PERSONAL GROWTH
LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026
What Mindy Kaling and I both believe about confidence.
Hands up in the air if you love Mindy Kaling… Summary Confidence isn’t a personality trait you either have or don’t — it’s a skill that gets built through action, not waiting.
- What Mindy Kaling and I both believe about confidence.
- And I couldn’t agree with her more.
- But what if you grew up in a home where you weren’t taught to be confident?
- But for some of us, we were not born into families like this.
- What do I mean by this?
- Risk is the operative word here.
- So let me ask you:
- References
- Frequently Asked Questions
Hands up in the air if you love Mindy Kaling…
Summary
Confidence isn’t a personality trait you either have or don’t — it’s a skill that gets built through action, not waiting. For driven, ambitious women, understanding where confidence actually comes from (and what blocks it) is often tied directly to childhood relational experiences and the internal messages those experiences left behind. This post is about what real confidence looks like and how to build it without performing it.
[throws own hands wildly in the air!]
And really, who doesn’t?!
She’s a super talented, hilarious, smart, hard-working, stereotype-busting, multi-talented woman.
I’ve loved her work from her earliest days on The Office but what really sealed the deal for me was when I read an article she wrote in Glamour and I realized that she and I both believe the exact same thing about developing confidence.
To learn more about this, and to discover a tool that can help you nurture confidence in areas of your life where it’s needed, keep reading.
A person’s belief in their capacity to execute the behaviors necessary to produce a specific outcome. Psychologist Albert Bandura, who introduced the concept, distinguished self-efficacy from self-esteem: self-esteem is a general sense of one’s worth, while self-efficacy is domain-specific — the conviction that you can do this particular thing. Daniel Siegel, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA and author of The Developing Mind, notes that self-efficacy develops through repeated experiences of attempting, failing, and recovering with attunement from a safe relationship.
In plain terms: Self-efficacy isn’t about believing you’re great at everything. It’s the quiet, specific confidence that says: I’ve done hard things before, and I can do this one. It’s built through action and experience — not through waiting until you feel ready.
What Mindy Kaling and I both believe about confidence.
Relational trauma refers to psychological injury that occurs within the context of important relationships, particularly those with primary caregivers during childhood. Unlike single-incident trauma, relational trauma involves repeated experiences of emotional neglect, inconsistency, manipulation, or abuse within bonds where safety and trust should have been foundational.
Earned Confidence
Earned confidence is the kind of self-trust that develops not from affirmations or positive thinking, but from the accumulated experience of doing hard things, navigating failure, and choosing alignment over approval — over time. For those with relational trauma backgrounds, confidence is often conditional and performance-based; earned confidence is something different: a quiet, durable sense of one’s own competence and worth that doesn’t require external validation to stand.
“Work hard, know your shit, show your shit, and then feel entitled. Listen to no one except the two smartest and kindest adults you know, and that doesn’t always mean your parents.” – Mindy Kaling
A few years back, I came across this terrific article written by Mindy in Glamour.
The whole essay is great (and, predictably, hilarious). In it, Mindy is addressing a young fan of hers who she felt she let down with a canned answer about how to be confident.
Her written response is her re-do, and it’s a strong, honest, and compelling one.
In it, Mindy talks about a concept that I call earned confidence: The idea that we’re not just magically, spontaneously confident, but rather that the state of confidence is earned through hard work and experiences that increasingly teach us we can and should have confidence in ourselves.
And I couldn’t agree with her more.
“Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.”
SIGMUND FREUD
I agree with Mindy Kaling. Because confidence, by definition, is a feeling state of certainty, assurance, and faith in someone or something (including yourself).
And I would argue that, for most of us, when we’re starting new behaviors, exposing ourselves to new situations, trying out something we’ve never done before, it’s normal, natural, and very realistic not to feel confident in yourself.
