Estimated Reading Time: 10–12 minutes

What You Will Learn

• Why self-confidence is better understood as partly situation-specific rather than something you simply have or lack.

• How assertive behavior can create experiences of competence and personal agency.

• Why confidence can follow action instead of needing to come first.

• How self-silencing may weaken trust in your ability to handle difficult conversations.

• Why assertiveness is different from dominance, certainty, or never feeling anxious.

• Practical ways to strengthen both communication skills and interpersonal confidence.

• Why culture, power, personality, and context influence what assertiveness looks like.

Does Confidence Make You Assertive, or Does Assertiveness Build Confidence?

People often assume that confident people naturally speak up. They say no more easily, express opinions without hesitation, and appear comfortable asking for what they need. From the outside, confidence seems to come first and assertive behavior seems to follow. That assumption can leave anyone who feels nervous waiting for a psychological state they believe they must achieve before they are ready to communicate differently.

The relationship is more interesting than that. Confidence can certainly make assertive behavior easier, but behavior can also influence confidence. You may become more confident in difficult conversations because you have repeatedly experienced yourself stating a preference, asking a question, declining a request, or surviving disagreement. What begins as an uncomfortable behavior can gradually become evidence that you are capable of handling situations you previously avoided.

This does not mean every assertive interaction increases self-esteem or that one boundary transforms the way you see yourself. “Self-confidence” is a broad everyday term rather than one single psychological construct. It is often more useful to think in terms of self-efficacy, your belief that you can manage a particular task or situation. You can be highly confident professionally and hesitant in intimate relationships, socially confident but uncomfortable with authority, or generally self-assured while finding confrontation difficult. Assertiveness can build confidence most directly in the situations where you actually practice it.

Assertiveness Gives You Experiences of Capability

One reason assertiveness may strengthen confidence is that it provides mastery experiences. Psychologist Albert Bandura’s work on self-efficacy emphasized that beliefs about capability are shaped strongly by experiences of successfully performing relevant behaviors. Reading about communication can increase understanding, but actually asking for what you need gives you different information: you discover what happens when you do it.

Imagine someone who rarely disagrees in meetings because they fear sounding foolish. Their first attempt to express a different view may involve a racing heart and considerable hesitation. If they speak anyway and discover that they can explain their reasoning, tolerate questions, and remain present even if not everyone agrees, they have acquired evidence that the situation is manageable. Repeated experiences can gradually change the expectation from “I cannot handle this” toward “I may be uncomfortable, but I know how to participate.”

That distinction matters. Confidence is not always the belief that things will go well. Sometimes it is the belief that you can cope even when they do not.

Self-Silencing Can Undermine Interpersonal Confidence

The reverse pattern can also develop. When someone repeatedly avoids expressing preferences, disagreement, needs, or limits, they receive little opportunity to discover whether they could have handled those interactions successfully. Avoidance may reduce anxiety in the short term, but it also preserves uncertainty. The feared situation remains largely untested.

Over time, the person may begin relying more heavily on others to determine what is acceptable. They wait for reassurance before deciding, apologize before expressing a preference, or assume disagreement must mean they communicated badly. This can feel like a confidence problem, but part of the difficulty may be behavioral: there have been too few experiences of acting independently enough to develop confidence in that domain.

Research on assertiveness training supports the idea that these behaviors can change. A 2023 randomized controlled trial involving 210 adults found that an eight-week CBT-based assertiveness intervention produced large improvements in adaptive assertiveness compared with a wait-list group, with improvements maintained at one-year follow-up. Participants also showed improvements in social anxiety and well-being. The study does not prove that assertiveness automatically creates global self-confidence, but it demonstrates that assertive behavior itself is trainable and that changing it can coincide with meaningful psychological benefits.

Confidence Does Not Mean the Absence of Anxiety

A common mistake is to use emotional comfort as the test for confidence. If your voice shakes while saying no, you assume you were not confident. If you rehearse what you want to say, you believe you are not naturally assertive. If criticism still hurts, you conclude that your self-esteem needs more work before you can speak openly.

