Trust me: The right to confidence, the confidence to write
I spent too much of my twenties in the company of a serial con man who owned his own pool cue and made a living going town to town across Montana, hustling for often good piles of cash and, sometimes, pills, in neon billiard halls and veteran’s bars. He had a lot of hustles he would play, and they all involved actually being great at pool plus varying degrees of flat-out lying. He was proud of this work, and very good at it (for all I know he’s still out there “running the game”). A con man, he always said, is a scam artist.
Con, as in con man, running a con, or long con (and in case you didn’t know) is short for confidence game or confidence trick, a caper in which a thief gains the trust of the victim, or mark, before swindling them. The “confidence” here doesn’t refer to the power, ego, and charisma it takes to lie, cheat, and steal while staring into the widening eyes of an innocent man—though trust me, it takes a lot of all that. Con refers instead to the exploitation of the mark’s confidence, in the sense of their trust. The victim’s confidence is the criminal’s weapon.
To have confidence in others means trusting that the world is not everywhere out to get you. To have confidence in others is to believe that they are going to do what they say they’re going to do, that you can count on them. When you have a secret you need to tell, you demonstrate trust by taking someone into your confidence. When you are confident in someone, you trust they are capable and on your side, with no expectation that they may use their capabilities against you. The con man gains the mark’s confidence in order to steal his intended prize—be that $300 in cold cash and loose change or a poor girl’s heart—but this confidence too is never returned, the mark forever marked by the loss of their fundamental trust. The marked are cynical, closed off, and fearful. Soon, they may start to behave in cruel ways toward others, wanting to inflict their own betrayals in what is now a mixed-up crazy world. In a con, the first theft is of the victim’s virtue.
You may think a person who gets scammed or betrayed deserves what they get, that trusting people is not a virtue but a vice—in action, however, most of us are not this callous. It’s very clear how trust in others is necessary for our survival on a micro and macro level (can you hold this ladder?), and striving or at least wanting or wishing to be trustworthy to others (someone people can have confidence in) truly matters to most of us. Stories of broken trust—whether our friend’s cheating spouse or our neighbor who lost her savings to LuLaRoe—tend to wound us in the place of core values I believe most humans share. We caution against gullibility and being too trusting, yet we typically see too-trusting people as “too good for this world” rather than immoral or unethical themselves. Trust is a virtue, and it offends something human in us to have this confidence broken.
But, when turned on ourselves, we don’t see confidence anything like inherent virtuous trust. At best, it’s a niche skill you’re told to trot out for job interviews—confidence as tilting at power. Most often, we fear self-confidence as prideful, heedless, or unearned. How can I be confident in myself if the thing I’m trying to do is something I’ve never done before? How can I trust myself not to make things worse? How can I be confident as myself if I am broken and I’m not sure where or why? Why would I trust that I’m going to be ok if I’ve never felt ok? If I am confident and I fail, then that means I am foolish. If I am too confident, perhaps I will not be able to see that I have failed. The best thing, when it comes to ourselves, is never to practice high trust—when it comes to ourselves, we might pay lip service to self-confidence, but we treat trust like a vice.
Think about the friend whose writing you champion and whose every creative effort you support. Go, friend, go! You have total confidence in your friend!
And, in that same moment, you see your own efforts are scorned, your own desires dismissed by the voice inside. You don’t deserve the confidence you so naturally have in your friend.
Why is it like this?
I think this lack of trust in the self—put simply, self-doubt—actually pains us as much as it would pain us to deceive another or witness the violation of a loved one’s trust by a malevolent actor; it hurts as much as it hurts if our worldview is one in which others are always out to get us, as if we lived in an untrustworthy world constantly teeming with threat; it hurts as much as it would hurt our friend if we told her she was nothing and never going to make something good.
