What Mindy Kaling and I both believe about confidence.

PERSONAL GROWTH • April 1, 2018

LAST UPDATED: JULY 2026

What Mindy Kaling and I both believe about confidence.

Last reviewed: July 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

A client sat across from me a few winters ago, résumé freshly updated on her laptop, and said, “I don’t know how to feel confident about something I haven’t done yet.”

Hands up in the air if you love Mindy Kaling. I’ll go first: mine are up. She’s brilliant, she’s funny, she’s built a career most people can’t imagine building, and I’ve admired her work since her earliest days on The Office. But what actually sealed the deal for me wasn’t a scene or a punchline. It was an essay she wrote for Glamour years ago, one I still think about, because in it she said something about confidence that I’d already come to believe from an entirely different direction: my therapy room.

In short: Confidence isn’t a personality trait you either have or don’t. It’s a skill you build through deliberate action, tolerated risk, and the gradual accumulation of evidence that you can do hard things even when you’re afraid.

What Mindy Kaling and I Both Believe About Confidence

“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, Glamour

A few years back, I came across a terrific essay Mindy wrote for Glamour, and I still think it’s one of the better things ever written on this subject. In it, she’s answering a young fan she felt she’d let down earlier with a canned, forgettable response about how to be confident. This piece is her re-do, and it’s sharp, funny, and unusually honest.

What she’s describing is a concept I’ve come to call earned confidence in my own clinical language: the idea that we’re not magically, spontaneously confident from the start. Confidence gets earned through hard work and through experiences that, bit by bit, teach us we can and should trust ourselves.

Why I Agree With Her: Confidence Isn’t a Personality Trait

I agree with Mindy. Confidence, by definition, is a feeling state of certainty, assurance, and faith in someone or something, including yourself. And here’s what I’d argue, after 15,000-plus hours in the room with people trying new things: when you’re starting new behaviors, stepping into unfamiliar situations, attempting something you’ve genuinely never done before, it’s normal, natural, and realistic not to feel confident yet.

One note, because I think the distinction matters. Grandiosity, a false and inflated sense of your own abilities, isn’t the same thing as confidence. Grandiosity is usually a hollow, reactive cover for a lack of self-esteem, not evidence of the real thing.

So confidence, that feeling of assurance in yourself or your actions, has to be earned through repeated exposure that slowly, authentically proves the belief true: that you can succeed at the thing you’re attempting. There isn’t a shortcut through this part. I wish I could tell you there was.

What If You Weren’t Taught to Be Confident?

Some people out there seem to have been confident from birth. If you don’t know their backstory, it’s easy to assume they had it easy, that confidence just arrived for them the way height or eye color did.

And honestly, sometimes that’s partly true. Maybe they got lucky enough to be born into a family that was supportive and affirming, one that nurtured confidence whenever they saw it blooming, moment to moment, in their kid.

A childhood like that tends to set someone up for a psychologically balanced, realistic view of themselves when they try new things. It can make them look more naturally confident, even though the truth underneath is that they’re still earning it the same way the rest of us do; they just started with better scaffolding.

The Families Where Confidence Wasn’t Modeled

But some of us weren’t born into families like that. In fact, some of us had close to the opposite experience: parents, siblings, or other early influences, church, school, the broader social messaging swirling around us, that told us, directly or otherwise, that we were unworthy, incapable, or fundamentally lacking. Messages like that tend to follow us into adulthood, showing up as a stubborn unconfidence in areas that have nothing to do with the original wound. That’s genuinely tough to carry.

Or maybe your experience was somewhere in the middle, which is honestly the most common story I hear. A family that tried to support and nurture your confidence in some ways, while unintentionally, unconsciously handing you messaging that undercut your self-esteem in other ways.

And let’s be honest: show me a woman in this culture who hasn’t had some social message quietly erode her confidence at some point. I haven’t met her yet.

Here’s the good news buried in all of this. If confidence is a feeling state that gets earned rather than inherited, that means no matter where you’re starting from, you can work toward it and build real confidence today, as an adult, regardless of what your childhood or adolescence handed you.

Whitney showed up to our second session still in the blazer she’d worn to a board presentation that morning, laptop bag dropped by the door like she wasn’t sure she was staying. She’s 43, a VP at a mid-size logistics company, the person her team calls when a deal needs saving at the last minute. “I got a promotion I should be thrilled about,” she told me, turning a paper coffee cup in slow circles on her knee, “and I keep waiting to feel like I deserve it. I don’t think that feeling is coming.” I sat with the particular ache of watching someone objectively excellent describe herself like a fraud waiting to be caught. What I’ve come to understand with clients like Whitney is that the promotion itself was never going to produce the feeling she was waiting for. Confidence doesn’t arrive as a reward. It gets built, afterward, through the accumulating evidence of having done the new, harder thing and survived it.

Finding the Kernel: How Earned Confidence Actually Builds

As a therapist, I hear a version of this belief constantly: “I can’t have confidence in this thing I’m attempting because I haven’t succeeded at it before, and honestly, I’ve gotten plenty of messages telling me I won’t.”

