How Mindfulness Builds Confidence

Cultivating confidence isn’t always what comes to mind when people think of mindfulness, nor the reason why they decide to practice meditation or study Buddhism. We often start out looking to reduce stress or just generally be more grateful and present for all the little moments of daily life. But in talking to people over the years, I’ve found that just below an initial set of attractions to Buddhist practice lurk questions of self-worth. People want to work with their insecurities. They want to learn how to trust the choices they make and trust that they’ll be capable of navigating the unknown.

Confidence is defined in the dictionary as “firm trust.” Self-confidence, then, is firm trust in yourself. On the outer level, this might mean trusting in your specific abilities—like public speaking or coloring precisely within the lines. But inwardly, confidence means trusting in your ability to navigate your own mind. It is exceedingly rare to meet a person who genuinely trusts their own mind. Getting to know—and then trust—your own mind is the core of mindfulness practice. 

Self-confidence is a tender and messy topic to discuss openly. Sure, alpha males swagger and bluster their way through, proclaiming confidence (“I got this, bruh!”), but for most of us, even approaching the subject makes our voices get a little quieter, as if we’re asking an imaginary friend if we have permission to speak freely. This is even true for people who’ve been able to thrust themselves onto public platforms—after all, they’re now dealing with the vulnerabilities that come from putting themselves out there. Merely addressing the topic of confidence from a spiritual perspective feels like walking a tightrope, a narrow path with uncomfortable associations on both sides.

On one side of the tightrope, discussing confidence involves admitting you feel insecure, that you don’t think very highly of yourself, that sometimes you feel neither powerful nor capable. It takes tremendous openness to admit your vulnerability, to acknowledge that you might be shrouded by impostor syndrome or self-hatred. On the other side, talking about confidence brings up a fear of taking up too much space—a fear that if you project too much strength or promote yourself too strongly, you’ll be perceived as arrogant, greedy, or self-absorbed. This concern is amplified in some spiritual circles by the belief that a true spiritual path should signal the death of the ego, leading you to transcend human needs, especially the need for validation or recognition. According to this view, if you aren’t using your spiritual path to try to disappear completely, then you’re doing it wrong.

This tightrope between arrogance and self-diminishment has felt very real throughout my whole life. Buddhist teachings have helped me turn the tightrope into a cushion—a wobbly cushion, but a seat nonetheless—from which I can navigate life with more presence and compassion.

Have you been by a car wash or car dealership and seen those inflatable people (often called tube men) who come to life when the wind picks up and wave at all passersby like everything in the universe is amazing, only to droop in despair when the animating breeze leaves them? One moment the tube man is on top of the world, and the next he looks like he thinks he’s the worst piece of shit who ever existed. If we’re going to have a real conversation about confidence, we have to admit we each have one of these tube people inside us. We’re sensitive to the tiniest signals of positive or negative feedback from the world. Someone cute smiles at you, and everything is golden. Then you get a text message containing one offhand criticism, and every drop of sunshine leaves the world. The winds are constantly blowing, and they prop us up with superficial perceptions of self-worth, only to knock us down into gloom when one contradictory experience rips through. If you’ve been around the block a few times, you know that no matter what you do, no matter how you try to protect yourself, the next contrary experience is always coming.

In Buddhism, these forces that both inflate and deflate our self-regard are sometimes called the eight worldly winds, because they can blow us off balance. They can also be thought of as eight traps of hope and fear, because we’re trapped in constantly chasing after them or bracing against them. The historical Buddha categorized the eight worldly winds into four couplets, in which the first of each pair represents our elation (what we reach for) and the second describes our deflation (what we try to avoid). These are the four pairs of worldly winds:

This framework is both ancient and timeless, because even as culture evolves and technology accelerates, not much has changed in the terrain of the human heart. The eight worldly winds could simply be called life itself. Sometimes we get the result we’ve been striving for, arriving at an outcome that lets us taste the fruits of our labor, a moment of perceived closure and satisfaction. At other times, we experience failure or loss, where our efforts are in vain, our project unfulfilled, and our sense of self wounded or demolished completely. 

