your outcome. People who seek engagement, absorption in doing tolerate repetition better than those chasing pleasure or results. Train yourself to focus on did I do the practice? Not did I get the result I wanted. That shift in focus makes all the difference. If confidence really is built through small repeated moments of slight courage, and it is, then it helps to stop thinking about it as something abstract and start noticing where it shows up in everyday life. Because it's not dramatic, it's ordinary. Most of the time it shows up in just three places at work, in conversations, meetings, decisions, moments when you're being seen or judged. In your relationships, the things you say or don't say, the conversations you put off, the moments you feel you're holding back. And then in personality. The quiet stuff, fitness, creativity, learning. Keeping the promise to yourself when no one else would know if you didn't. Most people are reasonably confident one of those areas and quietly struggling the other two, and that's normal. There's nothing wrong with that. What matters is understanding this. Confidence doesn't come from thinking differently about yourself. It comes from building evidence that you can handle what you're avoiding. And that evidence doesn't come from how well things go, it comes from doing the thing at all. When I work with people encourage them to stop asking whether the meeting went well or whether the conversation felt smooth or whether they enjoyed the effort. Early on there's only one question that really matters. Did I do it? Yes or no? That's how evidence starts to build quietly, almost invisibly. The brain might doubt your feelings, but it struggles to argue with repetition ten times, twenty times. Over time something shifts. Before that shift happens though, there's a phase you need to expect. It's the dull bit. The point where the novelty's gone, nothing feels exciting, and you start wondering whether this is making any difference at all. For many people that shows up around the second week, sometimes the third. And this is where most people stop, not because they failed, but because no one told them boredom was part of the process. In many ways it is the process. It's where the real work happens. If you're someone who needs a bit of variation to stay engaged, that's okay. Keep the action small, short in the time, and let someone else know you're doing it. A quick message, a passing comment. We can sit with discomfort for longer when we're not carrying it entirely on our own. Then there's the other voice, the one that tells you we're bad at this, that it won't work, that everyone else finds it easier than you do. When that shows up, you don't need to fight it. Just pause and ask gently, what's the evidence for that? Most of the time there isn't any. And this is how confidence really begins. Not with a breakthrough, not with a sudden change, just with small, quiet actions repeated often enough that the evidence starts to speak for itself. Over the years I've seen a clear pattern when it comes to the To this. There are two types of people. Type 1, high pain threshold for repetition and slow progress. They can sustain effort when results are invisible. Often had calmer hell environments that built boredom tolerance. Type 2 need novelty to maintain engagement, find repetition excruciating, often had early environments that train constant vigilance, not sustained focus. Type one people aren't more capable, they aren't smarter, they aren't more deserving of confidence. They simply have one specific capacity boredom tolerance. That makes implementing confidence building techniques easier for them. If you're type two you're not broken, you just need to start with much shorter practice sessions and build boredom tolerance as a separate skill and be more patient with it. How long it takes. The hope boredom tolerance is trainable. The research shows that four year olds who couldn't wait for two minutes learn to persevere for over 20 minutes by changing their approach. You can too. It's just ironically going to require enduring boredom to build your boredom tolerance. Start smaller than seems reasonable and build gradually. In future episodes we'll be talking to people who've had to build confidence through pressure, consequence, founders who've lost everything and rebuilt, leaders making decisions with incomplete information, and professionals who had to perform before feeling ready. Not motivational stories, honest examinations of what they actually did, how they persisted through that boring middle bit, and what they learned from failure. But here's the thing listening to other people's stories won't build your confidence, only your practice will.