What if the self wants to trust itself, just as much as it is human to want to trust in others and be trusted? What if we are constantly bending the self away from its most relaxed, productive state of trust? What if self-confidence is as much a virtue as having confidence in our fellow human beings? Every time you don’t write because you’re “not a writer,” when you turn away from a shitty first draft because it’s not yet Nabokov, when you refuse to share your work with anyone—somewhere inside us the self calls out, how can I earn your trust if you won’t trust me to try?
I believe every one of us has this faithful voice. Trust me! And they are hurt when we do not. Every person has a desire to believe in themselves, even a need to—and I think this confidence is something, like our innate desire and need to play, that is eroded and turned by the world, the experiences of growing up and being hurt and told stories about our self-worth, to desire the unattainable and how to keep on proving our value. We are not the con man, betraying the trusting self; we are the conned, our self-confidence both the weapon used against us (“If you believe in yourself and try then everything will work out, so no safety nets or helping hand for you”) and the ultimate object of the thief’s desire (“If people are actually self-confident they won’t need to buy a lot of the shit we need them to buy to keep and grow our wealth, so we need to feed them ever more complex and confusing stories about their own brokenness.”) This makes us as conned as any shill—the person used by the con man to enact their grift.
You can restore yourself to trust—the wisdom that you aren’t a broken thing needing to be fixed, that you can do so much more than you imagine, and that you are going to be ok. I ask you to consider that self-confidence may have been conned out of you—that self-doubt is not an inherent part of being you, but a sign that the trust that’s been eroded must be restored.
Writing can help. Because in writing, confidence is both necessary to do the thing and can be continually reinforced and expanded by the process, practice, and craft of writing. And we can even, as I’ll share in an exercise at the bottom of this post, investigate our inherited stories of self-worth and self-doubt in order to lessen their power and then rewrite them.
Here are a few of the ways writing and self-confidence are linked.
Reveals and Deepens Self-Knowledge
A foundational belief of narrative therapy—a topic I will be writing about for our next post, stay tuned!—is that every person is the expert in their own life. No one can tell you more about your experiences than you can. Though you can be guided to new insights and perspectives by others, you uncover inherent tools and resources to capture these truths and use them to transform your behavior and beliefs. That is the goal of my work with writers.
In writing, you have the chance to explore and deepen your awareness of your own experiences, to bring back memories you thought you had forgotten, to articulate your beliefs both self-limiting and visionary, to use your tools and resources of imagination and craft to richly understand and describe your own life and mind and ideas.
I think—actually, I have seen in my practice time and time and time after time—that the more a person can richly describe their own positive or negative-but-generative life experiences, the more confidence they have in themselves to move through present challenges and dream of the future. Writing shows us our own expertise and demonstrates our ability to become greater experts and indeed authors of our lives.
Inspires Gratitude and Awe
In Jenny Boully’s book on writing, Betwixt and Between, she writes:
“In writing, too, there exists the struggle with sincerity and wanting someone to love me. There is a craft in that, I do think: the craft of writing as the craft of getting someone to love me.”
I feel a little bad for saying this, but I find this admission deeply sad. There may be craft in getting someone to love you—the kind of craft of the scam artist. Do not write to get someone else to love you—that’s… not going to happen nor is it good if it does. But I do believe writing is a way to fall in love with yourself and life itself—and that this is an excellent goal for developing a practice.
How? I write about it so much in this newsletter, but writing is miraculous because it depends on the miracle of imagination. Writing allows you to experience the incredible miracle of your own imagination—wow, this is mine. I had a thought, I had more, I had a vision, I found the language, I think this works. I can communicate and I can relate. You can develop an awe for these abilities inherent in you by developing a practice that values them.
Further, improving your craft shows you how much you are capable of. Getting better at something inspires awe in the self and the world—and it inspires trust. You learn it is never impossible to get better. Even when you don’t know how you can.
Connects us to others
It’s another principle of narrative therapy that there is no ‘self’ without others, there is no identity that is not relational. Self-confidence is intimately related to your confidence in other people, and theirs in you.
