How to Build Creative Confidence

Building "Yes, I can" for creativity

Source: Brett Jordan/Unsplash

The start of the new year is traditionally a time of resolutions. And resolutions set goals. Some tackle self-improvement by developing new skills, and others set goals to achieve, but what they have in common is that they are challenging.

Chances are that many of the items on our resolution lists require creativity—the capacity to imagine a different reality, not quite knowing how to make it happen but deciding to pursue it anyway. The fuel for creativity, regardless of what our specific goals are, is creative confidence. The good news is that psychological science shows that creative confidence can be built and provides four groups of strategies to develop it.

Creative confidence, or creative self-efficacy, is a belief that we can successfully complete tasks in the creative process, from coming up with original and valuable ideas, to judging which are the best and most feasible ones, to taking action to develop them into performances or products. Research that jointly analyzed results from 41 studies with more than 17,000 participants shows that those who have greater creative confidence tend to do better on tests of creative thinking and be more creative in what they do, whether students in elementary school science class or professionals at work who are evaluated by their supervisors.

Intuitively, we know that confidence helps us achieve goals. But it is less intuitively obvious that we can develop creative confidence. The starting point is a growth mindset about creativity. Scientists have found that when people have such a mindset—believing that creative potential can be developed through experience and learning—they are also more likely to have creative confidence. In turn, the confidence enables people to come up with more original and higher quality solutions to creative problems.

Four kinds of strategies help build creative confidence:

Learning by doing

We can build creative confidence by observing our own behavior and reflecting on past successes. This is the strategy of If I could do that, I should be able to do this, too.

In one study, Maciej Karowski and his colleagues asked a large group of people about their creative achievements in different domains and about their creative confidence. Then, scientists administered two standard creative thinking tasks asking people to come up with ideas for alternate uses for common everyday objects. Right before starting the tasks, people indicated how much they believed they could generate creative ideas for the specific questions.

Results showed that people who had more creative achievements—those who had exhibited, performed, or published their work, or been recognized for their accomplishments—were more likely to have high creative confidence, both in their everyday lives and for the specific tasks in the study. In turn, more creative confidence before the task predicted creative performance and strengthened creative confidence after the task. In other words, people looked back at their prior creative achievements and reasoned that they must be able to rise to the occasion at present if they were able to do so in the past.

Learning by observing others

Another way to build creative confidence is by observing others who we consider role models, through a process psychologists call vicarious learning. This is the If they can do it, so can I strategy.

Vicarious learning is the psychological mechanism behind inspirational stories of people seeing themselves represented in popular culture and coming to imagine new possibilities. When they saw Nichelle Nichols as Lt. Uhura on Star Trek, Whoppi Goldberg gained confidence to imagine herself on screen and Mae Jemison gained confidence to imagine herself as an astronaut.

Similarly, scientists have found that seeing our teammates act in creative ways at work influences our own creative confidence. The strategy of vicarious learning works when we perceive other people as similar to ourselves and identify with them. When watching Star Trek, the identification was on an aspect of social identity, and in the example of teammates, it was about role-relevant skills.

Learning through encouragement from others

Creative confidence can grow through encouragement from others. Implicitly, we reason that If they think I can do it, perhaps I can.

Parents, teachers, mentors, and leaders all have expectations of us. When they have expectations for creativity, we tend to rise to the occasion and both develop creative confidence and show more creativity in what we do.

Moreover, we are very sensitive to changes in expectations. When researchers recorded supervisors’ expectations about creativity from their employees and employee creative confidence at one time and then again six months later, they discovered that increases in supervisors’ expectations predicted growth in employee creative confidence. The increase in confidence also translated into more creative accomplishment at work. Trusting others’ opinion of our capacities ends up boosting our capacities.

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Learning through emotional feedback

Creative confidence is boosted when we pay attention to what our feelings are telling us. Reflecting on satisfaction after progress builds confidence in the If I am happy with what I did, I must have creative ability manner.

Professors Rogelio Puente-Diaz and Judith Cavazos-Arroyo studied feelings about performance throughout the creative process. They found that creative confidence at the end of the creative task was predicted by feelings of satisfaction and ease of working on it at different times during the process. The more we notice our progress, the more confident we get.

Creative confidence is the engine of creativity. But just as in the story of The Little Engine that Could, the Yes, I can conviction does not have to be a certainty. The Little Engine did not chug over the mountain with cheerful self-assurance. Rather, it kept repeating, “I think I can” and, after succeeding, concluding with, “I thought I could”. Those statements are ones of trust sufficient to start the Engine, get it going, and gain momentum.

When we get going, we can build creative confidence by reflecting on our own progress, identifying with others who become role models, getting encouragement along the way, and noticing positive feelings of small successes. Then, the creative confidence we build becomes a resource for the future.