Confidence isn’t a personality trait, it’s a skill you can learn
For our series No One Told Me, neuroscientist and psychologist Ian Robertson breaks down the science of confidence.
By Jorinde Croese
You don’t need to feel confident to be confident. In fact, the most successful people in creative industries – the ones pitching ideas that aren’t fully ready, managing teams without training, or presenting collections under pressure – are often full of doubt. What sets them apart isn’t self-belief. It’s action.
For this instalment of No One Told Me – a series exploring the skills we need to grow beyond creativity – we spoke with neuroscientist and psychologist Ian Robertson, author of How Confidence Works, how it functions in the brain, and why it’s less about personality and more about practice. His insights are essential for anyone working in fashion today, where the markers of success are constantly shifting and the pressure to perform is high. Confidence, it turns out, is a skill – one that can be built, rebuilt, and strategically deployed.
This post is part of No One Told Me, a series of sharp, thoughtful conversations exploring how to build better creative careers, with insights from experts across design, psychology, philosophy, and business.
We hate our bodies. What does fashion have to do with it? A conversation with psychoanalyst Susie Orbach.
Designers say they care about inclusivity. But how can they actually make it real? A conversation with Parsons Dean Ben Barry.
The fashion industry rewards silence. Here’s how to speak up anyway – with negotiation expert Elaine Hering.
Why you’ll never feel good enough. And how fashion culture feeds that feeling. A conversation with philosopher Clare Chambers.
The most important relationship in your working life? The one with your manager. A conversation with executive coach Melody Wilding.
Let’s start with the central question that leads to everything else: how does confidence work? Is it a fixed trait, or is it something we can build like a muscle?
Ian Robertson: Confidence is something you can learn. It’s a set of habits – of thinking, of behaving, and of emotion. And it works because it’s not optimism. Optimism is the belief that things will turn out well. And it’s not self-esteem – that’s your evaluation of yourself. Neither of those have the secret sauce that confidence has, which is its link to action in the brain. It’s the belief that you can do something, and that doing it makes your desired outcome more likely. The brain treats that belief – that you can do something – as if you’ve already done it, and it gives you a mini success experience.
That has five effects on the brain. It boosts your mood via the reward network, lowers your anxiety, increases your motivation to take action, and – importantly – it makes you a bit smarter, thanks to dopamine in the prefrontal cortex. Finally, it makes you more influential and persuasive to others. That raises your status, which in turn reinforces your confidence. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You’re more likely to do the thing. Not with 100% certainty – if you’re 100% certain, you don’t need confidence. Confidence is about bridging uncertainty.
Interesting. I read something recently about manifestation and the neuroscience behind it – how creating neural pathways through visualisation can set you up for success.