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Confidence comes after you do it
Small steps
Boundaries work best in small steps. Telling every friend and family member no all at once alarms the nervous system, which decides it isn't safe. People who benefited from a lack of boundaries often lash out at the first change, so setting them also means grieving some of those people.
The marathon picture
Picture training for a marathon after sitting at a desk for 15 hours a day. A 10-mile hike tomorrow is the wrong first step. One shoe goes by the door one day, the other shoe the next, then a sock, then another sock. Each step tells the nervous system this is safe, and capacity builds until the small things are less scary.
The cool girl
The cool girl or cool guy finishes last, because they are one-dimensional. Nobody wants a partner without a no, a thought, or an opinion, except the people who benefit from that silence.
Why does doing come before confidence?
Psychologist Albert Bandura introduced self-efficacy theory in a 1977 paper in Psychological Review. He identified four sources of confidence: mastery experiences, watching others succeed, encouragement from others, and a person's physical state. Of these, he argued that mastery experiences, actually doing the thing and finding out it works, are the strongest. Bandura spent his career at Stanford University.
How does gradual exposure shrink fear?
In 1924, psychologist Mary Cover Jones worked with a three-year-old boy named Peter who was afraid of rabbits. She brought a caged rabbit a little closer each day while he ate, and his fear faded. In the 1950s, Joseph Wolpe built on this idea with systematic desensitization, which uses a ladder of graded steps from least to most frightening.
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