How to Build Creative Confidence
And feel like a Creative, Entrepreneurial Badass
You don’t need to learn another productivity technique or take another course.
The key to feeling like a Creative Badass, accelerating your momentum, and taking on bolder and bigger goals is creative confidence.
What is Creative Confidence?
⚡️I define Creative Confidence as the self-belief that you have the ability to overcome challenging, complex, and uncertain situations and achieve the creative outcomes that you set out to do. When your creative confidence is at level 10, you have zero doubt that you can figure out anything and everything that comes your way with your creativity.
IDEO co-founder, David Kelley, describes it as the ability to come up with new ideas AND have the courage to try them out.
Without creative confidence, no productivity technique or tool will be sustainable.
With it, you likely will never even need another productivity hack or tool again. 🤯
How Do You Get Creative Confidence?
Creative confidence is like a muscle — it can be strengthened through deliberate effort and experience.
Momentum and Guided Mastery
The best way to build creative confidence is through a process that social psychologists call “guided mastery” — experiencing one small success after another — and increasing the level of challenge as you go.
Have you heard of the Progress Principle?
One of my favorite creativity & innovation researchers is Harvard professor, Teresa Amabile. She conducted a large study to discover the states of inner work life and workday events that correlated with the highest levels of creativity and productivity.
For four months, Dr. Amabile and her colleagues asked 238 project team members across seven different companies to respond to a daily email survey inquiring about their feelings, motivation, performance, and creativity. This resulted in about 12,000 diary entries.
Much was learned from this research initiative, but their primary finding was the “Progress Principle.”
They found that experiencing progress on meaningful work was THE most significant factor related to the highest levels of creative output, productivity, and even fulfillment.
⚡️ The best way to strengthen your creative confidence is to experience one small success after another. To follow through on the things you say you want to do — no matter how small these things are. To feel regular progress.
Break your goals down into smaller steps and then build confidence by accomplishing one small step after another.
In other words, by creating and sustaining momentum.
This means using any technique that works for you to get one small thing done, starting today.
❓Ask yourself, “What progress do I want to make next?”
Then execute.
Acknowledge and Celebrate Your Progress to Strengthen Your Psychology
To amplify the benefits you get from building momentum, it’s important to actually acknowledge and celebrate your successes and progress.
Dr. Amabile and colleagues also found that tracking small wins every day further elevated employee motivation.
Simply recording your progress may help you appreciate your small accomplishments, which in turn may boost your sense of confidence, performance, and momentum that you can carry with you toward achieving bigger and bolder goals.
❓Do YOU pause and reflect on your progress?
👉 Try keeping a weekly or daily progress log (perhaps in a google spreadsheet or a handwritten journal). Any time you feel you’ve made progress on something meaningful, record it. Or simply ask yourself at the end of each day, “What progress did I make?”
👉 Create a “Wins Board” or wins repository. Create something in Trello, a google spreadsheet, or even a physical board to remind yourself of all the badass stuff you’ve done. Gather your accomplishments, awards, client testimonials, positive reviews, media coverage, nice notes from people, etc. — anything that gives you a creative confidence boost and reminds you that you have done great things in the past and can do them moving forward. Review this board weekly.
If you make progress or accomplish something and you don’t celebrate or acknowledge it, you’re actually training your mind that what you’re doing is not meaningful!
When you celebrate something, no matter how small, the reward circuitry in your brain gets activated, and the neurotransmitter dopamine is released. This release of dopamine not only energizes you and feels great, but it also tells your brain to repeat what triggered its release.
In other words, celebrating your progress and successes doesn’t just feel good — it actually helps to reinforce the positive actions, behaviors, and decisions that you made so that they are repeated again in the future.
Celebrating your small wins can literally fuel your momentum.
You don’t need to throw a party every time you make progress or accomplish something, but if you’re not taking the time to acknowledge and celebrate your wins in some small, personally meaningful way, you’re missing out on a simple but powerful way to build creative confidence and accelerate your momentum towards your creative goal.
Practice Gratitude
Performing simple weekly or daily acts of gratitude can have a big impact on your health and happiness — and thus your creativity and productivity.
There are many psychological benefits of keeping a gratitude journal. And simply visualizing and reflecting on what you are grateful for can bolster your internal resources.
Perhaps the strongest benefit in regards to helping creative confidence that I’ve experienced is building the belief that I am and have enough in my life.
I don’t need to achieve certain outcomes to feel validated or worthy. This has given me a sense of freedom and confidence where my self-worth is not tied to the success or failure of my creative pursuits. If someone rejects something I create, no worries. I have enough love, relationships, and resources to feel enough. Everything I achieve creatively is a bonus in my life and I can pursue those goals for the experience and journey — I don’t need a certain result from them. This feeling helps me stay committed but detached to my goals — which in turn increases my confidence and resilience.
❓ What experiences, relationships, accomplishments, or material things are you grateful for?
Closing
When you focus on building your creative confidence, you’ll come up with more creative ideas, make bolder decisions, and have the courage to consistently take action toward your creative goal.
❓What small steps can you take this week to begin cultivating your creative confidence?
Pick ONE to start building your momentum TODAY.
Let me know what’s resonating with you in the comments or privately messaging me. 🤘
More About Coach Jeff
My name is Jeff Fajans (rhymes with “lions”) and I help creative entrepreneurs bring their biggest ideas to life and reach their next level of creative success. I believe that I have unique expertise in the psychology of creative work.
I have a PhD in Positive Organizational Psychology from Claremont Graduate University, where I studied under Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the world-renowned author of Flow. My research focused on how to help people learn, develop, and lead more effectively to better achieve creative goals.
I am also an avid music creator and guitar player. 🤘
Through my 1-on-1 Creative Momentum Coaching, 30-Day Creative Momentum Challenge community, toolkits for creative entrepreneurs, internationally acclaimed digital courses, and speaking engagements, I’ve helped thousands of people from around the world connect with their purpose, clarify their creative vision, amplify their motivation, and create actionable strategies & systems that make achieving their most meaningful goals inevitable.
These are people who are pursuing big goals like starting or leading a business (and scaling it to higher levels of innovation & growth), writing + filming a feature film (and it winning a Sundance award), building an app or product (and getting accepted into Y Combinator or getting VC funding), writing a book (and hitting the Amazon bestseller list) or even exploring a meaningful side hustle or passion project.