Maybe it’s a woman who can’t imagine getting married because she’s never had a relationship that lasted longer than three months. Or a woman who doubts she’ll ever be a good mother with a thriving career, because her own mother and grandmother modeled something painful and destructive instead.

Both of these fears make complete sense for the women carrying them. It makes sense you wouldn’t feel confident doing or being something if you haven’t yet had the belief-affirming experiences that would build that confidence. So I’m not going to ask you to magically, spontaneously believe you’ll get married or thrive as a working mother if that’s not where you actually are. That would just be cognitive dissonance, two contradictory beliefs mentally at war, and it wouldn’t hold.

What I’ll ask instead is that you find the kernel at the heart of the thing you long for, and build from there.

If it’s the woman who wants to be married but can’t picture it happening for her, I’d ask her to look at what actually sits at the center of that dream: connection, being known and chosen by someone. Is she a good sister? A good friend, a good colleague? Are there people in her life she already knows how to connect with, people who genuinely like her? We look for the places where connection is already working, and we extrapolate a belief from that evidence: I know how to be successful in plenty of other relationships.

That belief isn’t sufficient proof she’ll succeed at dating specifically, not yet. But it can support enough esteem, enough sense that she’s likable and worth choosing, to eventually get her onto a dating app or out on the blind date her roommate keeps offering to set up. The task is finding the smaller, more congruent belief that gives you enough confidence to take the very next step, not the whole staircase at once.

Risk Is the Operative Word Here

Ultimately, if you want to believe you’ll succeed at something, you’ll have to take the risk and actually do the thing, at some point. There’s no version of this that skips that step.

And then, much like what Mindy writes about in her essay, you’ll have to keep working to earn confidence in that area, again and again, because one success doesn’t permanently install the belief.

As you risk doing the thing you’re lacking confidence in, you’re accumulating evidence: that you can tolerate the discomfort of putting yourself out there, that you can survive the failures and setbacks that will inevitably happen along the way.

But when you’re just starting out, building confidence in an area that currently feels wildly unachievable, it helps to start smaller. Identify a more congruent, realistic belief that speaks to the essence of what you’re ultimately after, rather than the whole outcome at once.

Deepa, a 46-year-old biotech operations lead, described this exact mechanism to me without knowing the clinical term for it. She’d been offered a stretch role leading a division twice the size of anything she’d managed before, and she was seriously considering turning it down. “I keep telling myself I’m not ready,” she said, still holding her badge lanyard in one hand like she might need to leave any minute. “But when I actually list what I’d need to be ready, half of it I’ve already done, just at a smaller scale.” That was the whole shift, right there. We spent the session finding the kernel: the specific evidence, drawn from her actual history, that supported a smaller, truer claim than “I’m ready for anything” or “I’m not ready at all.” She took the role two months later, not because the fear vanished, but because she’d built a belief specific enough to carry her past it.

When you nurture those kernels of confidence in smaller, adjacent, or parallel beliefs, you build the platform for eventually taking the bigger risk, the thing you actually want. Slowly, and sometimes in very small increments, you start earning confidence where you didn’t have it before.

Both/And: You Can Be Confident and Still Doubt Yourself

Driven women often have a sophisticated, articulate understanding of their own worth, at least in theory. They can name their value in a negotiation, advocate ferociously for someone else, speak fluently about boundaries at a conference. But the gap between knowing your worth and actually feeling it, in your body, in your quietest unguarded moments, in what you’ll silently tolerate from other people, can be enormous. Intellectual understanding and embodied belief run on entirely different timelines.

Dawn is a corporate attorney who commands real respect in every courtroom she walks into. Partners defer to her read on a case. Junior associates seek her out for mentorship. And she goes home to a relationship where her needs get consistently minimized, because some part of her doesn’t feel entitled to ask for more. “I know I deserve better,” she told me, arms crossed over a suit she still hadn’t changed out of. “So why don’t I act like it?” The honest answer is that her sense of worth got fractured long before she built the professional identity that looks, from the outside, like unshakable confidence. I remember feeling the weight of that gap myself, sitting across from someone so clearly capable and so quietly unconvinced.

Both/And means Dawn can be confident and uncertain at the same time. She can know her value at work and doubt it at home. She can be the strongest person in one room and feel like the smallest in another. Healing here isn’t about resolving that contradiction into something tidier. It’s about closing the gap between what she knows and what she feels, slowly, through corrective relational experiences that were missing the first time around.

The Systemic Lens: The Cultural Machinery That Undermines Your Confidence

Confidence in driven women doesn’t erode in a vacuum. It erodes inside a culture that tells women their value is conditional: on appearance, on productivity, on relational status, on likability. The multi-billion-dollar beauty industry, the productivity-as-virtue work culture, the social-comparison economy of social media, none of these are neutral forces. They’re built, quite deliberately, to manufacture a gap between who you are and who you think you should be, then sell you something to close it.

