10 Confidence Hacks (from a traveling musician)
Belief in yourself, your ideas and your abilities is important stuff – but it ebbs and flows. So these are my top confidence hacks as a traveling musician.
Let’s get to it.
1. Define What Confidence Means to You
Confidence will mean something different for everyone. So a reasonable first step is to define things for yourself.
For me, it’s the ability to push past specific fears, anxieties or limiting beliefs I may have about a situation.
So, how about you?
Here are some questions to help clarify things:
What areas in my life do I feel most confident in and why?
What are the emotions of confidence?
How do I handle failure or setbacks?
How do I react when I receive compliments or praise?
What’s my take on comfort zones and stepping out of them? How come?
Do I believe confidence is fixed or malleable?
What role does self acceptance play in personal confidence?
2. Narrow Your Focus
There are many types of confidence and it’s a nuanced situation.
It shows up (or disappears) in different places at different times and in different ways.
So this next tip is all about focus.
Rather than trying to find a solution to general confidence (i.e., trying to tackle all areas of confidence at once), it may be better to isolate specific areas and work on them individually.
Eventually, everything will come together. But first, focus.
For example, some of my confidence goals are performing live music, calling myself a music producer and realizing my value as a creative entrepreneur.
But each of these areas have their own portfolio of reasons, goals and emotions.
So what should I do?
I’d start by making a list of specific confidence areas I want to focus on, and choose just one or two.
Because focus tends to shrink things.
3. Isolate the Cause(s)
Once you know which area of confidence you’d like to focus on, it’s time to dissect things.
So grab your proverbial lab coat.
Confidence is the result of overcoming specific confidence bottlenecks, one at a time.
This requires an understanding of what’s causing each of them. So now’s the time to do some self reflection.
Going back to my lack of confidence as a music producer, I can start by answering one key question: why do I think this way?
It’s probably related to my comparison habits and perfectionism in creativity.
In my mind, I have this fallacy that if I'm not an expert, I don’t deserve the title. So, I’m stuck as a student.
How about you – what are some potential causes of your confidence woes?
4. Brainstorm Ideal Solutions
After identifying the cause(s) of a confidence block, it’s time to plan and get strategic.
It’s time to brainstorm solutions.
I like to believe that most problems have more than one solution.
So we can think of a few remedies – and each may work in different ways at different times.
For example, some days reminding myself that there are no finish lines and there will always be a next level goal gets me out of a confidence slump.
But other days, this mantra just sounds irritating.
So here are some tips to finding ideal solutions:
Practice visualization
Try meditation to calm the mind and find new perspectives
Study the solutions of other people who have similar confidence woes
Revisit your strengths and weaknesses
Work on your weaknesses
Try body language and posture hacks to feel more confident
Practice growth mindset thinking
Practice positive self talk (even if feels ridiculous in the beginning)
5. Break Down Solutions Into Micro Steps
If you’ve got a decent list of potential solutions, it’s time to break things down.
Solutions are only the first step to addressing an obstacle.
Usually, solutions involve many steps and require a lot of time, testing and patience. So I find it super helpful to break things down into manageable micro steps.
For example, let’s go back to my music producer confidence issue. Let’s say that one cause for this lack of confidence is a lack of skills.
So an obvious solution would be to skill build and focus on weaknesses.
Here’s how I would break down that solution:
Identify 2-3 core weaknesses to focus on first
Create a list of micro-skills the each weakness involves
Create a daily practice workflow to work on each micro skill
Rotate between the core weaknesses every other week
After a couple months of this routine, assess my progress (and my confidence)
6. Use Emotion (not logic)
Confidence isn’t technically an emotion, but for me, they’re close friends.
Of course, logic has its place, but when it comes to making lasting changes, I’ve found that feeling is way more powerful – it’s an awesome tool.
For example, we all know what confidence feels like. Or we can at least imagine the feelings associated with it.
So rather than trying to reach confidence, we can try to reach that specific emotional state. It’s a perspective shift and sheds the nuance of confidence from the whole equation.
For me, confidence is an emotional cocktail of things like joy, excitement and pride.
So by practicing those emotions and getting into character (through visualization or doing an activity that puts you in that emotional state of mind), we can inch closer to our goal.
It’s like a backdoor to building confidence.
7. Use An Alter Ego
For me, struggles in confidence often relate to my identity (or at least, who I think I am).
After all, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves aren’t always accurate – especially the negative ones.
So while practicing things like internal and external self awareness are helpful, I also like to embody an alter ego.
An alter ego is like an alternate version of yourself or who you’d like to be. It’s a powerful tool for artists and is seen as a positive psychological hack.
The whole process is pretty creative (and fun).
So here are some quick tips to creating your own personal batman life:
Make a list of ideal characteristics
Create a persona avatar of your alter ego (interests, values, motivations, their whole backstory, etc.)
Get into character and practice embodying your new role
8. Stack the Deck
Environment plays a big role in our life. Luckily, we can usually control at least some aspects of it.
Stacking the deck means creating a situation that supports your goals and preferences.
And it’s an awesome way to build a more confident lifestyle.
I focus on three key areas when stacking my deck:
My inner circle
The people I spend time with
My outer circle
The content I consume
My environment
My room, home and the places I spend the most time in
While you may not have full control over everything, there’s a good chance that you can make changes to at least one area.
So start small (such as consuming less news and more motivational content) and stick with it.
These things (like so many things) add up over time.
9. Make Better Comparisons
Comparison is public enemy number one.
Nothing blasts my confidence like a rogue, unjust comparison. But it’s hard to avoid as modern life is digital and social.
I think there’ll always be an element of comparison that seeps into our psyche, but simply becoming aware of it can have a big impact.
So that’s step one: become aware of unfair comparisons.
They pop up quickly and without warning. Try to get into the habit of recognizing them.
Then, get into the habit of challenging their merit and making healthier comparisons.
I always try to shift my focus (in real time) to more realistic and more helpful comparisons (such as comparing myself to my past self).
It’s not easy and it’s not always successful, but it is another tool in the bag.
10. Skill Build + Zoom Out
Sometimes confidence issues exist because, deep down, we know we can do better at something.
At the same time, they pop up because we forget how far we’ve actually come.
So to address these truths, I like to:
Focus on consistent skill building
Zoom out every once in a while
It’s a balancing act of recognizing skill issues and personal weaknesses while appreciating my progress thus far.
And with that, I’ll wrap things up.
Let me know in the comments how you like to psych yourself up or build confidence – got any bonus hacks?
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