(Note: Grandiosity – a false and unrealistic sense of superiority or abilities – is not to be confused with confidence. This is a hollow, reactive state to a lack of self-esteem, actually.)
So confidence – the feeling state of assurity in yourself or your actions – has to be earned through repeated exposure that authentically reifies the belief, little by little, that we can be successful at that thing we’re attempting.
But what if you grew up in a home where you weren’t taught to be confident?
There are some people out there who may seemingly have been confident from birth. And if we don’t know that person’s story, it’s easy to believe that they had it easy. That they’ve always been confident.
And honestly, maybe that is kind of the case.
Maybe they were lucky enough to be born into a family that was supportive and affirming. Nurtured confidence in their child when they saw it blooming and blossoming moment-to-moment in their kid.
A childhood of that will likely set someone up for a psychologically balanced and realistic view of themselves when trying out new behaviors or activities. And that might make them appear more confident (though the reality is they likely have to earn confidence like any of us).
RESEARCH EVIDENCE
Peer-reviewed findings that inform this clinical framework:
- Prevalence rates varied from 9-82%, particularly high among ethnic minority groups (PMID: 31848865)
- 42.5% moderate, 35.8% frequent, 6.7% intense impostor experiences (total moderate+ 85.5%) among 165 medical students (PMID: 38106704)
- 35.8% frequent, ~7.3% intense imposter experiences (89.5% moderate+) among 399 medical students (PMID: 38681358)
- Prevalence of impostor phenomenon among surgeons and trainees ranged from 27.5% to 100% (PMID: 40102828)
- Among graduate students using AI in research, 68% had perceived impostor syndrome vs 57% non-users (n=575) (Almohammadi et al., International Journal of Research in Education)
But for some of us, we were not born into families like this.
In fact, we may have had even the opposite kind of upbringing, one in which parents, siblings, or other early influencers (like church, schools, or social messaging writ large) gave us messages that we were unworthy, incapable, or lacking. (Stay tuned for my next blog post in two weeks for more on that!) Early messages like that can often lead us to feel unconfident in many life areas even as adults. And that’s tough.
Or maybe you had what many of us had in childhood – families who tried to support you and nurture your confidence in some ways and yet they or society gave you unintentional, unconscious, unhelpful messaging which didn’t support your self-esteem in other ways.
(And quite honestly, show me a woman in this patriarchal world who hasn’t had social messaging attempt to erode at her confidence in some way!)
But you know what the good thing is about any of these scenarios?
If confidence is a feeling state that’s earned, it means that no matter where you’re starting from, you can work towards this and achieve confidence today as an adult no matter what your childhood or adolescent experience was like.
And I have a little tool that I think can be helpful for any of us working to build confidence in any life area.
So how can we use this concept of earned confidence to help us out in our own lives?
As a therapist, often I hear beliefs such as “I can’t have confidence in this thing I’m attempting to do or this way I want to view myself because I haven’t had success with that and/or I’ve received lots of messages that tell me something different.”
For example, maybe it’s a young woman who feels like it’s impossible to imagine getting married because she’s never even had a successful date or a relationship that’s lasted longer than three months before.
Or maybe it’s a woman who doubts that she will ever be able to be a good mom and have a great, fulfilling career because she had such a destructive model of that in her own mother and grandmother growing up.
Both of these fears, these beliefs that something won’t be possible, this lack of confidence in these areas makes total sense for the women who believe them.
It makes sense we wouldn’t feel confident in our abilities to do/be something if we haven’t had successful, belief-affirming experiences of that yet.
So I’m not going to ask you to magically, spontaneously believe that you will be able to get married or that you can be a wonderful mother and have a flourishing career if that’s not what you believe.
That may be a cognitive dissonance for you – a clash of two contradictory beliefs that creates mental stress.
But what I am going to encourage you to do is seek out a kernel at the heart of both of these longed-for dreams and to build upon that to slowly earn confidence.
