Building Confidence Takes More Time Than You’d Think

At last year’s China Fashion Week in Beijing, a 79-year-old male model took the stage, surprising the audience in an appearance that soon went viral. Wang Deshun strode onto the catwalk shirtless, his long white hair flowing behind him. He moved like a man in his 20s and waved to the audience like he owned the place. He was having fun up there.

Social media went crazy. People wanted to know: Who was this guy?

Wang is a professional actor, so he’d been on stage before and knew how to work a crowd. But it would’ve been easy for him to feel outclassed and insecure while sharing the stage with a bunch of 20-something fashion models. After the show, reporters asked how he did it.

“Confidence,” he said, “comes from the accumulation of successes.”

Wang’s reply echoes the theme of a Chinese aphorism used in a recent Huawei brand campaign. Roughly translated, the aphorism is “Through steady, accumulated effort, one achieves sudden breakthroughs.” It describes a moment when a long, steady series of small accomplishments culminates in a breakthrough. To the casual observer, this looks like overnight success. Yet those who put in the long hours of work to make it happen know that it was anything but.

Thomas M. Sterner, a professional musician who wrote The Practicing Mind, lays out a strategy for practicing anything: your golf swing, your piano scales, your Chinese characters, whatever. When you practice, he says, you can calm your mind and banish distraction by remembering that you are exactly where you need to be, doing exactly what you should be doing. The key is not to focus on the outcome (which you can’t control), but on the process that gets you there.

That’s the best approach I know for building confidence. Yes, there are other methods. Many self-help authors, for example, recommend a “fake it ‘til you make it” approach: Pretend to be confident, and eventually you will be. And in a widely watched TED talk, Harvard psychologist Amy Cuddy discusses “power poses,” physical postures of dominance that are said to affect people’s hormone levels and make them feel more confident. These approaches can be a short-term aids to boosting confidence in stressful situations.

If that works for you, great. But when you’re presenting to a large audience—or even a small group of people whose opinions matter—faking it is rarely a viable option.

An approach based on diligent practice is less about projecting confidence, and more about building it. So, when you work toward a long-term goal, taking tiny steps that eventually culminate in a breakthrough, you’re where you need to be, doing what you need to be doing. Nothing beats the confidence-building effects of preparation, and of focusing on the minute-by-minute process that lies entirely within your control. Knowing this, you’ll start to feel more comfortable. Eventually, that comfort will become confidence.

Soon, you’ll realize that you’ve gone a lot farther than you thought you could—a great feeling, and one you won’t have to fake.

This article originally appeared in Fortune.