In Buddhism, the skill to recognize and face these forces goes by the name upekkha. This term is often confusingly translated as “equanimity.” Equanimity is almost always a head-scratcher for students. In English, it has the connotation of nondisturbance, inertia, or stillness. But if you meditate for more than five seconds, you come to the realization that there is no stillness, either internally or externally. Relative stillness certainly exists: Life in the country may be calmer than life in the city, but absolute stillness does not exist in our world. Even skyscrapers are built to sway in the wind. If you’re paying attention when any of the eight winds start to blow, you’re going to feel them, and they’re going to push you in a certain direction.

Equanimity isn’t about pretending that things don’t affect you. That pretense is called avoidance, a trick that works only for zombies and AI chatbots. On the contrary, equanimity is about realizing that everything affects you. We’re all much more sensitive to our lived experience than we might like to believe. A better English translation for upekkha might be “resilience.” Upekkha is the practice of holding your seat and responding mindfully to the moment, rather than reacting habitually to it. Confidence is the ability to be resilient when the winds blow.

In the traditions I’ve studied, “Take your seat” is used as a shorthand instruction for arranging one’s meditative posture. On the surface level, it describes the physical entry into contemplative practice. We find a long spine and an open heart, assume a confident but receptive demeanor, and balance alertness with physical relaxation. The posture was intuitively designed to balance the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems and quell our “fight, flight, or freeze” response long enough to help us grow more curious and insightful about our internal experience. The posture—upright but not uptight, as my colleague and friend Maho Kawachi likes to say—is designed to help us find the physical alignment that lets us experience our mental events in a state of (relatively) nonjudgmental awareness.

“Take your seat” also has a deeper meaning that extends far beyond meditation practice. It’s an empowering instruction for how to show up on this earth. “Take your seat” grants us permission to take up space with confidence—not arrogance. It’s about having a sense of our own worth and owning our capabilities without self-diminishment. Some of us have been trained to gobble up too many seats, while many of us have been taught that we’re not worthy of even being alive. “Taking your seat” is a metaphor for claiming power that has influenced great activists in recent generations. The United States’ first Black congresswoman, Shirley Chisholm, said, “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.”

“Taking your seat,” or true presence, happens when you accept the disappointment of not being able to escape your humanity. The thudding return to earth—coming back to yourself exactly as you are—happens not just once, but repeatedly. This disappointment is exactly what Buddhist meditation compels us to embrace and, eventually, transform into happiness, to use an extremely controversial word. Once you accept your nontranscendence, the feeling of being stuck with your flawed humanity turns into a deep sense of relief. You can give up trying to either disappear or become someone else. You become more able to inhabit both the joys and the frustrations of being a citizen of this planet at this time of chaos. The failure to transcend everyday experience is not the malfunctioning of practice; it’s the start of the journey.

There’s a further metaphor related to the meditation seat. This relates to what Pema Chödrön calls “learning to stay with” your difficult experiences. At a difficult moment during mindfulness practice, you’re instructed to stay nonreactively present with the felt experience. This is the hardest part of any meditation session, and it mirrors the hardest moments in life. It’s the moment you want to distract yourself, flee, flail, or give up and end the session early. The ability to stay present with a difficult moment or uncomfortable emotion is called “holding your seat.” When life gets hard, it’s easy to do the opposite, to lose your seat (or lose your shit, as some like to say). In meditation, the force that knocks you off your seat could be caused by an itchy nose or an overwhelming memory. In life, the disruption can be caused by just about anything, including a text from someone you’re crushing on or the threat of losing your job when you’re deep in debt. Either way, to hold your seat means to remain grounded and present when your mind or your life knocks you around. To remain open and available when difficulty arises is to make friends with—and eventually transform—your insecurity and fragility.

