‘What If I Mess Up?’

Your teacher calls on you, and your heart starts pounding. Moments before a group presentation, your mouth goes dry. Backstage at a piano recital, your stomach twists into knots. Sitting down for a job interview, you notice sweat gathering under your arms and feel certain the interviewer can see growing wet patches…

These reactions are the body’s natural responses to stress. You can call it nerves, jitters—whatever term you use—it is part of what scientists call fight-or-flight mode.

In such situations, your mind usually races as much as your heart: What if I mess up? What if people laugh? What if I’m not good enough?

You may feel you lack confidence or even that you have none at all. What can make this even harder is that some people seem to have it all put together. They give a speech, sing a solo or play on the varsity team, and just make it happen. They appear to be perfectly confident.

Why do we feel nervous, hesitant or unsure when entering into situations where all eyes are on us?

Dr. Theresa Callard-Moore called this feeling performance anxiety in a Cleveland Clinic article. She explained: “Think about any time you’re trying to do something well. You want to be socially appropriate. You want to make a connection with someone. You want to excel at a task. You want to be safe. These are all good things. But performance anxiety amps up the volume on all that and can be paralyzing.”

Performance anxiety shows up in many parts of our lives—not just on the stage. It can involve completing a project at work, taking a test at school, or even parallel parking. This feeling can also show up in interactions such as making small talk, asking a question or introducing yourself.

How do you cut through performance anxiety? How do you stop your mind from telling you that you are not good enough?

The Bible gives us the right starting point. The apostle Paul wrote, “For God has not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind” (II Tim. 1:7). God does not want fear to control your mind and is ready to give you all the help you need.

God wants you to have proper self-confidence, which is a realistic belief in your abilities and skills.

But this type of confidence is not a feeling you wait for. It is a skillset you can build. It includes spiritual habits—such as prayer and trust in God—as well as practical, time-tested habits used by professional athletes, musicians and speakers.

Name the Fear

Think of a specific area of your life where you really feel unsure of yourself. You dread doing it. You would rather scrub 100 toilets with a toothbrush than do whatever this thing is.

Now ask: Why do you not want to do that thing? A simple “I’m not confident” is not going to cut it.

Whenever we are unsure of ourselves, the actual fear is usually something more specific:

• I’m afraid of failing.
• I’m afraid of looking stupid.
• I’m afraid of being judged.
• I’m afraid I will disappoint someone.
• I’m afraid I will not be able to handle the outcome.

Learning to name specific fears when you lack confidence is a great first step to taming them.

Science backs this up. A study by researchers at UCLA used MRI machines to scan participants’ brains. They found that specifically naming a fear reduced activity in the amygdala—the part of the brain involved in processing fear and emotional reactions. Naming fears can help the brain respond more calmly.

Those are some of the mental benefits, but there are also practical reasons to name your fears.

Making your concern specific can help it become actionable and help you build a plan to handle it. Instead of being an amorphous, lurking fear, you can take your specific issue and address it head-on.

Consider talking to your parents and close friends about your concerns. They can help you specifically define them and come up with ways to address them.

The key is to keep it specific. If you just say, “I’m worried” or “I’m scared,” you may only hear, “You’ve got this.” But saying, “I failed at this before, and I’m worried I will fail again,” can lead to a much more useful conversation and plan of action.

That level of specificity is important in prayer too. God does not want anyone to be wracked with fear. In fact, Philippians 4:6 tells us, “Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God” (Revised Standard Version).

Bring your specific anxieties to God, and He will help calm you and work through whatever issue you have.

There is nothing wrong with having a little worry and fear. Even King David did, even though he was athletic, a skilled harpist and accomplished songwriter (I Sam. 16:18; II Sam. 22:1).

Despite all that, he wrote this: “What time I am afraid, I will trust in You” (Psa. 56:3).

Feeling afraid does not mean you cannot do it. But that fear does need to be addressed.

Answer Fear with Truth

One way to handle your anxieties is to answer them with truth.

Fear tells a skewed story about us: “You always mess up.” “Everyone else is better.” “If this goes badly, it proves something about you.”

A surefire way to cut through these false narratives is to tell the truth.

When speaking to His disciples, Jesus told them, “And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32).

God’s truth sets us free from wrong ways of living and thinking. Similarly, telling the truth about ourselves can set us free as well.

After one failure, fear may tell you, “You will never be good at this.” Yet the truth is that one attempt does not define your future. A more truthful thought is, “I’m not good at this yet.” Or, “I need more experience.” Truthful lines of thinking free you to learn from your mistakes and try again instead of giving up.

When answering negative thoughts with truth, avoid empty hype. Recall that self-confidence is the realistic belief in your abilities. Being overconfident in your abilities can also set you up for failure.

Answering negative thoughts with truth is something that God helped Jeremiah with when he was first being called as a young man. He could have been as young as 17 at the time.

Notice what Jeremiah said when God told him he was going to be a prophet and speak to the nation of Israel: “Ah, Lord God! Behold, I cannot speak: for I am a child” (1:6).

Jeremiah was worried. He saw his youth and inexperience as impossible roadblocks to being used by God.

But God stopped that negative thinking right in its tracks: “Say not, I am a child…” (vs. 7). In the following verses, God assured Jeremiah that He would be with him every step of the way and give him the words to speak.

Knowing God has your back is a truth you can always rely on when fear comes your way. Hebrews 13:6 says, “The Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid; what can man do to me?” (RSV).

Always remember that God is your helper. This does not mean every challenge will be easy. But knowing God is on your side can help you stop worrying so much about what others may think, stop assuming the worst about yourself, and start facing your fears head-on.

