Can I Become Confident in Something I'm No Good At?

So you’ve realized that you’re actually not very good at something. Can you develop confidence in something that you’re incompetent at? Yes. Will being confident make up for the incompetence? No.

Confidence without competence is not a particularly good idea. As they say in marketing, if you’re promoting yourself before you get good, you just speed up the rate at which people find out you’re no good.

But, wait a second. How do you get competent? Competence requires time and effort. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. So once you put in the time, you will get the competence. But this is where confidence comes in. If you’re good at something, but don’t have confidence in yourself, you will continually undersell yourself. You need confidence in yourself and in your abilities to push yourself further to achieve more.

But confidence also plays a role before you get good at stuff. Confidence allows you to venture into an area that you otherwise are no good. Confidence helps you to develop competence. People who are truly confident are able to transfer their confidence to areas where they wouldn’t normally feel comfortable. That transferred confidence allows them to have a superior attitude, which enables them to pick up new skills quicker than someone who was lacking in confidence.

When we develop our skills and abilities in a certain area, we go through 4 distinct stages. The first stage is that of unconscious incompetence. That’s when we don’t even know what we don’t know. Then comes conscious incompetence. That’s when we realize how little we know, and how much we need to improve. This can be frustrating and demoralizing. This is where, the truly confident person distinguishes themselves. They have confidence in their ability to learn and become skilled in this new area. They push through to the third stage, which is conscious competence. You know what to do, but you have to be fully attentive when you do it. The final stage is unconscious competence. You know what to do, and you don’t even need to be attentive, because the skill is imprinted.

So you see, confidence without competence is no good. But it can help you push through and make the effort required to be competent. Once you have both confidence and competence, you are unstoppable!