For driven women specifically, this particular assault is insidious because it comes disguised as meritocracy. You’re told that if you just work hard enough, the feeling of worthiness will eventually arrive. But the goalpost keeps moving with every achievement, because the system needs you to keep striving. The promotion doesn’t fix the feeling. The raise doesn’t fix it either. External validation keeps proving insufficient because the wound was never external to begin with, even though the culture keeps insisting it is, so you keep looking for the fix in the wrong place.

Joan C. Williams, JD, distinguished professor at UC Hastings College of Law, has spent years documenting what she calls the “double bind” facing women in high-status professions: judged harshly for being warm (read as not competent enough) and judged just as harshly for being competent (read as not warm enough). I think about her framing often, because it names something my clients feel constantly but rarely have language for. Add a relational trauma history to that bind, and the internal monitoring becomes nearly continuous, an exhausting second job nobody’s paying you for.

In my clinical work, I help driven women see the systemic sources of their confidence struggles alongside the personal ones. When a woman can recognize that her persistent sense of “not enough” isn’t only a childhood wound but also a cultural message she’s receiving thousands of times a day, in advertising, in comparison, in workplace dynamics, she can start to externalize some of what she’s been internalizing. The feeling of inadequacy isn’t really about her. It’s about a system that profits from her never quite feeling like enough.

If what you’ve read here resonates, individual therapy and executive coaching are both 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.

Building Earned Confidence in Real Time

So let me ask you a few honest questions, the same ones I’d ask in session:

• Where in your own life are you genuinely lacking confidence right now?
• What’s one dream, wish, or desire you want to feel, do, or become in that area?
• What sits at the heart of that dream? Connection, acceptance, security, possibility, something else?
• What’s a smaller, more scoped-down belief you could realistically hold about yourself here? What evidence already exists, even on a small or parallel scale, that the essence of what you’re longing for is possible?
• What’s the extrapolated belief you could carry that feels more honest and more workable than either extreme?
• What would it look like to move toward that dream while holding this new, more congruent belief instead of the old story?

What I’ve come to understand in my clinical work is that confidence isn’t the absence of doubt. It’s the willingness to act while the doubt is still present, because you’ve accumulated enough evidence, through repeated action, that you can handle whatever happens next. That’s earned confidence in its most essential form: not a feeling you wait around for, but a capacity you build through the ordinary, unglamorous work of showing up, trying things, sometimes failing, and continuing anyway.

I’ve sat with enough driven women through this particular shift to recognize its shape now. The inner critic doesn’t vanish. I wish I could promise that, but it wouldn’t be true. What changes is the volume, and more than the volume, the relationship to it. Whitney still hears the voice that says she doesn’t deserve the promotion. She just doesn’t organize her Tuesday around it anymore. That’s the whole trick, if you can call something this unglamorous a trick: hearing the old fear, and making a different choice anyway, on purpose, over and over, until the choice itself becomes the more familiar path.

The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, to a real extent, shape our reality and absolutely shape our emotions. You don’t have to fake it until you make it, performing a confidence you don’t feel. The move is to scope it back: find the smaller belief you can genuinely stand behind, ground yourself there, and build outward until you’re ready to risk the bigger thing you actually want.

No matter where you’re starting from, you can earn your confidence, and in fact, you’ll have to. The path isn’t instant. It’s slower than any headline promises. But it’s real, and it’s yours to build, one piece of evidence at a time.

This is the clinical heart of confidence work: not eliminating vulnerability, but expanding your capacity to tolerate it while it’s still there. If you’re ready to build that capacity, not through affirmations but through the real, sometimes uncomfortable work of healing the relational roots of self-doubt, trauma-informed therapy and executive coaching offer two different, complementary paths in. You don’t have to perform confidence. You get to build it, from the inside out, in a way that actually holds when it matters.

You deserve a life that feels as good as it looks. Let’s work on that together.

Here’s to healing relational trauma and building thriving lives on solid foundations.

Warmly, Annie.

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. Reisz S, Duschinsky R, Siegel DJ. Disorganized attachment and defense: exploring John Bowlby’s unpublished reflections. Attach Hum Dev. 2018;20(2):107-134. doi:10.1080/14616734.2017.1380055. PMID: 28952412.
2. Porges SW. Polyvagal Theory: Current Status, Clinical Applications, and Future Directions. Clin Neuropsychiatry. 2025;22(3):169-184. doi:10.36131/cnfioritieditore20250301. PMID: 40735382.

Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)

• Bandura, Albert. Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. W.H. Freeman, 1997.
• Bandura, Albert. Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory. Prentice-Hall, 1986.
• Menakem, Resmaa. My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Central Recovery Press, 2017.
• Clance, Pauline Rose, and Suzanne A. Imes. “The Imposter Phenomenon in driven women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention.” Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice 15, no. 3 (1978): 241-247.
• Kaling, Mindy. “Mindy Kaling’s Guide to Killer Confidence.” Glamour.

Medical Disclaimer