Self-Worth vs. Confidence and Why Being a Beginner Can Feel So Threatening
Written by Crissy Fishbane, Keynote Speaker & Writer
Crissy Fishbane is a keynote speaker and writer exploring what helps us build a meaningful life. Drawing from psychology and lived experience, her work focuses on worthiness, courage, curiosity, and belonging.
Developing greater confidence is often treated as the answer when we feel awkward, uncertain, or afraid to begin something new. But what if the deeper issue isn’t whether we believe we can succeed, but what failure might say about our worth? Understanding the difference between self-worth and confidence may change whether we are willing to remain beginners long enough to actually start building our confidence.
When confidence isn’t enough
Many of us spend a great deal of time and effort striving to become more confident. We want to walk into the networking event without feeling awkward or speak up in the meeting without second-guessing ourselves. We want to start the business, write the book, try the new endeavor and somehow already feel like we belong.
We assume confidence is the missing ingredient. This makes sense. Society very clearly tells us to work on our confidence any time we struggle with shyness, presence, meeting new people, asking for things, excelling at work, or any number of other daily tasks.
Yet I’ve come to believe what many of us are truly starved for isn’t confidence at all. It’s worthiness.
Confidence and worthiness may feel similar, but they do very different jobs. When we ask confidence to solve a worthiness problem, we can spend years collecting accomplishments and trophies without ever feeling like we are enough.
Confidence is supposed to change
Confidence is when we can say, Oh yeah. I’ve got this. Watch me! It feels really good. We’ve been taught, especially over the last couple of decades, that confidence will be the answer to so many of our struggles.
But the truth is, confidence naturally ebbs and flows.
I am extremely confident when it comes to hosting an event, standing on a stage, or synthesizing ideas from multiple sources. Put a houseplant in front of me or ask me to solve a quadratic equation, and my confidence takes a nosedive.
If I spent the next five years learning about and growing houseplants, I could probably become pretty confident in that area too. Quadratic equations? I can’t imagine an earthly realm in which I would willingly devote five years to that pursuit, but theoretically, the same thing applies.
We build confidence by doing. We practice. We develop skills. We gather evidence that we are capable.
Psychologists often use the term self-efficacy to describe our belief in our ability to perform a particular task or behavior. Research on self-efficacy suggests that it is influenced by several sources, including our actual experiences of mastery. In other words, successfully doing something can strengthen our belief that we can do it again.
This is partly why confidence can be so situational. In fact, the problem may be expecting confidence to be steadier than it is.
I can feel incredibly confident as a parent one day and then the next feel so overwhelmed that I’m fairly certain someone in the universe is playing an elaborate practical joke on me by allowing me to be responsible for another human being. If I’m being perfectly honest, sometimes that feeling lasts for days on end.
The fact that our confidence changes isn’t necessarily the problem. In fact, it seems likely the problem is expecting confidence to be steadier.
Confidence comes later
Think about how strange our expectations are when we start something new.
We want to feel confident before we’ve even given the presentation, written the book, or attended fifty networking events. Before we’ve learned the sport, built the business, lifted the weight, or somehow managed to keep the houseplant alive.
But if confidence develops, at least in part, through experience, we don’t yet have much evidence when we’re first starting something new. We are beginners.
Perhaps the goal at that moment should not be to manufacture confidence. Perhaps the more important question is whether we can tolerate not having confidence yet and move forward anyway.
That was something I struggled with for a long time.
When being bad felt personal
I grew up in a trailer park with a single mom.
When I was nine years old, a girl in my class called me “trailer trash” in front of my classmates. I saw friends going home to their big houses with two parents, and I felt like I was lacking something essential.
Somehow, I felt like it was my fault. Like my circumstances existed because I was less than. That experience became one of the earliest stories I carried about who I was and what I needed to prove. So I became the queen of overachievement.
My mom jokes that she never even had to come home and tell me to do my homework. I simply did it. I got straight A’s. I stayed inside at recess to help teachers grade papers and clean the chalkboard.
I wanted to be liked and I wanted to prove my worth. That showed up not only in how hard I worked, but also in what I was willing to try. If I tried something and wasn’t immediately good at it, I quickly stepped away. Hello, lacrosse and ballet.
I ended up running track because I was naturally fast. Looking back, I probably could have become pretty good at lacrosse or soccer or ballet over time. I had the speed. I had the grace.
What I didn’t have was the skill set. Of course, developing a new skill takes time and practice. The problem was that I struggled to stay in that uncomfortable space long enough to actually develop it.
When your performance becomes proof of your value, being bad at something no longer simply means: I don’t know how to do this yet.
It begins to feel like: This proves I’m not good enough. That makes being a beginner a much higher-stakes experience.
When achievement feels like proof
Psychologists Jennifer Crocker and Connie Wolfe use the term contingencies of self-worth to describe the areas in which people stake their self-esteem.
In a later study of 1,418 college students, Crocker and her colleagues identified common domains of contingent self-worth, including academic competence, appearance, approval from others, competition, and family support.
I certainly didn’t have language like contingent self-worth as a child. But I recognize the experience.
When success gives us evidence that we matter, it makes sense that we would chase more of it. When failure feels like evidence that we don’t matter, it makes sense that we might gravitate toward the places where we already know we can succeed.