But not in the sense of validation.
When you are self-confident, proud of what you have created and the fact you can create, when you become grateful for what you can do and accept what you have done, when you are confident in your own voice, you stop relying so much on the positive opinions of others. This allows you to enjoy others more. When you require less of people to maintain your personal confidence, the act of sharing reveals its own values.
But desiring affirmation and that others connect with your work is not bad. When it comes to desiring affirmation, think about it—you have confidence in your friend. She has confidence in you. Confidence is relational—we share stores of it with each other. The more you believe in your friend, or your reader, the more she’ll believe in herself, and vice versa. So the more you create opportunities for others to find their confidence in you, you are gaining back pieces of what’s been taken. And as you support others, you yourself become more supported.
Eliminates competitive stress
As a writer, when you have freed your voice and feel in flow in writing, you will feel this as confidence. The voice will take you where it’s going, and it’ll be right and good. Though it can be hard work to get to this place, when you have true confidence in your voice, it is freedom. And feel me: confidence that the voice is good is not as important as confidence that it will take you somewhere good. That is, it is freedom when you’ve learned to trust the voice as a guide more than a tool. People think the voice is just about how good the writing is or how it sounds—but it’s about the vision for the impact of your work, how you relate to other people, for these things inform the true and consistent qualities of voice. Voice is content. Style is substance. This is why I say your voice is a tree—it’s everything about how the tree looks, but also about where the tree is, and how it grew. No tree and no being is a “dominant” species—success always requires the success of others.
And so, confidence in using ones own voice reveals that competition has no place in your jar of helpful feelings. Writers who stress about other writers are not helping themselves to be writers. Artists don’t compete. Being an artist means doing the things that only you can do. You can’t compete to be the most yourself. So let all that go—you’ll feel your confidence restored in the moments you can.
Taking up space
One of the biggest struggles for writers I have met is the lack of trust that they deserve to take up any space in the world. I have nothing to say—or, I don’t think anyone will care what I have to say. I’m just another whatever, I have nothing new to add. I should just stop. Or never start. All these ideas have probably been written before.
This is hard to do and I really think having friends and champions (editor, coach, publisher) are pretty much essential to help one become more self-confident about taking up space. But I think individually, people need in this case to stop mistaking confidence to take up space as entitlement to do so. People who feel entitled to take up space—who are loud, annoying—they are taking up the space of others, well beyond what’s fair. They steal others’ spaces and their work—these people are plagiarists, aggrandizers, and liars. These are the con men of writers. And they are not, not, not asking questions about whether they are doing something wrong. If you are worried about this, it’s extremely unlikely that you will take up the space of others—the only way to “take too much.”
Over time, writers I work with work diligently to unblock themselves from this confidence-sapping story—that to write is to take something away from someone else or to take too much. Every single piece of writing, no matter how small or even if shared with just one person, works to restore confidence that taking up space will not result in the writer’s death or abandonment. Figuring out what exactly you want to fill space helps even more—I do have this experience, I do have this message, and it is valuable (again, voice is vision). It really helps with this one to do the deconstructing work I share in the exercise at the bottom of this post—this story that you shouldn’t take up space came from somewhere. I know because that language isn’t yours. So who said it? And do you believe them now?
This is urgent work as well. Heed me—if you don’t take up your own space, someone else will step into it.
Everything will be ok
Time and time and time again, I have seen the power of drafting change lives.
Sure, many writers agonize over every draft anew, forever—I think this is just part of the little drama of writing that some people enjoy or insist on playing out.
But (at least the way I coach with our emphasis on practice and process as well as craft), drafting occurs to many writers starting out as a miracle. Wait, this good thing came from something that was originally bad? Wait, you’re saying this bad thing has the potential to become something good? And I can learn how? The more the writer goes through this process, the more confidence they have. It starts out as disbelief—almost too good to be true that one can actually learn and improve. And then, through simply seeing it happen, we engage regularly with trust, belief. Because it comes from reality. Over and over again, something bad turns into something good. Some idea becomes clearer to us. Some limp phrasing punches through.
