Confidence Doesn't Come From Experience

Before you could believe it yourself, someone had to say it first.

The Book Nook

I was six years old, sitting in the corner of my first-grade classroom.

Mrs. Grovenstein had a small area she called the Book Nook, a cluster of shelves and cushions where the classroom books lived. You didn’t just wander over there. You earned it. Finish your work early, and you got to go sit in the corner and read.

I always finished early. I always went straight to the Book Nook.

I was working my way through The Hobbit and The Chronicles of Narnia, books many adults wouldn’t attempt, let alone a six-year-old. One afternoon Mrs. Grovenstein walked over, looked at what I was reading, and said something I have never forgotten.

She told me I was a good reader.

That was it. No ceremony. No gold star. Just a teacher noticing something true about a child and saying it out loud.

I believed her completely.

I remember sitting up a little taller. And then looking around the room to see if anyone else had heard.

What Gets Through

My parents told me things like this all the time. That I was intelligent. That I was kind. That I was a good athlete. That I was someone worth knowing.

They weren’t lying. But they also weren’t handing me a finished identity. They were offering a set of beliefs about who I was, beliefs I could accept or reject, internalize or ignore.

I accepted them. All of them.

My grandmother Carmen did the same thing, in her own way. I used to help her in her kitchen; dark wood paneling on the walls, the smell of something always on the stove. She would talk to me while we worked. Not lectures. Just conversation, the way she talked to anyone. She told me once, wiping her hands on a dish towel and looking at me with a smile that I had a good mind and a good heart, and that those two things together were rarer than people realized. I was maybe ten. I had no framework for what she was giving me. I just believed her.

Which is interesting, because the world also offered the opposite. Kids who teased. Situations where I failed. Moments where the evidence pointed the other way. And somehow, none of that landed with the same weight. The negative voices came in and passed through. The positive ones stayed.

I’ve thought about why for a long time, and I don’t have a clean answer. Maybe it was the repetition. Maybe it was the love attached to the source. Maybe it was something in the way Mrs. Grovenstein said it, not as encouragement, but as observation. She wasn’t trying to make me feel good. She was just telling me what she saw.

Whatever the reason, I built an internal operating system from those early declarations. And that operating system, more than anything else in my life, is what I would later come to recognize as confidence.

The Drupal Years

In the mid-2000s, I was working in commercial real estate and it was not going well. I was restless in a way I couldn’t quite name.

So I taught myself web development.

I had no background in it. No formal training. I started with an open-source content management system called Drupal and learned it to build my own blog, then started thinking it might be a path out of a career that had stalled. I believed I was intelligent. I believed I was adaptable, that I could learn hard things. Those weren’t things I’d proven through web development. They were things I believed about myself before web development ever entered the picture.

The business I built around that skill struggled for two or three years. Technically, I got good. Commercially, I couldn’t make it work; I hadn’t yet learned that doing the work and selling the work are two completely different skills, and nearly impossible to carry simultaneously when you’re starting from zero.

Most people, I think, would have read those years as evidence. As the world returning a verdict.

I never read them that way. Not because I was courageous. Not because I dug deep in some dramatic moment of resolve. It simply never occurred to me to quit. Other people told me I was being stubborn or unrealistic. They may have been right about the timeline. They were wrong about the outcome.

The belief wasn’t loud. It just ran in the background, like an operating system that doesn’t announce itself. And it kept me moving until the small unglamorous projects became a portfolio, and the portfolio became a job managing digital properties for a large public company in Atlanta, and that job eventually opened the door to management consulting.

The belief didn’t produce a straight line. It produced persistence through a crooked one.

I Said No to Their No

When I decided to move into consulting, I set my sights on SEI, a firm I knew was exceptionally hard to get into. I went through a long, rigorous interview process.

They said no.

I told them no back.

I requested one more interview with the managing director. They gave it to me. I walked in and made my case.

I was not nervous. I did not seriously consider accepting their answer. I recognized that others might not yet see why I was right for the role, that I didn’t have the conventional background, didn’t check the standard boxes. But I had no doubt I could do the work. None.

What I couldn’t fully explain then and can only partially explain now is where that certainty came from. It wasn’t arrogance. I wasn’t blind to the gap between my background and what they were looking for. I saw the gap clearly. I just didn’t believe the gap was the final word. Something had been telling me who I was for a long time. I believed it more than I believed them.

