Confidence is key to well-being. Here are 5 ways to boost yours

By Andrea Kane, CNN

(CNN) — Everyone has encountered them: people who always appear to know what they are doing. They gladly take control of a situation, express their opinions as if they were established facts or plunge into a project believing they are going to succeed — with or without the required experience.

What magic dust was sprinkled on their breakfast cereal to give them this superpower?

“Confidence — it is probably the most important resource in human well-being and human performance, I believe,” neuroscientist and psychologist Ian Robertson told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta recently on his podcast Chasing Life.

Robertson is a professor emeritus of psychology and the codirector of the Global Brain Health Institute at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland and the T. Boone Pickens Distinguished Chair at the Center for BrainHealth at the University of Texas at Dallas.

“Confidence is a belief with two strands to it,” said Robertson, the author of “How Confidence Works: The New Science of Self-Belief.”

“It’s the belief you can do something, and it’s the belief that if you do that thing, you will get a reward or get an outcome you desire.”

When you feel confident, you are more likely to succeed because confidence activates brain circuits that produce an elevated mood, lower anxiety and sharper thinking — all of which raise the odds of success, Robertson said. These are the same brain circuits that get activated when you do succeed. So whether you have confidence or succeed, even at a small task, it leads to success and then even more confidence.

“The greatest source of success is success,” Robertson said. “And success, like confidence, acts like compound interest: It’s exponential. A little bit grows steadily.”

You can listen to the full episode here.

If confidence is on one end of the spectrum, anxiety is at the other, Robertson said.

“If you lack confidence, if you don’t think you can do that thing, then that will generate anxiety because of the prospect of failure,” he said. “The greatest source of anxiety is the fear of the negative evaluation of other people, and almost all anxiety has to do with other people.”

Additionally, anxiety activates circuits that disrupt “the fluid synchronization of different brain regions that are critical for elite or top performance,” he noted.

Research shows that people who are chronically anxious do less of everything, Robertson said.

“They do less … socially, they do less in work, they do less in hobbies and interests,” he said. “Why? Because their brains are primed into a threat mindset, where they’re anticipating and focusing their attention on potential negative outcomes and threat. And that inhibits those systems of the brain that do the opposite with confidence.”

For example, Robertson said, take two 5-year-old girls: They are equally intelligent and capable, but one has slightly more confidence than the other.

“That slight difference in confidence will mean that that little girl is more likely to try something new. A tiny thing: Ask a question, (be) less frightened to make a mistake,” he said. “And that will result more likely in a small success. That means she’s then more likely to do the next step. And by the time these two girls are 25, there’s a yawning gap in their achievement and their well-being because of the exponential nature of the mathematics of confidence.”

All is not lost if you were not born brimming with confidence. Robertson has five tips for building up confidence, even under daunting circumstances.

Take action

Taking steps to do something and then doing it (no matter how shaky you feel) will result in a burst of confidence.

“Confidence is linked to the action systems of the brain,” Robertson said. “The great Persian poet Rumi said the road only appears with the first step. And people who lack confidence and have anxiety tend to hold back from taking action because they see ‘threat.’”

Taking action, in spite of feeling anxious, is very important for building confidence, Roberston said.  

Choose your focus carefully

What you pay attention to determines your emotional state, so pick wisely, Robertson said.

“If you’re giving a talk to a group of people and there’s a couple of people on their phones or frowning, your attention will lock on to them because … that’s what we do when we feel under threat,” Robertson said.

“However, if you deliberately choose to pay attention to the majority of people, or to one person who is looking interested in the front row, who is smiling … you will feed your brain with positive thoughts and images that will help you remember past successes rather than past failures.”

He said that being intentional in this way will not only reduce your anxiety and decrease the effort you have to put into the task, it will also build up your confidence.

Adopt a growth mindset

Your attitude toward yourself and your abilities can make a difference.

“You have to believe that change is possible,” Robertson said. People with a “growth” mindset believe that with effort you can learn abilities and cultivate talents; conversely, those with a “fixed” mindset believe talents and abilities are innate — you either have them or you don’t.

“If you have a fixed mindset — that is, you believe that your abilities or your emotions are determined by genetics or inheritance — then you’re not going to engage in … the slow ups and downs that learning entails,” Robertson said. “You can learn to be more confident — but not if you cripple yourself with a fixed mindset.”

Fixed theories about yourself are “always wrong” because the human brain is enormously plastic at all ages, he explained.

Deal with your anxiety

Anxiety is corrosive to confidence, so reframe anxiety as excitement.

“It’s possible to control anxiety by not becoming frightened of it and not treating it as some alien force coming, but rather seeing it as a form of energy that you can harness,” Robertson said. “In fact, the bodily and brain symptoms of anxiety are identical to those of excitement.”

Robertson recommends that if faced with a situation that makes you feel anxious, such as a difficult conversation or an interview, adopt a “challenge” mindset.

“You can actually change your frame of mind to one of ‘Oh, can I perform here?’ versus ‘Oh, terrible things are going to happen,’” he said. “And you can help yourself do that by the words you say to yourself: ‘I am excited.’”

Robertson said that doing so doesn’t mean you’re not going to feel nervous, but by using language, you are harnessing a form of energy.

Affirm your values

Define yourself and what you stand for, he said.

“Because who you are as a person is grounded in what you stand for and what’s important to you, what your values are,” Robertson said.

“And if you can just take a few seconds to even write down what your values are and why they’re important to you and what they mean to you, the evidence shows that your brain will be then more resilient and protected against the fear of criticism, of humiliation, of failure.”

In other words, Robertson said, you will be protected from the destructive anxiety that eats away at confidence.

We hope these five tips help you build up confidence. Listen to the full episode here. And join us next week on the Chasing Life podcast when — in the wake of the recent presidential debate — we examine what normal aging looks like.

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CNN Audio’s Eryn Mathewson contributed to this report.