08/15/2026
Building confidence. This relates to our dogs too.
🚨 According to Research about our Brain :
This is for the person who has been looking for confidence in the wrong place.
Who has been seeking it in compliments and in recognition and in the approval of people whose opinions they respect. Who has found that the confidence produced by external validation, however genuine the validation and however much it is appreciated, does not persist in the way that genuine confidence is supposed to persist.
That it requires regular renewal. That it is present when the validation is present and begins to thin when the validation is withdrawn or withheld or simply not offered for a period.
Who has wondered whether genuine confidence, the kind that does not require constant external replenishment, is something they are capable of or whether there is something specific about them that makes them more dependent on external validation than other people seem to be.
Neuroscientist Roy Baumeister at Florida State University, whose extensive research on self-esteem and its sources found that self-esteem built primarily from external validation was significantly less stable and significantly less predictive of genuine wellbeing than self-esteem built from the internal experience of meeting challenges and demonstrating competence, found the specific reason why externally sourced confidence does not hold.
External validation activates the brain’s reward system in a way that is structurally similar to other forms of social reward. It produces a genuine neurochemical response. And like other reward responses, it habituates. The same level of external validation produces a diminishing response over time, requiring either escalating validation or more frequent validation to maintain the same felt effect. This is why the pursuit of confidence through external approval tends to produce an increasingly demanding cycle rather than a stable foundation.
Researcher Albert Bandura at Stanford University, whose concept of self-efficacy found that genuine confidence is built specifically through what he called mastery experiences, the direct personal experience of attempting something difficult, navigating it, and arriving at the other side with the evidence of one’s own capacity, found the specific alternative.
The brain builds stable confidence not from being told it can do something but from having done it. From the accumulated record of difficult moments that were entered and survived and completed. From the specific, internal, unborrowable evidence that the person attempting the next hard thing is the same person who survived the previous ones.
This evidence cannot be given to you by anyone else. It can only be gathered by you, in the moments when something is difficult and you do it anyway, one instance at a time.
Those moments are available right now. In whatever form the current difficulty is taking. And each one entered and survived is adding to the only kind of confidence that does not require external replenishment because it is built from something nobody outside you can take away.
