By Dave Harris, PhD

The August 2024 TAA Conversation Circle on productivity reminded me of how much productivity depends on confidence. This insight can guide us: confidence can be built through practice. I offer some suggestions on building confidence, and thus productivity, through practice.

Degrees of self-confidence and behavior

Speaking generally, emotions shape our behavior: the optimist behaves as if things will work out, while the pessimist behaves as if things will not. Metaphorically speaking, the optimist will buy a lottery ticket, and the pessimist will not. The optimist submits a draft for publication, where the pessimist does not.

Self-confidence varies for each person, and, generally, the optimal degree of self-confidence lies between the extremes: too little self-confidence leads to paralysis; too much leads to arrogance and an inability to learn.  Ideally, a scholar has enough self-confidence to move forward with their projects and to present their work to others while also remaining open to correction when errors arise.

Self-doubting writers benefit from advice that helps them take action, and they suffer from advice that triggers doubt.  By contrast, writers with abundant self-confidence benefit from advice that helps them refine and improve their work, and they suffer from advice that lets them ignore their weaknesses.  So, for example, advice on improving style can add to the doubts of a doubting writer, increasing barriers to productivity, while that same stylistic advice may benefit a self-confident writer who produces poorly written manuscripts (whether the self-confident writer will admit their manuscript is poorly written or take anyone else’s advice is another question). Or, for example, the well-known advice to write “shitty first drafts” (to quote Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird), is well-suited to the self-doubter because it can avoid a whole set of doubts that delay many writers, but it’s not great advice for confident writers who are already producing manuscripts, and would benefit from refining their prose.

Practice and self-confidence

Self-confidence is emotional, and sometimes we can improve our emotional state through practice, as demonstrated by the empirically validated efficacy of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). In its simplest form, CBT argues that “Psychological problems are based, in part, on faulty or unhelpful ways of thinking,” and “People suffering from psychological problems can learn better ways of coping with them, thereby relieving their symptoms and becoming more effective in their lives” (emphasis added).

Self-doubt is not inherently a “faulty or unhelpful way of thinking”—as noted above, some self-doubt is necessary for any learning—but it certainly can become faulty or unhelpful. While it’s a good thing to recognize your own ignorance (and corresponding need to learn more) and the possibility that you make mistakes, doubt is a slippery slope to impostor syndrome, perfectionist paralysis, and writer’s block.

If we suffer from self-doubt, it’s possible to improve productivity through confidence-boosting practice. In my personal struggles with self-doubt, practice is built from small, low-risk actions. While I cannot dispel large-scale doubts about my weaknesses, I can still build on a foundation of smaller confidences, from the smallest scale (e.g., spelling a single word correctly), to larger and larger chunks (e.g., phrases, sentences), and ultimately to a draft as a whole. So, for example, although my larger argument and presentation may be flawed due to my ignorance, I can still write most sentences with reasonable confidence: if I cite a source, I feel confident relying on published research and reputable sources; I feel confident writing questions because questions are worth asking (and if it’s a question with an answer, someone reviewing the manuscript will hopefully tell me so before publication). And if I write a sentence that I dislike or doubt, I’m confident that I’ll be able to edit it later. Because any manuscript is built of many small pieces, no one piece is high-stakes, which further increases my confidence in dealing with the small pieces.

Practically speaking, even when I am struggling with doubt about large-scale issues—the argument, audience, presentation, etc.—I can feel confident with each sentence. Is my whole manuscript good? I have no idea. But is that last sentence good enough? I can feel confident about that (especially with practice—it’s all too easy to slip into perfectionist paralysis over a single sentence or word, but with practice, I get better at pushing on, leaving those awkward sentences for a later edit). Sentence after sentence, I can practice my confidence. I can even be confident in my ignorance in the same way that Socrates proclaimed that he knew that he was ignorant.

Virtuous cycles

I know doubt. Philosophically, I’m a skeptic, influenced by David Hume and the complexity of real-world planning problems (in the general sense of “making plans”); and my personal demons are doubts, all of which is to say that I remain intimate with doubts that can lead to paralysis, not just in writing but throughout my life. But my writing practice is also one of my best defenses against doubt.

Writing was once one of my greatest fears. But, through years of practice, my confidence has grown. Now, on a day-to-day basis, the practice of writing supports a virtuous cycle in my life, in which each small accomplishment—each sentence and paragraph, as well as each minute or hour of productive work—boosts my mood, giving me greater confidence, which helps me take on another small task, which can then become another confidence-boosting small accomplishment.

If you want to increase your productivity, can you benefit from boosting your confidence? If so, what small steps can you take that can set you onto a path where your practice becomes a confidence-boosting virtuous cycle?

---

Dave Harris, Ph.D., editor, writing coach, and dissertation coach, helps writers develop effective writing practices, express their ideas clearly, and finish their projects. He is author of Getting the Best of Your Dissertation (Thought Clearing, 2015), Literature Review and Research Design: A Guide to Effective Research Practice (Routledge, 2020) and second author with Jean-Pierre Protzen of The Universe of Design: Horst Rittel’s Theories of Design and Planning (Routledge, 2010).Dave can be found on the web at www.thoughtclearing.com