The Difference Between Courage and Confidence

Why cultivating courage often comes before confidence

“Courage is doing what you are afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you are scared.”

Eddie Rickenbacker

We talk a lot about confidence. Confidence is attractive and needed in our lives. We often talk about how someone needs more confidence: if they want to get into a relationship, to be in a position of authority or power, and to be wanted by people in general. We don’t think much about what makes someone courageous as opposed to confident though. They are not the same thing, though both qualities are often found in the people we admire.

I think we don’t talk a lot about courage because it is a word we reserve for heroes in real life and in fiction (typically adventure stories). It feels strange to us to talk about it in our own, often boring lives. To be confident is to feel you will succeed at what what you try. To be courageous is when you don’t know if you will succeed, or don’t think you will succeed, but you are going to try anyway.

Confidence comes from two places: experience–you have done this before or you have done something like it before so you are confident you can do it this time; and a sort of Dunning-Kruger effect–you don’t understand your own limitations or how stacked against you the odds actually are. I won’t get into the Dunning-Kruger effect since I think we all know what overconfidence looks like. Confidence from experience is something you gain from doing stuff and gaining life experience. It comes from expanding your horizons and trying new things to prove to yourself what you are capable of doing. I wrote about that before here.

“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”

Charles Bukowski

Why would the intelligent be full of doubt? Because they know the odds and difficulties and challenges facing them, and, maybe more importantly, they are often deeply aware of their own limitations. They know the chances of failure are high and they know how much effort they’ll need to exert.

Those who are more ignorant of what they’re up against will tend to have more confidence. Those who do know the odds need something else to push them to try: courage.

Resistance

In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield described “resistance,” the psychological blocks that hold people back from working on the things they really want to achieve–artists who somehow don’t paint, writers who somehow can’t write, entrepreneurs who somehow can’t seem to take the steps needed to start their business. Ultimately it is fear holding them back–sometimes it is the fear of failing so their brain will search for any means it can to convince the person not to try at all.

Other times it may even be the fear of success–human beings are deeply conservative in our psychology. We fear the unknown future that comes with change, and succeeding in what we most want to do in life will confront us huge changes in the way we live our daily life, which our brains will fight to resist through inaction.

Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it. Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. That's why we feel so much Resistance. If it meant nothing to us, there'd be no Resistance.

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Resistance is fear. But Resistance is too cunning to show itself naked in this form. Why? Because if Resistance lets us see clearly that our own fear is preventing us from doing our work, we may feel shame at this. And shame may drive us to act in the face of fear. Resistance doesn't want us to do this. So it brings in Rationalization.

Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

Resolve

Don’t beat yourself up if you aren’t confident. That won’t do you any good because it isn’t something that will just magically develop by thinking it through or changing your mindset. Accept you’ll need a bit of courage to develop confidence. The fear preventing confidence won’t just go away without utilizing courage to confront it. You just have to accept that and that means going ahead and trying and doing anyway.

Resolve is courage in action: you’re resolved to do the thing anyway despite the risks and fears you’ll feel. It is a choice consciously made–a Kierkegaardian leap of faith: you don’t know if you’ll succeed, and there may even be a high chance of failure, but you’ve resolved to do your best and try anyway. You feel scared, nervous, and maybe even hopeless about what you want to succeed doing, but you’ve made the conscious choice to try it despite all those feelings and you steel yourself, grit your teeth, and follow through. That is an act of courage.

Fear is inertia in our life. Fear is a stagnating force. Courage and resolve are needed to get moving again. If you love and value yourself, you will do whatever you can to prevent and overcome stagnation.

The talkative socialite at a party is filled with confidence, but it is the shy agoraphobe stepping out of their home to face the world who is being more courageous.

The loneliness epidemic could stand to be combated by people acknowledging that yes, a little courage will be needed to put themselves out there and connect with new, unknown people. Confidence, that easy feeling of comfort when around people won’t just magically start for the lonely. You’ll need to courageously confront fears first to grow into the kind of person who can have confidence meeting new people.

Self-Value and Love

To love something is to value it. To love yourself is to feel that you are a valuable person. But this doesn’t mean just hedonism. Play, relaxation, good food, drinks, and pleasure of all kinds are necessary in life, but if you really value yourself you will treat yourself as someone worthy of development–of growth and pushing into new frontiers in life. To value yourself is to value what you could be. A parent who truly loves their child will want that child to grow and develop into a healthy, independent, functioning adult who grows and lives and has achievements of their own. A good friend will want to see you grow and improve and become the best version of your self.

The depressive who looks at themself in the mirror and tells themself they can’t do it, or they aren’t good enough is failing to love themselves. Would that same person tell a good friend they aren’t good enough or they’ll never succeed? Treat yourself at least as well as you would treat a best friend you love.

You need to be willing to push yourself to grow and try new things. To grow is to expand yourself into the unknown–new skills you don’t have, new friends you don’t know yet, new experiences, and a new you. Once again, it requires courage to confront that fearful unknown. If you truly love yourself you will be courageous as you resolve to confront your fears and do. Once you have confronted your fears and done the deed you can then have confidence.

There is a relationship between courage and confidence I haven’t mentioned yet: you can gain confidence in your own courage. That is, courage is something you can train and develop. The more you exercise and develop yourself through courage, the more confident you will be that you have and can use courage to overcome the problems you face.

“Problems call forth our course and our wisdom; indeed, they create our courage and our wisdom. It is only because of the pain of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually.”

M. Scott Peck