3 Ways to Rewire Your Brain to Boost Your Confidence

The same wiring that keeps us safe can also keep us small and deplete our confidence. But we can rewire our brain to boost confidence and seize momentum in our success.

We are programmed to look for what’s wrong

There’s something that I see showing up often in the people around me, and within myself: the way in which we tend to cling to the negative feedback and experiences over the positive.

This is our evolutionary wiring. It’s how we survived — and continue to survive — in the physical world. If you ran into a bear in the woods, you want the automatic reflex that tells you “this is a bear” to kick in, so you get to a place of safety.

Even if you don’t come into contact with a bear, you still need this natural response. If you touch a pan after you pull it from the oven, you will burn yourself. You don’t want to repeat that mistake. The biological response to remember the negative keeps you safe by forcing you to remember getting burned the first time.

How the Protection Mechanism Fails Us

Where this evolutionary wiring fails us is when it keeps us small. This happens often when it comes to emotional pain. If we open to love and get hurt, we create a wall to prevent ourselves from opening again, assuming that we will be hurt the same way. If we take a risk and it doesn’t pay off, we become wary of taking the same or a similar risk again.

Preventing the Crash and Burn

We need to train our brains to learn where danger is, and isn’t, present.

At flying trapeze practice, this is a constant lesson. At one practice, a friend was caught up in her past failures in her turnaround — a skill where you take off from the board and turn around to swing over the board. In the past, she had crashed into the board on the way back. This is common when first learning this skill, and we’ve all been there. (Long ago I learned the truth: circus hurts.)

Each time my friend attempted the skill, she looked at the board and kicked into it. Although she had previously done the skill successfully, without crashing into the board, her body remembered all the times…