We can become incredibly accomplished that way. From the outside, we may even look exceptionally confident. But inside, our sense of ourselves can remain highly dependent on the next achievement, the next compliment, the next selection, the next piece of evidence telling us, See? You’re good enough.
Research on contingent self-worth has found that it can create particular difficulties when tasks become challenging and failure is possible, precisely because success and failure are carrying more than their obvious consequences. Our performance can become entangled with our self-esteem.
That can keep us from doing something incredibly important: staying long enough to be bad.
How self-worth changed me
This is where I see the difference most clearly in my life now.
When I first decided to pursue professional public speaking, I didn’t know how it would go. I participated in the Next Top Speaker tournament. I started stepping into bigger rooms and onto bigger stages. I shared vulnerable stories without knowing exactly how they would land.
I’ve also applied for a lot of things and been rejected, or simply ignored. Those moments can absolutely knock my confidence. When I was first starting out, they often did. But they didn’t shake my sense of worth. I knew I had a valuable message. I knew I could share a story in a way that resonated with other people.
So I kept going. My confidence grew through the reps I got because I kept going. Another stage, another story, another application, another opportunity to figure out what worked and what didn’t.
I didn’t need a successful outcome every time in order to keep going. A rejection could hurt. A story could land differently than I hoped. I could walk away from something knowing I wanted to do better next time. But none of those things had to become evidence that I didn’t deserve to be there.
My sense of worth gave me enough room to keep showing up while my confidence caught up.
Worthiness is something different
We easily confuse confidence and worthiness because both can create a feeling of strength. But to me, worthiness feels different. It’s more subtle. It provides a deep inner knowing. A soft strength.
My belief is that our worth is not earned. It exists underneath and alongside any performance, achievement or demand placed upon us. That doesn’t mean our sense of that worth never wobbles. Those are different things.
I can believe my worth is inherent while also acknowledging that I spent years learning to experience it as conditional.
We are inundated with messages suggesting that the prettier we are, the more we’ll be liked; the more A’s we get, the further we’ll advance; the better we perform, the more we’ll be recognized.
The adult versions may look like landing the account, getting the promotion, building the impressive career, being the parent we aspire to be, or maintaining our lives at whatever standard we’ve decided proves we have it together.
So, of course, we can know intellectually that we are worthy and still catch ourselves trying to earn it. Knowing your worth and living from it are two different things.
What happens when the thing proving your worth disappears?
This may be one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves.
What happens when we develop a skin condition and the appearance we were praised for changes? What happens when we enter a class where earning an A is no longer guaranteed? When we don’t get promoted? When the business struggles? When we are rejected? When we discover that we’re simply not very good at something?
If succeeding in that arena has been carrying the weight of our worth, struggling there can feel like losing part of who we are.
But if my value is not dependent on the outcome, failure gets to become something much less threatening. It becomes information, feedback, experience, maybe even an invitation to try again.
Research examining people whose self-worth was highly contingent on academics has found that a stronger learning or mastery orientation can buffer some of the blow to self-esteem following failure and is associated with greater persistence afterward.
I love that because it mirrors something I’ve begun to experience in my own life.
Accomplishment gets to become exploration
When accomplishment stops being evidence of worth, pursuing something becomes more fun. It simply becomes a mountain you can explore.
Let me see where this takes me. Let me find out what I’m capable of. I wonder what happens if I stay long enough to get better.
I can still care tremendously about the outcome. I can still want to win, get selected, build something successful, deliver an incredible speech, or accomplish a difficult goal.
Worthiness isn’t apathy. The difference is whether I’m saying: I want to accomplish this because it matters to me. Or: I need to accomplish this so I can feel like I matter.
Those can look almost identical from the outside. But inside, they create two very different experiences.
Maybe confidence isn’t the problem
For years, I thought the goal was to become the kind of person who could walk into every room feeling confident. I don’t view that as my goal anymore.
I understand that it’s okay to feel awkward. It’s okay to be out of your comfort zone and stand at the beginning of something having absolutely no evidence that you’ll be good at it. Confidence can come later. What I want underneath that is something sturdier.
I want to know that I bring value into the room even if I don’t have the biggest company, the longest list of accomplishments, or all the answers figured out. I want to know that I can fail at something without becoming a failure. I want enough security in my worth to remain a beginner long enough to stay in the room and learn.
So the next time you hear yourself thinking, I just need to be more confident, try asking a different question, "If this doesn’t go the way I want it to, will I still feel like enough?"
Because you may not need confidence before you begin. You may simply need to know that your worth will still be there if you fail.
Then you can take the first step and build your confidence along the way.
Read more from Crissy Fishbane
Crissy Fishbane, Keynote Speaker & Writer
Crissy Fishbane is a keynote speaker, writer, and educator exploring one central question: What actually helps us build a meaningful life? With a background in psychology and education, she writes about worthiness, courage, curiosity, belonging, and the ways we can live more intentionally in a world that constantly pulls our attention elsewhere. She is the co-founder of HER Health Collective and host of the award-winning podcast Mama Needs a Moment, where she has spent years in conversation with experts about psychology, relationships, health, identity, and what it means to live well. In 2026, she placed third out of more than 4,000 speakers in Next Top Speaker Season 7.