Why does the practice of mindfulness help us work with the worldly winds? Superficially, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that if we meditate, we will become impervious to pleasure and pain; we’ll be unaffected by all the different ways our minds and nervous systems gauge what other people think of us; and we’ll definitely never waste a thought on how many likes our last post got. However, the practice of confidence—holding your seat—has nothing to do with becoming invulnerable. It’s actually the opposite. If mindfulness is the practice of tending to our experience directly, then when we pay attention, it turns out we become more, not less, sensitive to the events of life. This growing sensitivity leads to familiarity with life’s ups and downs, and we realize that the eight worldly winds get right to the heart of what it means to be human, touched by pleasure and pain, and caring what other people think about our work. This awareness—this insight into the human condition—is what allows us to hold our seats.

Neuroscientists, particularly Dr. Richie Davidson and his team at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, have studied the effects of long-term mindfulness practice on the pain receptors in the brain, using both novice meditators and master practitioners such as Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. What they found, generally, was that a lifetime of mindfulness practice helped experienced practitioners manage painful sensations. However, the details of the findings were surprising. Highly experienced practitioners demonstrated far less bracing against anticipatory pain than the control group, and they dwelled on the pain much less once the sensation ended. But, perhaps very surprisingly, during the painful experience, the pain receptors of the highly experienced meditators spiked higher than people who had never practiced mindfulness before. While it was happening, the experienced meditators felt the pain more.

It stands to reason that what is true for physical pain is also true for psychological/social pain—criticism, insignificance, failure, and loss. The more we learn to hold our seat, the more acutely we feel what happens to us. It turns out, when I’m paying attention, being criticized simply feels painful. The more I practice attending to this sensation, the more I normalize and humanize the experience of “ouch” that criticism delivers, and consequently, the more comfortable I feel in situations where praise or criticism might come. To practice mindfulness means to commit to attending to your direct experience, and to practice confidence means that you aren’t afraid of the worldly winds. You trust yourself to deal with whatever blows your way, so you’re more willing to take chances.

As much as success feels good, criticism and failure hurt, and there’s nothing we can do to avoid the direct experience of that pain or pleasure. Slowly, over time, I’ve learned to stop bracing against a plethora of hypothetical criticisms and just be present with the momentary pains of the critiques I actually receive, while simultaneously realizing that every other human feels their own version of the same pain I’m feeling when they put their work in front of others to behold. It’s not magic that allows us to practice confidence. It’s mindfulness.

You are here. This moment—whether it’s pleasant or painful, whether you’re feeling important or insignificant—is what’s happening. You are of this earth. You belong here. You get a spot. Claim it. Take your seat. And then prepare to feel.

Mindfulness Meditation for Cultivating Confidence

Knowing yourself is the foundation for true self-assurance. What follows are step-by-step instructions for getting to know your own mind.

1. Take Your Seat 

As you find a long but relaxed spine, see yourself as claiming a spot on the earth, and know that this practice is not retreat from the details of life but a way to prepare to meet life head on, with an open heart. Leave your eyes open, but gently gaze downward six to eight feet in front of you to signify staying present in the world during this meditation.

2. Check In

You might take a moment to notice if any of the eight winds has been strong in your life recently. Notice, without judgment, your current state of mind. 

3. Mindfulness of Body 

Guide your attention to the body and breath. Feel how your breath anchors you to your body, and to meeting life as it is. When you notice you’ve lost track of your body, you can gently note, “thinking.” 

4. Mindfulness of the Worldly Winds

If you’d like, you can note “hope” or “fear” when a thought related to one of the eight winds arises. Without extra analysis, you can also name the specific wind (i.e., praise or insignificance) and then return your attention to the breath. The point isn’t to conquer any of the winds. It’s to see that you can hold your seat when hope and fear blow through your mind, without needing to react immediately to them.

5. Gratitude

When you feel finished with your meditation, you can offer yourself a bow or other gesture of gratitude for your willingness to practice holding your seat in this way.