Assertiveness does not require emotional certainty. You can be nervous and assertive at the same time. Confidence often grows because you learn that uncomfortable feelings do not prevent effective action. The person who waits until anxiety disappears may practice far less than the person who learns to communicate while anxiety is still present.

This is particularly relevant to social anxiety. Assertiveness training has long been incorporated into cognitive-behavioral approaches partly because some interpersonal fears are maintained by avoidance and inhibited behavior. Practice provides opportunities to test predictions about rejection, embarrassment, or conflict. Sometimes negative reactions do occur, but even then the experience can build a different kind of confidence: “I can handle someone disagreeing with me.”

Assertiveness Is Not Dominance

Confidence can also be confused with forcefulness. Someone who speaks loudly, interrupts, refuses compromise, or expresses every opinion without hesitation may appear confident, but those behaviors are not necessarily assertive. Aggressive communication prioritizes one person’s position while disregarding another person’s rights, dignity, or opportunity to participate. Assertiveness represents your position without requiring the other person to surrender theirs.

The most confident response is therefore not always the strongest-sounding one. It may be:

“I disagree with that approach, and I’d like to explain why.”

“I understand why you prefer that option. I still prefer this one.”

“I’m not available to take that on.”

“I need more information before I decide.”

Even “I was wrong about that” can be assertive. Confidence includes enough security to revise your position when new information warrants it.

Clear Communication Can Strengthen Self-Trust

Another connection between assertiveness and confidence involves self-trust. When your outward behavior repeatedly contradicts your internal position, you may begin to feel disconnected from your own decisions. You agree while resenting the agreement, say everything is fine when it is not, or allow someone else to make a choice because expressing your preference feels too difficult. The issue is not that compromise is unhealthy. The problem is losing the sense that you could have represented yourself if you had wanted to.

Assertiveness restores choice. Sometimes you will still accommodate another person, but the accommodation becomes deliberate rather than automatic. You might say, “I would rather stay home tonight, but I know this event matters to you, so I’m choosing to come.” That is different from silently agreeing and later telling yourself you had no choice.

Confidence can grow from this consistency between intention and behavior. Not because you always get what you want, but because you experience yourself as someone who participates in your own decisions.

Other People’s Reactions Are Not a Reliable Confidence Score

One obstacle to assertiveness is measuring the quality of your communication entirely through other people’s responses. If they approve, you feel confident. If they look disappointed, you assume you were too demanding. If someone disagrees, your confidence disappears.

Feedback matters, and assertiveness does not mean becoming indifferent to how you affect others. But reactions need interpretation. Someone may dislike a boundary because it inconveniences them, not because the boundary was communicated badly. A supervisor may reject your proposal for legitimate business reasons without that rejection meaning you should not have spoken. A friend may tell you that your tone was hurtful, and that feedback may reveal something worth repairing.

The more useful confidence question is therefore not “Did everyone respond positively?” It is “Was I able to communicate my position clearly, respectfully, and appropriately for the situation?” Confidence becomes more stable when it is based partly on your behavior rather than entirely on external approval.

Build Confidence Through Small Assertive Actions

Because confidence develops through experience, low-stakes situations are useful training grounds. State a restaurant preference instead of automatically saying “anything is fine.” Ask someone to repeat something you did not understand. Tell a colleague when you need more time. Return an incorrect order politely. Decline an invitation when you genuinely do not want to attend.

The behavior should be small enough to attempt but meaningful enough that you notice the difference. Afterwards, evaluate the experience realistically. Did the feared consequence occur? If it did, could you handle it? Did your anxiety decrease once the conversation began? Did you discover that another person could be disappointed without the relationship collapsing?

Gradual practice is often more useful than suddenly trying to become “a confident person.” Specific behaviors give you something concrete to repeat.

Replace Over-Apologizing With Clear Ownership

Apologies are valuable when you have caused harm, made a mistake, or violated an agreement. They become less useful when they are used automatically to soften ordinary needs and preferences.

