I watched an incredible video on YouTube this week about confidence. As a maker, confidence ebbs and flows, hour to hour, week to week, month to month, and it affects what we are able to put out into the world. It made me think of confidence like a reserve that you build as you achieve tasks, large and small. Set backs tap your confidence reserve, and it builds back up over time as you make new achievements, or even revisit old ones.

What happens when your reserve is tapped out? For me, that means doing very little. Am I sulking, full of self pity, a failure? It has certainly felt like it before. Sometimes the reserve doesn't fill fast enough to bounce back quickly, and I've spent weeks or months either avoiding the workshop entirely, or drifting between projects I don't believe in.

I've experienced this pattern of behaviour a lot over the last, oh, lets say 3 years. When I first started making with the vigour that I do now, I had no confidence reserve and I would frequently bottom out and feel like shit for either the rest of the day, or the weekend. It could be the silliest little incident, not even necessarily a failure that would crash my confidence back to zero. Sometimes it would result in a week or more not setting foot in the workshop, even though I wanted to!

Over a period of a couple of years, I built my confidence reserve. It felt like I was building muscle. Setbacks, mistakes and general annoyances might still see me quit for the day, but bouncing back got easier, and then it got - surprisingly - easy. It turns out though, that it's still possible to wipe out your reserve in a single weekend, and when your buffer hits zero for the first time in probably 12 months, it hits hard.

Exhibiting at Makers Central this year was a last minute decision. I worked incredibly hard to get ready for the show, and when the show dates came I was already physically and emotionally exhausted, ready to be picked up by crowds of people and sales. Unfortunately it didn't really work out like that. By midday Saturday, my confidence buffer was empty. It would buoy as I spoke to interesting people, and met some mutual follows from Instragram, but the drain remained.

I was shocked by how hard it hit me, and what that resulted in. It didn't manifest as avoiding the workshop, I still spent the same amount of time making, but I chose projects that I knew I could tackle, or protected myself emotionally when I wanted to tackle something harder. Great advise from the Making It podcast on tricking yourself into doing something you are fearful of was invaluable.

It took many months to build back a confidence buffer, I'm not sure if I'm fully there, but now I am confident that I will be.

I hope your confidence reserve is full!

Simon