This is where it really all happens. The point at which you become confident that things will work out in your writing, that confidence will spread out elsewhere in your life. If this, why not this? If this shitty first draft can become something I am so proud of, why not trust that this bad experience might be made into something good? If I can do that, maybe what I thought needed fixing inside me was just my first attempt? Maybe what I thought was irreversibly broken in me was just a story someone else was telling?
From here, anything is possible.
Confidence makes things possible. Confidence is a virtue that demonstrates the value of trust—including trust in yourself.
Makes things possible
A wonderful client I’ve been working with for the last year described our work together: “Writing is the vehicle. You’re really helping us see what’s possible.”
I was very struck by this, because ‘helping you see possibilities’ has been a core belief I’ve held about writing (and human potential) for a long time. The journal is a mind-expanding agent. Writing teaches you to see beyond, into new worlds, to question, to question well, to analyze and turn over and over, to strive toward truth knowing it’s not there, to knowing the value in seeing and witnessing and registering uncertainty and confusion is a vital one and a gift.
What I’ve discovered in my work is how this kind of exploratory writing helps people see greater possibilities for themselves outside of the writing project. I can be creative—in fact, I am. I can be a writer—in fact, I am. I don’t have to use these labels for myself that keep me stuck in certain paths. I don’t need validation to care about this or to be who I am. And on and on. I’ve seen people start business, end businesses, move, create whole new lives in ways that have directly been supported by and inspired by their writing—whether they ever wrote about those problems or not. What they apply to their lives from their writing practice is a deeper, wider sight—the confidence that other than this is possible.
This ability to see more than you could before isn’t about holding greater power, it’s about containing greater expansiveness. If you have practiced ‘seeing outside this one way’ over and over in your writing, you become better at seeing outside any situation—whether it’s a bad job, relationship, or negative thought or fear. Writing teaches you how to bring space in between you and the trigger or struggle you are facing.
You might call the power writing connects you to a spiritual creative power. I would just call it being human. But it is profound to realize your mind, your imagination, your intention, and your story are things you can understand, define, and practice through writing, a way to build—in the language of narrative therapy I’ve used before—rich descriptions of your life to replace thin conclusions that bind it up.
All I know is, if you really believe that you can’t do something, you will not somehow miraculously be able to do it. Maybe you delight yourself by landing a point or a line and say, “I didn’t know I could do that!” But somewhere in that second where you “just went for it,” you acted in confidence—you flipped the confidence coin where one side is the trust you’ll land it, and the other side is the trust you’ll be ok if you don’t. It doesn’t matter how that coin falls. Playing the coin allows things to have their chance at becoming.
Exercise
I leave you with an exercise today to investigate more deeply your own self-confidence stories. Maybe you want to write about lack of confidence in your writing, or in yourself, or in some aspect of you that’s been holding you back. Whatever it is you focus on, journal on the following questions:
When did I start feeling a lack of confidence in this?
How has a lack of confidence affected my life?
What are the rules that dictate my behavior around confidence? For example, “If I trust myself to be a writer, I will be made a fool.” “If I try wearing the clothes I want, I will be ridiculed.”
How has my lack of confidence been influenced—by family, community, society, and history?
How do I want to relate to confidence in this?
If you’re not sure how exactly low-confidence is holding you back in your writing, here’s an exercise inspired by Julia Cameron’s “blurts”: Write out ten times in your journal, “I am a writer.” As you write out this line, record to the side every negative thought or “blurt” that comes up. These are your self-limiting stories.
For deeper deconstructive work, revisit “end laziness now!” And join us next post for a deep dive on narrative therapy—we’ll be learning a lot more about this kind of work this year.
Thank you, writer! I hope you gained some new perspective from this piece. Please reach out if you do or would like to see something else covered. See you next time!
