By Justin Stum, LMFT | Licensed Counselor & Therapist

How Do I Build Confidence in Myself?

Confidence is one of those things that a lot of people assume you either have or you don’t, like it’s some personality trait you were born with. In my 23 years of working with people as a therapist in St. George, Utah, I can tell you that is simply not true. Confidence and self-esteem are not fixed. They are not handed out at birth in unequal amounts to lucky people. They are built, piece by piece, through awareness, practice, and a willingness to challenge the stories you’ve been telling yourself, sometimes for decades.

The real question isn’t whether confidence is available to you. It is. The better question is: what is getting in the way, and what does it actually take to grow it?

Where Your Sense of Self Comes From

Your sense of self, that inner feeling of who you are and what you’re worth, gets shaped very early in life. Most of us develop our core beliefs about ourselves inside the families we grew up in. The messages we received, spoken and unspoken, became the foundation for how we see ourselves as adults.

For some people, that foundation was solid. They were encouraged, valued, and seen. For others, it was anything but. Shame, criticism, being talked down to, or simply being ignored can quietly destroy a person’s self-esteem before they’re even old enough to understand what’s happening. If you grew up in an environment like that, it makes sense that confidence feels elusive. You weren’t taught to trust yourself. You were taught to doubt yourself.

The good news is that what was learned can be unlearned. The brain is adaptable. A healthy sense of self is something you can build, even if it wasn’t given to you early on.

Your Beliefs Are The Starting Point

Here’s something I see constantly in my work with people in St. George, Utah: most people who struggle with low confidence or low self-esteem want to feel better, but they try to change their feelings without ever touching the beliefs underneath them. That approach almost never works.

Feelings follow beliefs. If you believe at your core that you are not good enough, not capable, or not worthy of good things, your emotional experience is going to reflect that belief every single day. So the work has to start at the belief level.

Try this: sit down and actually write out what you believe about yourself. Not what you wish you believed, but what you actually believe. Then write out what you do well. What would your closest friend say about you if someone asked them? What would a trusted coworker say? What would your mom say? Write it down, not just in your head, but on paper. Then put that list somewhere you will see it. This is not just a feel-good exercise. It is a deliberate practice of beginning to feed your mind with a different kind of information than what your default thinking has been serving up.

The Spin Cycle: Understanding Your Default Thoughts

One of the most useful things I do with people working on confidence and self-esteem is help them pay attention to what their mind is actually doing throughout the day. Most people, when they tune in, are shocked by what they find.

The mind runs on patterns. Think of it like default settings on a device. Without any intentional input, the brain is going to follow the well-worn grooves it has been running through for years. For someone with low self-esteem, those grooves are usually full of self-criticism, worst-case thinking, and a constant mental review of every flaw and failure. This isn’t a character issue. It is a neurological habit. The brain is doing exactly what it was trained to do.

I call this the spin cycle. Just like a washing machine running through the same rotation over and over, your mind can get locked into a repetitive loop of negative self-talk before you’ve even had your morning coffee. The first step toward changing it is noticing it. You cannot change what you do not see.

Start paying attention to where your thoughts go when you’re not directing them. Are you replaying conversations and assuming you said the wrong thing? Are you comparing yourself to others and coming up short? Are you bracing for failure before you’ve even tried? That awareness is not a small thing. It is actually the doorway to real change.

Starting to Build: What It Actually Looks Like

Building confidence is not about fake positivity or convincing yourself that everything is great when it isn’t. It is about gradually, intentionally shifting the ratio of what you’re feeding your mind.

People with healthy self-esteem and genuine confidence are not walking around with no doubts or fears. They have simply developed a stronger relationship with their own strengths and a more balanced view of their struggles. That does not happen by accident. It happens through practice.

Here are some concrete starting points:

Write down three things you did well today, even small ones. Did you show up for someone? Did you handle a hard moment with more patience than you expected? Did you push through something that felt uncomfortable? Those things matter and deserve to be counted.

Catch yourself in the spin cycle and redirect, not by shutting down the thought, but by questioning it. Is this thought actually true? Is it the whole story? What would I say to a good friend who was thinking this about themselves?

Pay attention to your body. Confidence is not just mental. How you carry yourself, whether you make eye contact, whether you hold your head up, physically affects how you feel. The mind-body connection is real. Small physical shifts can start to create internal ones.

Think about the people in your life who seem to carry themselves with confidence. Chances are they are not suppressing self-doubt so much as they have built enough evidence of their own competence and worth that self-doubt does not run the show anymore. That is available to you too.

When It Goes Deeper

Sometimes low confidence and poor self-esteem are not just habits of thought. Sometimes they are rooted in real experiences, trauma, chronic criticism, painful relationships, or losses that cut deep into a person’s sense of self. When that’s the case, reading an article and keeping a journal is a good start, but it may not be enough.

In my practice in St. George, Utah, I work with people on exactly this kind of thing. Rebuilding a healthy sense of self after years of messages that tore it down takes more than positive thinking. It takes real therapeutic work that gets to the roots of why those beliefs formed in the first place.

If you find yourself stuck in patterns of low self-esteem, self-doubt, or a fragile sense of self that has not budged despite your best efforts, reaching out to a therapist who understands this work can make a real difference. You do not have to stay where you are.

You Can Grow This

Confidence is not a personality trait reserved for a lucky few. It is a skill. A practice. Something that grows when you tend to it with the same consistency you would bring to anything else that matters. Your sense of self is worth working on. And the version of you that actually believes in yourself, that person is in there, waiting to be built up.