The process by which members of a marginalized group come to absorb and believe the negative messages, stereotypes, or limiting beliefs that a dominant culture projects onto them. Resmaa Menakem, MSW, LICSW, somatic therapist and author of My Grandmother’s Hands, describes internalized oppression as a form of body-level conditioning — the nervous system learns to constrict, self-censor, or self-diminish in advance of actual threat, because that’s what safety once required.
In plain terms: Internalized oppression is why self-doubt in driven women is never just a personal issue. When culture has told you repeatedly — through media, workplaces, families — that ambitious women are threatening or unwelcome, your nervous system can start to enforce those limits from the inside. Real confidence isn’t just personal work — it’s also resistance.
What do I mean by this?
Well, for the young woman who wants to be married but doesn’t think it can happen for her, I would challenge her to look at what’s at the heart of her dream: connection, being in a relationship.
And I would encourage her to look for evidence and examples of how she already knows how to do this. Is she a good sister? A good friend and work colleague? Are there people in her life who she knows how to connect to and who like her?
We notice those areas and moments where connection and relationship are happening successfully and we extrapolate a belief from them. Maybe something like, “I know how to be successful in lots of different kinds of other relationships.”
And while this may not be sufficient-enough evidence of her ability to be successful in dating yet, it can support her esteem that she’s liked and regarded well by others to, in her own time, give her enough confidence to possibly get on an app or go out on that blind date her roommate wants to set up for her.
The key here is to find smaller, more congruent beliefs that will help you have you the confidence to take the very next step, which, in this woman’s case, would be putting herself out there to date and risk collecting new experiences.
Risk is the operative word here.
Ultimately, if we want to believe that we will be successful at something, we will have to take the risk. And do the thing at some point.
And then, much like what Mindy Kaling speaks to in her article, we will have to work hard to continue to earn confidence in that area we are taking a risk in.
As we risk doing that thing we’re lacking confidence in, we want to accumulate evidence. That we can tolerate the discomfort of putting ourselves out there. That we can survive failures and setbacks.
But sometimes when we’re just starting out, building our confidence in areas that feel really unachievable to us, we want to start smaller and identify more congruent, realistic and supportive beliefs that speak to the essence of what we’re ultimately longing to achieve.
When we nurture those kernels of confidence in similar, smaller, or different beliefs, we may then build upon this to take the risk of working towards the thing we ultimately want.
We start slowly but surely (and sometimes in very small ways) earning confidence where we did not have it before.
So let me ask you:
- Is there an area in your own life that you’re really lacking confidence in?
- What’s one dream/wish/desire you want to feel/do/be in that life area?
- What’s at the heart of that dream/wish/desire for you? (think: connection, acceptance, security, possibility, etc.)
- What’s a very tiny, scoped-down belief that you can more realistically believe in for yourself in this area? What evidence do you have, even on a micro level or in a parallel way that the essence of what you’re longing for is possible?
- What’s an extrapolated belief you can have about yourself in this area that feels more realistic?
- What would it be like for you to move towards your dream/wish/desire holding onto this new, more congruent belief?
Wrapping this up.
The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and our lives, to a certain extent, may inform our reality and certainly impact our emotions.
You don’t have to fake it till you make it and pretend you’re confident when you’re not. The idea is to scope it back. And find smaller ways you can genuinely feel confident in yourself. Soothe and ground yourself in this. And then build on it until you can and want to risk the thing you ultimately want.
No matter where you’re starting from, you can earn your confidence and, in fact, you must earn it. The path isn’t instant. But it’s real, and it’s yours to build.
So now I’d like to hear from you:
Do you agree with what Mindy Kaling and I believe about confidence? What’s one way you help yourself “earn confidence” in areas you might lack it?
Leave a message in the blog comments below so our community of blog readers can benefit from your wisdom.
Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.
Warmly,
Annie
Further resources to support your re-writing of self-beliefs:
- What does it mean to remother yourself and why is it so critical for our growth as women?
