Let's talk about how to gain confidence for your problem solving. Many very confident people are sometimes not too confident in some specific subject matters or some specific problems. So we can all be plagued by this. But the good news is confidence is something you can work on and improve.

The way to improve confidence, for the most part, is with practice and experience. You gain confidence. But of course, there's a catch, because success gives you confidence so that you can practice more and get more experience and so on. But if you don't have that success, well, you don't want to practice. And so you're going to practice less and succeed less and fail more and have less confidence. This can go in very opposite direction.

Managing Failure

The very first thing to know is that failure will destroy your confidence. So you don't want to dwell on the failure a lot. What do most people do when they start out in a new fields? They might do the stubborn thing like, "I'm gonna power through it and I'm gonna solve it." You don't have to do that. In fact, it's not that productive because you need to know when to balance your effort by trying, making sure you're still working independently and giving it your best shot by asking for help. Especially if you're new in the field, don't fail for too long. It will ruin your confidence, maybe for the long term, because some people start thinking, "Maybe I'm just not good at this." No, it's not that. You just started off incorrectly.

Taking Breaks

Sometimes take a break, relax. Give your mind a chance to think about this. Sometimes our minds work behind the scenes. When we are relaxed, our minds are still kind of processing the things we are passionately focused on. Sometimes the next morning you wake up, or sometimes people wake up in the middle of the night and they say, "Oh, I have a solution." Things like that, that's when your mind works in the background for you, so breaks can actually help.

Managing Your Tasks and Confidence

You want to manage your tasks and your confidence deliberately. Just like a textbook math or any science, what do they do if they have a lot of problems for you? They start out with the very, very, very easy problems. This is the same thing you want to do for yourself professionally, in business or at a job. Give yourself small problems. Don't tackle large problems. Large problems are hard to wrap your mind around; they have many unforeseen problems lurking in them. Start small and build up.

Avoid Grand Challenges

Don't start with grand challenges because it sometimes feels like, "I'm going to plow into this thing and I'm going to solve everything and maybe I'm going to prove to myself that I have a lot of talent in this field and I'm going to be better than everybody. I'm going to show everybody I'm going to do great." Suddenly instead of like a level one challenge, we take on a level four challenge or a level ten challenge and naturally don't do well at it. As soon as the wishful thinking goes away and the self delusion goes away, reality hits. So knowing that, don't give yourself a chance to fail. Give yourself small solvable problems that escalate with your experience and skill so you continuously can level up, put yourself in the position to succeed.

Building Confidence

Body Language

Your own body language can affect your confidence. Sometimes when they say if you smile you'll feel better because your muscles of your face tell your brain how to feel. Sometimes your brain dictates your physiology. Your physiology is related to your brain and vice versa. If you're slouched and if you're like this and if you're not into it, if you're already a little fearful of the problem that you have to solve, and if you're not sure and your body language is that of an unconfident person, it's going to tell your brain you're not good at this. But if you sit up and you position your body language as though you can handle it, suddenly your brain is like, "We got this." So that's the first thing and very easy to do.

Positive Self-Talk

Build up and build on and reinforce your positive, genuinely positive self image with positive self talk. Legitimately put yourself in the position to succeed with smaller problems that you solve well, so that you realize, "Oh, I am good at this." You don't become like one of those people who think, "I'm bad at math." Not because they're bad at math, but because that's just all the circumstances that worked up to it. You can find a way, "Hey, maybe I'm pretty good at this. I'm good at logic. There is something I'm good in here." Then you start doing that, more of that, and build success and start building confidence. Suddenly the self talk also helps to reinforce, "Hey, I'm good at it."

Surround Yourself with Positive People

Surround yourself with positively reinforcing people. If there are people who bring you down like, "You're not smart enough, you won't do this," disassociate from those and surround yourself with a peer group who's supportive. That will actually reinforce your self talk externally.

Avoiding the Slippery Slope Fallacy

Many people fall into this slippery slope fallacy where they think, "Okay, I'm failing at some math class or some other class or some project at work or something in my personal life. I must not be good at it. I must be stupid and I must be this and that and I'm not worth this. I'm a faker and I don't really belong here." Slippery slope. You go down and it just doesn't end. It's a common thing people do to themselves. It's very damaging. Very often it's false. Very often it's smart people who do this to themselves.

I actually did it to myself earlier. Growing up, I didn't have confidence in myself about my mental abilities or my abilities in education. I thought maybe I'm just not that smart. My confidence stemmed from that. Some of my early results stemmed from that. Then one day somebody was like, "Hey, why don't you take an IQ test?" So I took an IQ test and it turned out it was like 132, which is pretty high. Then I was like, "Huh, I'm smart." It changed everything because then suddenly I'm like, "Oh, you know what, I am smart." My behaviors after that moment legitimately changed. I was always like, "I can do this, I'm smart." That was the entire internal dialogue. "Hey, no problem with hard work. I can do this because I'm smart." Prior to that, I was like, "Am I stupid?" Even if you're a smart person, you have examples where you make mistakes, you fail at things. We're human. The examples I had when I was failing were resonating much more and I was amplifying them by thinking maybe it's true, maybe I'm not good at this in many subject areas. It really had damaging effects on my early career and my schooling. It was kind of by miracle I took this test and I was like, "Maybe this test is false, maybe the test result was false." That's ironic but it gave me this entire reversal of my self image and all the actions just followed right. Same problems once they're difficult, now they're easier because of the confidence.

Conclusion

Confidence is an additional soft skill like stress management, motivation, having the energy for problem solving. All these things add up. The same you minus those things is not that great. The same you with those things can achieve far greater things and solve much greater problems. The same you just put yourself in a way you can succeed with all these really doable, manageable soft skills and confidence is one of them.