"I'll do it when I feel ready"

You're going to apply for the senior role next year, when you feel more ready. You'll offer to speak at the conference once you're more confident on your feet. You'll show someone the drawings when they're better.

The belief is that confidence comes first and action follows. On this view confidence is a kind of entry ticket. Other people seem to have theirs already, and you're waiting for yours to arrive.

It sounds responsible, and in some cases it is. Nobody should rewire a house or fit a gas boiler before they're ready. But in those cases readiness is measured in hours of training and a test passed. Nobody asks the apprentice whether she feels ready. They look at her certificate.

Think about where the confidence you already have came from. Take driving, if you drive. In your first lesson you weren't confident. You were gripping the wheel while a stranger sat with his foot over a second brake. The ease you have now arrived somewhere in the first few hundred hours on the road. At no point did you feel like a driver first and then start driving. The same is true of your first week in any job, and of the first time you cooked for six people. In each case the feeling followed the doing, often by a long way.

The psychologist Albert Bandura spent much of his career on this. His term was self-efficacy, which means your belief that you can carry out a particular task. He identified four things that feed it. The first is having done the thing successfully yourself. The second is watching people like you do it. The third is being told you can. The fourth is how your body feels at the time. He argued that the first is much the strongest, and that being told you can is weak and fades quickly when it isn't backed by experience.

That explains a lot about why confidence advice fails. "Believe in yourself" is the third source, which is the weak one. A pep talk or a kind friend can lift you for an afternoon. By Monday it has worn off, because nothing has happened that your mind counts as evidence.

There's a large body of research linking self-efficacy with how well people perform at work. One review combined over a hundred studies and found a solid association. Some researchers have argued that much of that link runs from performance to belief, not the other way round. In other words, people come to believe they can do things largely because they've done them. For my purposes that's the point. Confidence is mostly a result.

So waiting until you feel ready means waiting for the result of something you aren't doing. The feeling is unlikely to arrive, because the strongest thing that produces it is the experience you're putting off. Next year you'll probably feel much as you do now, and the sensible-sounding delay will renew itself for another year.

The way out is to stop measuring readiness by feeling and measure it by something you can check. Take the senior role. What does it require? List the main things. Mark the ones you've already done, even in a smaller form. For each of the rest, ask whether you could learn it in the first few months, with help. That list will tell you whether you're ready enough to apply. How you feel about it won't. Bear in mind that nobody arrives in a job already able to do all of it. Part of every job is learned after you start, and the people who appoint you know that.

One objection is that this sounds like "fake it till you make it", and you don't want to be a fake. You don't have to be. Nothing here asks you to pretend you're sure. You can say "the form seems to be broken on mobile" with your heart thumping, and it's a perfectly honest sentence. You're acting with the doubt present. You aren't claiming it's absent. If anything, that's more honest than staying quiet and letting people think you had nothing to say.

The other objection is more practical. "If I try before I'm ready and it goes badly, I'll be worse off than before." There's something in that. Bandura's point was about successes, and an early disaster can set a person back. So choose the size of the step. Ask a question in a meeting of six before you give a talk to two hundred. Show the drawings to one friend before you enter the exhibition. Working up through steps you're likely to manage is simply how the skill gets built.

The step does have to be real, though. Something has to be at stake, even if it's small, or your mind won't count it. Practising your point in the car on the way home doesn't count, I'm afraid.

I'd also warn you about the first few times. They'll feel bad even when they go well. Your heart will pound the second time you speak up almost as much as the first. The feeling runs well behind the evidence. My guess, and it is a guess, is that a situation starts to feel different after something like ten goes, not two. If you judge by how you feel after the second, you'll decide it isn't working.

For now, pick one thing you've been putting off until you feel ready. Write down what ready would mean in terms you could check. Then work out the smallest real version of it that you could do this month. If a chance to do it comes up before you finish the book, take it. Otherwise chapter 12 will ask you to.