- Stop going to the hardware store for milk!
- Neuroplasticity and the Critical Practice of Speaking More Kindly to Yourself.
- Negative Thinking Changes Your Brain: So Which Wolf Are You Feeding?
Frequently Asked Questions
DISCLAIMER: The content of this post is for psychoeducational and informational purposes only and does not constitute therapy, clinical advice, or a therapist-client relationship. For full details, please read our Medical Disclaimer. If you are in crisis, please call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) or text HOME to 741741 (Crisis Text Line).
You deserve a life that feels as good as it looks. Let’s work on that together.
Stephen Porges, PhD, the developmental psychophysiologist who developed Polyvagal Theory, describes neuroception as the way the autonomic nervous system continuously evaluates safety beneath conscious awareness. For driven, ambitious women raised in environments where attunement was inconsistent, that internal safety detector tends to run on a hair-trigger setting. The room may be objectively calm, but the nervous system isn’t. Healing isn’t about overriding that signal — it’s about slowly teaching the body that the rules of the present are different from the rules of the past.
References
- Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. W. H. Freeman.
- Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2016). Attachment in adulthood: Structure, dynamics, and change. Guilford Press.
- Orth, U., & Robins, R. W. (2014). The development of self-esteem. Current Directions in Psychological Science.
- Kernberg, O. F. (1975). Borderline conditions and pathological narcissism. Jason Aronson.
- Bowlby, J. (1988). A secure base: Parent-child attachment and healthy human development. Basic Books.
- Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Prentice-Hall.
- Schore, A. N. (2001). The effects of early relational trauma on right brain development, affect regulation, and infant mental health. Infant Mental Health Journal.
- Clance, P. R., & Imes, S. A. (1978). The imposter phenomenon in driven and ambitious women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice.
- Brummelman, E., Thomaes, S., & Sedikides, C. (2016). Separating narcissism from self-esteem. Current Directions in Psychological Science.
Both/And: Confidence and Self-Doubt Can Live in the Same Woman
Driven women often have a sophisticated understanding of self-worth in theory. They can articulate their value, negotiate their salary, advocate for others with ferocity. But the gap between knowing your worth and feeling it — in your body, in your quietest moments, in the way you tolerate treatment — can be vast. Intellectual understanding and embodied belief operate on different timelines, and the driven woman who can speak eloquently about boundaries at a conference may still accept treatment in her personal life that falls well below what she deserves.
Aarti is a corporate attorney who commands respect in every courtroom she enters. Partners defer to her judgment. Associates seek her mentorship. And she goes home to a relationship where her needs are consistently minimized because she doesn’t feel entitled to ask for more. “I know I deserve better,” she told me. “So why don’t I act like it?” The answer is that her self-worth was fractured in childhood, long before she built the professional identity that looks, from the outside, like unshakable confidence.
Both/And means Aarti can be confident and uncertain. She can know her value at work and doubt it at home. She can be the strongest person in one room and the smallest in another. Healing doesn’t mean resolving this contradiction — it means closing the gap between what she knows and what she feels, slowly, through the corrective relational experiences that were missing the first time around.
The Systemic Lens: The Cultural Machinery That Undermines Your Value
Self-worth in driven women doesn’t erode in a vacuum. It erodes in a culture that tells women their value is contingent — on their appearance, their productivity, their relational status, their likability. The multi-billion-dollar beauty industry, the productivity-as-virtue work culture, the social media economy of comparison — these aren’t neutral forces. They’re deliberately designed to create a gap between who you are and who you think you should be, and then sell you products to close that gap.
For driven women specifically, the self-worth assault is particularly insidious because it comes disguised as meritocracy. You’re told that if you work hard enough, you’ll feel worthy. But the goalpost moves with every achievement because the system needs you to keep striving. The promotion doesn’t fix the feeling. The salary increase doesn’t fix it. The external validation proves insufficient because the wound isn’t external — but the culture keeps insisting it is, so you keep looking in the wrong place.