Earlier in my life, I had let no be the final word a few times. And I had regretted it. Something had solidified between those moments and that lobby. The belief had been tested enough times that it had become bedrock.

The managing director gave me the job.

The Bottleneck Isn’t the Tools

Here’s what I kept coming back to, years later, thinking about all of this:

When I taught myself Drupal in the mid-2000s, the information was free. Open-source software. Online tutorials. Forums full of people willing to explain what they knew. The tools were available to anyone with a computer and a connection.

And yet, not everyone who had access to those tools made the leap I made. Not everyone who struggled for two or three years stayed in it. Not everyone who got told no went back and asked again.

For a long time I thought the bottleneck was access to resources, to education, to opportunity. And those things matter. But they don’t explain everything. Because the tools really are democratized now in a way they never were before. And transformation still isn’t equally distributed.

The bottleneck, I’ve come to believe, isn’t access to tools.

It’s the prior belief that you’re the kind of person who can use them.

The psychologist William James wrote that faith in a fact can help create the fact. Confidence doesn’t raise your IQ. But it raises something else. Motivation, resilience, the willingness to keep trying long enough for the outcome to arrive.

And that belief, for most of us, has to be spoken into us before we can fully speak it to ourselves. It comes from someone who sees something true about you and says it out loud. A parent who tells you you’re intelligent. A grandmother in a wood-paneled kitchen who tells you that a good mind and a good heart together are rarer than people realize. A first-grade teacher who walks over to the Book Nook and tells a six-year-old that he is a good reader.

That’s not a skills problem. That’s a formation problem. And formation requires a person, not a platform.

And some people never got that person. Not because they weren’t worth naming but because no one in their life had been named either, and couldn’t give what they’d never received.

The Window and the Community

There’s something else worth naming, and it took me until my fifties to see it clearly.

Children can’t accurately assess themselves. Not because they’re incapable, but because accurate self-knowledge is built from accumulated experience — decades of it. A six-year-old in the Book Nook doesn’t have the equipment to know whether she’s a good reader in any meaningful, comparative sense. A ten-year-old helping his grandmother in the kitchen can’t yet evaluate whether his mind and heart are genuinely rare. They’re taking someone else’s word for it. And that’s not a weakness. That’s just what it means to be young.

Which means the adults around children aren’t supplementing their self-knowledge. They’re supplying it. In the absence of adult voices speaking true things, children don’t develop neutral self-assessments. They absorb whatever is loudest and in many lives, what’s loudest is criticism, silence, or the casual cruelty of other children.

The window for this matters too. The earlier the naming happens, the deeper it goes. A word spoken at six reaches places that the same word spoken at sixteen may not. By high school the operating system has begun to solidify. By college it’s largely set. Which means the most important intervention point is also the one we’re most likely to underinvest in because young children can’t advocate for themselves, and the results aren’t visible for decades.

For children who grow up without parents doing this work, the gap doesn’t have to be permanent. But it requires the rest of us to understand what we’re actually holding.

Teachers. Coaches. Youth pastors. The adults who show up regularly in children’s lives outside the home; most of them are thinking primarily about one thing: behavior. Don’t misbehave. Follow the rules. Stay in line. That’s not wrong. But it’s incomplete. Because the same teacher who notices a child reading above her level and says so out loud, specifically and seriously, may be doing something more durable than anything else that happens in that classroom all year.

Community can do what a single parent cannot always do alone. It can also do what an absent parent leaves undone. The naming doesn’t require a biological relationship. It requires an adult who is paying attention and willing to say what they see.

The Debt I’m Still Paying

I had a lot of people speak belief into me. My parents. Carmen. A handful of teachers and coaches whose names I still remember. They weren’t always dramatic about it. They were just consistent, and they were specific. They named what they saw.

I didn’t fully understand what they had done for me until I was well into adulthood. I think I assumed for a long time that my confidence was mine, that I had built it, earned it, developed it through the things I’d survived.

Partly true. But not the whole story.

It’s only been in the last five or seven years that I’ve become intentional about doing this for others. And when I’m honest about what took so long, the answer is uncomfortable: there are people I’ve known for twenty years who I never told — specifically, plainly, the way Mrs. Grovenstein told me: what I actually saw in them. I thought it. I never said it. That’s not humility. That’s just a failure to show up.

They’re sitting in the Book Nook.

They just haven’t been told they belong there yet.

Who around you is waiting to be named?