You Don't Need More Confidence. You Need a Bigger Comfort Zone.

For years, I made a very simple mistake.

I thought discomfort meant I wasn’t suited to something.

If I felt awkward doing it...

If I wasn’t naturally good at it...

If my stomach started doing somersaults at the thought of other people seeing me...

I assumed it wasn’t for me.

Funny thing is, I have plenty of evidence now that I was wrong.

Because I’m writing this after spending the last couple of weeks putting my face on camera and publishing videos on YouTube.

Old Barry would have thought I’d lost the plot.

This was a man who once thought putting his name on a fiction book was about as terrifying as life could get.

Now I’m putting my face, voice and opinions onto the internet for complete strangers to watch.

And I’m getting strangely comfortable doing it.

Not confident.

Comfortable.

There’s a difference.

I think we’ve got confidence backwards.

We look at someone who’s comfortable on camera and assume they were born that way.

We see someone publishing books and think writing must come naturally to them.

We watch someone speaking in front of an audience and think:

“I could never do that.”

I certainly did.

Because if something felt uncomfortable to me, I took that discomfort as evidence.

See, Barry? You’re not one of those people.

Except discomfort wasn’t evidence that I couldn’t do it.

It was evidence that I hadn’t done it enough.

I remember publishing my first Minecraft book.

Hitting that button was a big deal.

My work was going out into the world.

People could read it.

People could judge it.

People could tell me it was crap.

Then I wrote the second book.

That one was a little easier.

Then another.

And another.

Eventually, I wasn’t sitting there having an existential crisis over the publish button.

I was thinking:

“How quickly can I get this onto the store?”

What happened?

Did I suddenly receive a massive injection of confidence?

No.

I’d simply done it enough times that publishing wasn’t scary anymore.

It had become normal.

Like falling off a log.

That’s how I think your comfort zone actually expands.

Not through one massive act of courage.

Through boring repetitions.

The first rep scares the pants off you.

The second is slightly easier.

Then the third.

The fourth.

The twentieth.

Until one day you casually do something that an older version of you would have considered impossible.

And you barely notice.

That’s the strange part.

We celebrate the first time we do something.

We rarely celebrate the moment it becomes boring.

But maybe we should.

Boring is evidence of growth.

I can see it happening with my videos now.

Go back far enough and you’ll find me stiff as a board, practically shouting my message at the camera.

I was too aware of myself.

How do I look?

How do I sound?

What will people think?

Now I’m thinking more about the person on the other side of the screen.

I’m trying to get an idea across to them.

I’m more forgiving when I stumble over a word.

If the video is good enough, it goes out.

Because I’ve finally realised something else.

I don’t get to decide how somebody else will receive it.

My job is to make it and publish it.

That’s taken a lot of repetitions to learn.

Maybe that’s why I’m suspicious of the labels we give ourselves.

“I’m shy.”

“I’m not creative.”

“I’m not good on camera.”

“I’m not the type of person who could write a book.”

Sometimes those aren’t descriptions.

They’re walls.

And the funny thing is...

we built them ourselves.

We draw a little box around our current abilities and announce:

“This is who I am.”

As if who we are today is the only version of ourselves we’re ever allowed to become.

I did it for years.

People like me don’t write fiction.

People like me don’t make videos.

People like me don’t put themselves out there.

Except apparently we do.

If we get enough reps in.

And I don’t think I’d change how I got here.

If you could go back and magically inject old Barry with all the confidence I have today, I wouldn’t do it.

It would be like handing him a lottery win.

He hadn’t earned it yet.

He hadn’t written the books.

He hadn’t dealt with criticism.

He hadn’t published hundreds of pieces of work.

He hadn’t recorded the terrible videos.

He hadn’t accumulated the evidence.

I’d rather have what I have now.

Confidence with calluses on it.

Confidence that came from doing things badly, surviving them, and doing them again.

Because nobody can take those repetitions away from me.

There’s still an edge to my comfort zone, by the way.

Live streaming.

That scares the pants off me a little.

With a recorded video, I can mess it up.

Delete.

Start again.

Nobody needs to know Barry just spent three minutes talking complete bull.

Live?

Different story.

If I goof up, I goof up in front of everyone.

No delete button.

Which is probably why I know what I’ll eventually have to do.

Not wait until I’m confident enough to livestream.

Livestream until it no longer requires confidence.

There’s a difference.

So if there’s something you’ve been telling yourself you’re “just not the kind of person” to do...

Don’t try to become more confident.

Do one rep.

Then another.

Then another.

Let it be awkward.

Let yourself be crap at it.

Let your hands shake if they need to.

You’re not proving whether you have some natural talent.

You’re teaching your brain:

“We do this now.”

Eventually, today’s terrifying action becomes tomorrow’s boring Tuesday.

And when it does?

Move the wall again.

You don’t need to become a different person before you step outside your comfort zone.

Stepping outside it repeatedly is how you become one.

P.S. I suppose I’ve talked myself into trying a livestream now, haven’t I? 😂

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