What is confidence and where does it come from? First try to think of something you are confident about and think about how you became confident in it. I, for example, am confident that I could make a painting (the kind you see in museums), because I have been painting for over fifteen years. I am confident that I know how to drive a car because I have been driving for over fifteen years. I am very confident that I know the difference between healthy and unhealthy food because I have been eating healthy for over fifteen years, have been a health educator for over ten years, and because I have two degrees in health. I hope you thought of some of your own examples.

So where does confidence come from? The answer is in one word: Experience! Gaining more experience (confidence) in the things that cause you to have stress reactions will help you adapt much quicker. I can say I am confident that I cannot play a musical instrument, I cannot play golf, and I cannot fly a plane. I know this because I have no experience with any of those things. If I started learning to do anything that I do not have experience with, it would mostly start with some degree of stress. As I gain experience and confidence, the stress reaction would diminish.

Confidence also goes hand-in-hand with the concept of practice. We practice something so that when we do the “real thing” we do it better and easier. This will also reduce stress. The key is gaining the best experience. Think of a time when you were prepared for a situation versus a time when you were not. What was the difference in the level of stress you experienced? Job interviews are great examples of this. The more prepared or confident you are about the job you are seeking, the less stress you experience before, during, and after the interview.

I can clearly remember how stressful my first day as a high school health teacher was. Before that day, I had completed 16 weeks of student teaching, my Bachelor’s degree in Health Education, and also 80% of my Master’s degree in Health Education. My preparation before teaching definitely helped tremendously, but it was just not enough. It took about a year of doing the “real thing” before I started to feel some confidence in the classroom.

Even when you are doing the “real thing,” expect that it can still take time to adapt to the point that you experience little or no stress. So practice may not totally eliminate stress, but it will reduce it. Every year that I teach, my confidence increases. The good thing about that is there is usually no limit to how much you can improve your confidence.

Of course, even after gaining tremendous confidence in a skill, changes can come along and

challenge you once again, and you will have to re-adapt to the new conditions or face new stress. This is why we have to maintain our confidence levels as well. You might have heard the expression: “It’s like riding a bike.” This means that you really never forget how to ride a bike. Though this might be true, it does not mean that when you don’t do something, your skill level and confidence in it won’t decrease.

When I was a teenager, like most other teenagers, my bicycle was my main mode of transportation around town. Once I got my driver’s license, I literally abandoned my bike in my parents’ backyard to sit and rust, until I had to throw it out. Almost ten years later, I was in Israel with a group and one of the agenda items was a bike ride on a dirt path on the Jerusalem foothills. I was initially very excited, remembering my youthful days of riding fast and having so much fun. A few minutes into the bike ride, I came to the first downhill part, and then it was a different story. I got nervous, tensed up, and I kept slamming the brakes. I immediately realized that I had somewhat lost my confidence in my ability to ride a bike. I eased myself back into it and started to feel more comfortable, but it still didn’t feel the same as what I remembered as a kid. However, if I were to ride a bike even just a few times a year, I might maintain my comfort and confidence in it.

A year after that experience, I went on the same trip with the same group and had another opportunity to go on that hilly bike ride. And even though I had not ridden a bike for a year, I had still regained some confidence from the last experience. The bottom line is: once we experience something, even if we lose some confidence in it, it is easier to re-learn it later, rather than having never experienced it at all.

Here is one way to pre-test your confidence, without actually doing what you would like to check: Think about something you want to pre-test, for example, giving a speech, going on a first date or a job interview, and then pay attention to your automatic thoughts and feelings. Automatic thoughts are the first thoughts to come to mind about a given situation or experience. These are rooted from past experiences or observations from childhood to the present. Your brain records your past experiences. When something related to your past experiences occurs, it triggers your brain to recall those memories. If a majority of your automatic thoughts are negative, you will need to work on fighting those until you can replace them with positive ones after gaining more experience. I call it re-wiring your brain, because you have to over-write the bad past experiences with good new ones.

Jake Mezrahi is a Health Educator and the author of “Your Grass is Greener: Simple concepts to deal with the causes of stress” available on Amazon Kindle. This article is an excerpt of the book. Jake Mezrahi can be contacted via email, at [email protected]