In my over twenty years of teaching mathematics I have never seen anyone excel in math who never believed in their abilities. It is a known fact, those who think they can, will. Self-confidence is crucial for success in all forms of performance and educational performance is not an exception. The first step in being successful in any endeavor is believing that success is possible.
The truth is, though genes may play a mild role, confidence is only developed when we do what we intend to do. This is so because at its core, confidence is rooted in trust. We have confidence that a chair will hold us up, because we trust that the chair was constructed with the sole purpose of holding up individuals. The moment that there is a mass production of chairs that are unable to hold up people, is the moment that our confidence in chairs will diminish. However, since chairs have historically been known to hold up people (it does what it was intended to do) our confidence in them has not waned.
If you consistently do what you intend to do, your confidence will grow. When you know that you need to study and write it down on your study schedule and actually study at the appointed time, you make a deposit in your ‘self-confidence’ account that you are an intellectual, you are a person who studies. On the other hand, if despite your best intentions, you do not study at the scheduled time, you make a withdrawal from your ‘self-confidence’ account and by your actions tell yourself that you are not someone who can be trusted to do what you intend to do.
So how can we consistently do the things that we know are best for us, the things that we truly want to do? The answer is a change in mindset. Too often we want life to be easy and in the moment the actions that are best for us seem too difficult. Because what we ought to do does not seem pleasurable in the moment, we procrastinate and quite often never get back to the thing we know we should do. If we however change our mindset and begin to run down the difficult things, we will see that over the long run we will be more pleased with ourselves. We will learn the fine art of giving up immediate gratification for long term satisfaction. If we keep our future selves in mind, knowing that our future selves will be pleased if we indeed study for the biology test, then doing the necessary work won’t be that difficult.
In short, to build confidence we need to embrace the difficult, knowing that once we build a personal reputation for doing the good that we ought to do, our self-belief will grow and we will see ourselves as individuals who get things done. Armed with this identity we will have the self-confidence that is necessary for the achievement of any worthwhile goal – academic success being one of them.
Unleashing your true academic potential 