To Build Confidence, Focus on Skills Over Strength

In the gym, there’s nothing like the thrill of hitting a new personal record (PR). When you can lift a weight that you’ve never lifted before, it feels exhilarating. You feel strong and accomplished. Confident.

Most of the time.

One thing I’ve discovered in my lifting journey is that hitting a new PR doesn’t deliver on its promise of joy and confidence when it’s not rooted in the fundamentals of skills and technique.

Confidence comes from being able to do something consistently and repeatedly, even under pressure. The only way to achieve a consistent result is to practice good techniques and master skills.

I’d rather struggle for weeks or months to hit my next PR, knowing that I’m practicing in good form, than hit a PR in bad form.

Practicing the skill will eventually translate into improved strength that is sustainable. It’s not just that bad form can wreck your body — which is reason enough to avoid bad form.

It’s also that hitting a PR in bad form introduces doubt:

What were the conditions under which I hit that lift?
Can I replicate those conditions? Will I be able to do this again under different conditions?

When you have good techniques, you learn to trust your techniques.

You become confident in the techniques and skills that help you get the result.

This is especially important when you’re living in a human body that changes all the time. Strength isn’t the same every day. But skills and techniques, if properly learned, coached, and trained, improve over time.

Beyond the Gym

This principle applies beyond the gym. If you rely on all-nighters and marathon sprints to complete projects, or if you turn over all your thinking and writing to AI, you’re doing the work equivalent of hitting a PR in bad form.

What happens when you can no longer sustain the all-nighter pace, or the AI crashes?

Without proper systems, techniques, and skills, you won’t build confidence that you can do the work necessary to get the result.

If you want to build true capacity and confidence in any arena, skills, systems, and techniques are more important than pure strength.

Cheating your way to a result will never create confidence that you can replicate that result.