Concept
The confidence gap
The confidence gap is Russ Harris's name for the wait between feeling confident and acting: people who believe they must feel confident first never act, because the feeling arrives, if at all, after the action has been taken enough times to be familiar. The gap closes only from the action side.
Most people run on the rule 'first I need to feel confident, then I will act', and Harris's clinical observation is that the rule produces a life of waiting. The feeling of confidence is a product of having done a thing until it is no longer new; it cannot be a precondition. So the sequence has to be reversed: act, in the smallest version, with the fear present, and let the feeling follow or not. Harris defines confidence itself as a relationship with fear rather than its absence: a surfer does not wait for the waves to stop before going out. Every method that promises to make you feel confident before the interview or the speech fails on the day, because the feeling was never the entry ticket. The practical tool is an evidence list: every act of confidence taken before feeling ready, written down, so that the accumulating record does the work the feeling was supposed to do.
A real-life example
A nurse in Konya has wanted to raise a scheduling problem with the head nurse for a month and keeps waiting to feel sure of herself. She writes the problem in two sentences and raises it at the end of the morning handover, with her pulse up. The head nurse agrees to trial a change. Nothing about her confidence changed before she spoke; afterwards she had evidence that she could raise a problem and be heard.
How to use it
- 1Catch the sentence 'I'll do it when I feel more confident' and treat it as the gap, not a plan.
- 2Do the smallest version of the action today, with the fear present.
- 3Keep an evidence list of acts taken before feeling ready; read it when the feeling is missing.