Take Small, Brave Steps

We tend to believe we need to wait until we feel ready before trying something hard. But true self-confidence comes after action, not before it.

To get better at anything, you need to practice.

A Harvard Business Review article looked at how people reach expertise in their fields, whether gold-medal gymnasts, chess grandmasters or theoretical physicists. They found this: “Consistently and overwhelmingly, the evidence showed that experts are always made, not born.”

The same is true for confidence. It is made. You are not automatically born with it.

For people who are experts, the article concluded, the most important factor they had in common was deliberate practice. That means systematically focusing on things that are beyond your current skill level and stepping out of your comfort zone.

The article used golf as an example: Beginners improve quickly as they learn the basics and avoid obvious mistakes. But after a while, simply playing more rounds does not guarantee progress. To keep improving, they must practice deliberately—working on specific weaknesses instead of just repeating what they are already good at.

Whatever brings you performance anxiety, tackle it with deliberate practice. Small steps out of your comfort zone will help you shrink your fear over time.

If public speaking scares you, practice first in front of your cat. Then graduate to your parents or siblings and tell them a well-structured story. Then you can try it with your friends.

Make each small step just outside of what you feel comfortable with. If talking to others at Sabbath services feels awkward, determine to ask one simple question this weekend. If tryouts for the school musical feel intimidating, practice the hardest parts of your audition piece until it feels like second nature. If helping with a bigger duty in your congregation feels overwhelming, ask your minister how to get involved with one small part.

You do not have to conquer all your fears at once. Just take one brave step. Then another. Then another.

Jesus Christ said, “He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much” (Luke 16:10).

God looks at how we handle small things—both physical and spiritual—to determine how well we can handle larger things. We can apply that to ourselves too. If we see that we can handle small tests of our confidence, we can be more assured we can handle larger ones as well.

Just as it takes time to become an expert in something, it takes time to build confidence. Stick with it, and you will see results.

Build Evidence

Over time, you will see yourself becoming more confident during your practice time and trial runs. Then, when the performance or game day arrives, you can lean on those skills.

Make sure to pay attention to where you are growing. It helps to ask others. Often, we are hardest on ourselves, and we are always looking ahead to the next thing we want to learn or improve on.

The evidence you see can apply across activities as well. Attacking one hard problem can build the confidence skills you need to tackle another one.

While learning the piano does not automatically make you great at basketball, it does teach you overlapping skills: starting awkwardly, practicing when frustrated, accepting correction, repeating hard parts, recovering from mistakes and improving. Those skills can help with sports, schoolwork, a job, camp responsibilities and spiritual growth.

Self-confidence is not the belief that you are already good. It is the belief that you know how to get better—and that you can get better. Learning how to tackle one challenge prepares you to tackle the next.

Handle the Outcome

A big area that erodes our self-confidence is failure. When things do not go well, it is easy to throw a pity party, give up and decide to never try again.

An essential skill for building confidence is learning how to handle your failures.

Confident people have learned to accept that everything will not go perfectly. They show up, do their best, learn from what happens and then keep going.

After a larger event that tests your confidence, it helps to examine things systematically and logically rather than letting emotion take over. One way to approach this is to ask four questions:

1. What did I expect to happen?
2. What actually happened?
3. Was there a difference between what I expected and what actually happened? Why?
4. What can I change next time?

Taking a systematic approach after an event can help keep you from spiraling into negativity. Naturally, you will want to focus on questions 3 and 4. But a better approach is to spend most of your time on question 2.

Taking stock of exactly what happened will help you see all the good. It is easy to focus on where you failed and what you can do better next time—which is important for growth—but being realistic is essential.

Again, make sure to get outside perspectives. Often we will be hardest on ourselves. We know all the mistakes we made or all the things we intended to do but did not achieve. Knowing how it came across to others can help dispel a lot of that anxiety.

When you do focus on the lessons you learned and what you can change for next time, those can go back into your deliberate practice. You can hone your skills for the future.

Learning to handle outcomes will help you keep a positive outlook. A bad performance, awkward conversation, missed shot, failed tryout or disappointing grade is not the final verdict on who you are as a person.

Proverbs 24:16 comes into play here: “For a just man falls seven times, and rises up again.”

Notice that the person in this verse is called just. Even though this man falls repeatedly, he gets back up and continues to live the right way. God defines him by his continued effort to do what is right, not by his failures.

Your failures do not define you either.

Don’t Let Fear Get the Final Word

The goal in building self-confidence is not to feel fearless. It is to stop letting fear decide what you will attempt.

Work on building your confidence skillset: Begin naming your fears. Answer them with truth. Take small, brave steps. Remember that confidence transfers. And learn from the outcomes.

You are still going to get butterflies in your stomach, feel your mind racing and have sweaty palms from time to time. Even when you do not feel ready, draw on your self-confidence skills and dive into those uncomfortable situations.

Most important, remember God is your helper. Let’s revisit Philippians 4: “Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God” (vs. 6, RSV).

If you go to God regularly in prayer with your specific anxieties, worries and doubts, He will help you. When you do, keep yourself positive. Notice the need to include thanksgiving when you talk to God. Keeping a grateful mindset will help cut through negativity.

The result of such prayers will be renewed confidence: “And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (vs. 7, RSV).

As you tackle the hard things in your life—things that make you swallow hard—stay positive.

Verse 8 states: “Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (RSV).

Take stock of where you are on your confidence journey. We are all in different places, and that is OK. Keep thinking good, truthful things about yourself. Trust in the skills you build and in God to help you through everything that comes your way.

Do something small that is just outside of your comfort zone today—even if you do not feel ready. Scratch that: especially if you do not feel ready!