In my clinical work, I help driven women identify the systemic sources of their self-worth struggles alongside the personal ones. When a woman can see that her persistent sense of “not enough” isn’t just a childhood wound but also a cultural message she’s receiving thousands of times a day — in advertisements, in social comparison, in workplace dynamics — she can begin to externalize what she’s been internalizing. The feeling of inadequacy isn’t about her. It’s about a system that profits from her never feeling quite good enough.
If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.
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You were always enough. This course helps you finally believe it. A self-paced course built by Annie for driven women navigating recovery.
The women I work with who have done significant healing work often describe a particular shift: the inner critic doesn’t disappear. But its volume changes. And more importantly, the relationship changes — instead of believing everything the critic says and organizing their behavior around its fears, they’ve learned to hear it and then make a different choice. That choice, made consistently over time, is what confidence actually looks like from the inside.
Mira is a 38-year-old founder who came to me because she was terrified to pitch her company. Her product was excellent. Her track record was strong. But every time a high-stakes presentation approached, the critic would rev up: who do you think you are, they’re going to see through you, you’re going to embarrass yourself. What she needed wasn’t to silence that voice. She needed to learn to pitch with it running — to take action in the presence of fear, to let the fear be there without letting it decide.
This is the clinical heart of confidence work: not the elimination of vulnerability, but the expansion of your capacity to tolerate it. If you’re ready to build that capacity — not through affirmations, but through the real and difficult work of healing the relational roots of self-doubt — trauma-informed therapy and executive coaching offer different but complementary paths. You don’t have to perform confidence. You get to build it, from the inside out, in a way that actually holds.
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Self-sabotage involves behaviors that undermine your own goals and well-being, often unconsciously. You do it even when you know better because it’s frequently driven by unconscious fears and beliefs, not rational thinking. Common drivers include fear of success (and the expectations that come with it), fear of failure, feelings of unworthiness, or a need to stay within a familiar comfort zone.
Self-sabotage is often rooted in early experiences that created beliefs about what you deserve or what’s possible for you. If you internalized messages that you’re not worthy of success, love, or happiness, your unconscious mind may work to confirm those beliefs by undermining your efforts. Understanding these roots is key to breaking the pattern.
Common forms include procrastination, perfectionism (setting impossibly high standards that guarantee ‘failure’), self-medicating with substances or food, choosing unavailable partners, avoiding opportunities, and undermining relationships when they get too close or too good. These behaviors often feel inexplicable from the outside but make sense when you understand the underlying fears.
Breaking the cycle starts with compassionate awareness: noticing when you’re self-sabotaging without judgment and getting curious about what fear or belief is driving it. Journaling, therapy, and mindfulness can all help develop this awareness. From there, you can begin to challenge the underlying beliefs and make more conscious choices aligned with your actual goals and values.
Not necessarily. Self-sabotage is more often a sign of conflicting desires: a conscious desire for something (success, love, health) in conflict with an unconscious fear or belief that it’s not safe or possible. The behavior reflects the unconscious conflict, not a lack of genuine desire. Resolving the underlying conflict is the path to moving forward.
Further Reading on Relational Trauma
Explore Annie’s clinical writing on relational trauma recovery.
The cultural water that ambitious women swim in deserves naming explicitly. Joan C. Williams, JD, distinguished professor at UC Hastings College of Law, has documented extensively how women in high-status professions face what she calls the “double bind” — judged harshly when they’re warm (read as not competent enough) and judged harshly when they’re competent (read as not warm enough). Add a relational trauma history to that bind, and the inner monitoring becomes nearly continuous. Healing has to include a clear-eyed look at how much of the exhaustion isn’t yours alone — it’s a load you’ve been carrying for systems that were never designed to hold you.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
Helping ambitious women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven, ambitious women — including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs — in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