Compare:

“I’m so sorry, but would it maybe be possible to move the meeting?”

with:

“Could we move the meeting to Thursday? I have a scheduling conflict on Wednesday.”

The second version is not inherently more confident because it contains fewer words. It is clearer because the apology is unnecessary. Learning where you genuinely owe repair and where you simply need to communicate can reduce the habit of treating your existence as an inconvenience.

Boundaries Build Confidence When You Can Follow Them

Boundary-setting can also strengthen interpersonal confidence, but only when the boundary is realistic enough to maintain. Declaring a dramatic limit and abandoning it immediately may leave you feeling less capable. A smaller, clearer boundary that you can actually follow is often more useful.

Instead of “Nobody is ever allowed to contact me after work again,” you might decide:

“I stop checking routine work messages after 7 PM and respond the following morning.”

Following through teaches you something important about your own reliability. You are not simply communicating a rule to others; you are practicing keeping an agreement with yourself.

Assertiveness Does Not Look the Same Everywhere

Context remains essential. Communication norms vary across cultures, families, genders, workplaces, and relationships. A style considered appropriately confident in one environment may be experienced as unusually blunt in another. Hierarchy also matters. Challenging a friend’s restaurant choice and disagreeing publicly with a powerful supervisor are not psychologically or practically equivalent situations.

The goal is therefore not maximal directness. Assertiveness means representing your position in a way that fits the context while preserving reasonable self-respect and respect for others. Sometimes confidence looks like speaking directly. Sometimes it means asking a careful question, choosing a private setting, documenting a concern, or waiting until you have more support.

In coercive or unsafe circumstances, direct confrontation may not be the wisest expression of confidence at all. Strategic communication and self-protection can also be forms of agency.

The Confidence Cycle Works in Both Directions

Assertiveness and confidence can reinforce each other, but not through a perfect upward spiral. Greater confidence can make it easier to speak. Speaking provides experience. Experience can increase confidence. Increased confidence can make the next attempt easier.

There will also be setbacks. A conversation may go badly. You may say something too harshly, freeze when you planned to speak, or set a boundary and then reconsider it. Those experiences do not erase previous progress. They provide information for the next attempt.

The aim is not to become someone who never doubts themselves. It is to become someone who knows that doubt does not always require silence.

Conclusion: Confidence Often Follows the Voice You Practice

The relationship between assertive communication and self-confidence is real, but it is more specific and behavioral than the popular idea that speaking up automatically raises self-esteem. Confidence develops partly from experiences of capability. When you practice expressing a preference, asking for clarification, communicating a limit, tolerating disagreement, and recovering from imperfect conversations, you accumulate evidence about what you can handle.

Assertiveness also gives confidence somewhere concrete to operate. Rather than trying to “believe in yourself” in the abstract, you learn to trust yourself in particular situations. You discover that nervousness does not prevent you from speaking, that disagreement does not always mean rejection, and that another person’s disappointment does not automatically mean you acted wrongly.

Research on assertiveness training supports the idea that these communication behaviors are learnable and can improve substantially with structured practice. Broader confidence may grow alongside them, but the most reliable starting point is behavior.

You do not always need confidence before you speak up. Sometimes speaking up, carefully and repeatedly, is one of the ways confidence is built.

References

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. W. H. Freeman.

Bem, D. J. (1972). Self-perception theory. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 6, 1–62.

Speed, B. C., Goldstein, B. L., & Goldfried, M. R. (2018). Assertiveness training: A forgotten evidence-based treatment. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 25(1), e12216.

Hagberg, T., Manhem, P., Oscarsson, M., Michel, F., Andersson, G., & Carlbring, P. (2023). Efficacy of transdiagnostic cognitive-behavioral therapy for assertiveness: A randomized controlled trial. Internet Interventions, 32, 100629.

Alberti, R. E., & Emmons, M. L. (2017). Your Perfect Right: Assertiveness and Equality in Your Life and Relationships. Impact Publishers.