Confident by Choice: The Three Small Decisions That Build Everyday Courage

by Juan Bendaña Narrated by Juan Bendaña

Overview

Build unshakable confidence, break through fear, and live an inspired life with a practical, research-backed framework that transforms small steps into big changes!

“This book flips the script on confidence. Confident by Choice is a call to stop waiting and start showing up, even when you're not ready.”-Ben Nemtin, #1New York Times bestselling author of What Do You Want to Do Before You Die?

What if you could summon genuine confidence anytime you need it?

Being happier, building better relationships, overcoming fear: the missing link between you and everything you want to achieve is self-confidence. The problem? Confidence is hard to build, and even when we do, it often feels temporary and forced.

After years of research and working with over 250,000 individuals, Juan Bendaña uncovered the four myths about confidence that actually cause and reinforce self-doubt. Confidence is not linked to genetics, extraversion, insecurities, or competence.

To combat these myths, Juan Bendaña developed the Confidence Cycle, a repeatable flywheel that will help you gain and sustain confidence in every aspect of life through three key decisions:

Decision #1:
¿ Micro-Energy: Direct excitement toward the area of improvement.

Decision #2:
¿ Micro-Courage: Find the bravery to move through discomfort.

Decision #3:
¿ Micro-Action: Complete a small action.

RESULT: Micro-Proof & Boost of Confidence: Receive evidence that you are headed in the right direction, which gives you more confidence, thus continuing the cycle.

This actionable and hands-on guide will jumpstart your confidence and help you build lasting courage to be your best self and face life's inevitable challenges.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

This book flips the script on confidence. Confident by Choice is a call to stop waiting and start showing up, even when you’re not ready. Juan reminds us that confidence isn’t something you’re born with—it’s something you build, one bold step at a time.”—Ben Nemtin, #1 New York Times bestselling author of What Do You Want to Do Before You Die?

“Juan Bendaña reminds us that confidence isn’t something we’re born with—it’s something we build, choice by choice. Confident by Choice is the kind of book that makes you feel seen, inspired, and ready to take that next brave step. It’s a beautiful, powerful guide to becoming more of who you already are.”—Selena Rezvani, bestselling author of Quick Confidence

“This isn’t just a book on confidence. It’s a wake-up call for everyone who’s ever doubted themselves. Confident by Choice is a reminder that you’re more capable, worthy, and powerful than you think.”—Michelle Poler, entrepreneur and author of Hello Fears

“Confident by Choice does a fantastic job of providing tactical, practical guidance and advice to help all of us become more comfortable and calm in ourselves and the way we relate to the world.”—Matt Abrahams, author of Think Faster, Talk Smarter

Product Details

BN ID:	2940193442059
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	08/05/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

1.

Confidence Is a Verb

I’m proof that people aren’t born with talent. If you listen to my early recordings, I can’t play guitar and I can’t really sing or write music very well either. It’s all come through practice; everything comes through practice. You start off with a little spark, and it’s whether or not you nurture that spark. You have to expand it and work on it. —Ed Sheeran

Every good story has an epic battle. One the hero wins.

You’re obviously the hero. And since you’re reading a book about confidence, you could easily assume that overcoming a lack of confidence will be your epic battle. You might be right. But here’s where you’re wrong: The antidote to a lack of confidence isn’t just more confidence.

While adding more of something often works to make things better (in Canada, we top pancakes, waffles, crepes, oats, and ice cream with maple syrup; if it doesn’t taste quite right at first, just add a bit more maple), that doesn’t cut it here. That’s because the confidence struggle is a little bit trickier than simply adding more. Let’s break it down.

Researchers have been trying to unlock self-confidence, self-esteem, self-efficacy, and similar topics for decades. They relate the concepts to sports performance, leadership performance, academic performance, ability to learn . . . you name it, they’ve studied it. There’s almost no topic smart people won’t try to relate self-confidence to; in 2021, researchers studied three hundred Romanian employees, trying to figure out how their self-confidence related to their ability to utilize e-learning.

But we don’t need a bunch of academic studies to tell us what we already know about confidence: We all want more of it.

Most of us believe that if we just had more confidence, we’d be bolder in our workplaces, be happier in our relationships, and achieve our goals more frequently. We envy the person who seems to have all the necessary confidence to speak up when they feel mistreated, or to ask for what they really want in life.

But the problem is, or so we think, that confidence wasn’t ever granted to us. When the Confidence Genie went around handing out various amounts of this magical trait, he seemed somehow to have skipped us, or at least not to have been as generous as we would have liked. Most of us walk around believing that we’re stuck with the amount of confidence granted to us at birth. If our confidence does change, it’s only because someone else validated (or invalidated) our beliefs about ourselves:

• We ask someone on a date, and they say yes: point for self-confidence

• We get fired from our job: point for self-doubt

• Our boss gives us a raise: point for self-confidence

Overall, most of us start out with a bit of self-confidence (which is inevitably less than we would have liked), and then we walk around with a giant scoreboard keeping a tally in our minds.

Points for Self-Confidence
Promotion at work
Getting a second date
Being hired for a new job
Receiving positive feedback
Crushing a presentation at work
Having friends laugh at a joke

Points for Self-Doubt
Going through a breakup
Getting fired from your job
Being rejected
Failing at your goal
People laughing at you
Tripping over your words during a meeting

All these points add up to what we believe is our self-confidence score. Of course, there are some people who seem to have total control over their confidence (just not us). Those people, though, generally seem to be the perfect size, with perfect teeth and perfect hair. They always know what to say and when to say it. They have the perfect spouse, the perfect job, the perfect friends. When the Confidence Genie visited them, he granted an extra dose of everything, from physical attributes to communication skills to having a super-cool job. Their confidence started out great and only went up from there as the world congratulated them on their undeserved merits. Glen Powell. These people are Glen Powell.

But you know the problem with that philosophy of happenstance?

It’s just not true.

I want you to pay attention to the next story. It’s a story about someone who has all the confidence in the world, but (at least when they started out) they shouldn’t have had any confidence—unless we’ve all been wrong about self-confidence from the beginning.

Fifty million records. Twenty-seven billion views on YouTube. Four Grammys. Taylor Swift’s trusted confidant. A guy all the girls seem to want.

On one hand, there couldn’t be a better picture of confidence than Ed Sheeran—the guy who bravely raps onstage with his lovely accent, his loop pedal, and his hair blowing in the wind. But on the other hand, we have Ed Sheeran before he was, well, Ed Sheeran—a scruffy, red-haired, lazy-eyed, couch-surfing, stuttering, broke musician wannabe. If that guy can be confident and wind up an all-star, so can you.

Pay attention to his story, because you’ll notice that at every juncture he is given a reason not to be confident, but then he does something that turns the corner.

Sheeran was born in 1991, with a birthmark on his eye. When doctors tried to surgically remove it a few years later, they inadvertently created both a lazy eye and a stutter. Combine those with his ginger hair, and you can imagine what primary school was like for him. In one interview, he said he “cried every day” before going.

Now, that could have been the beginning of a really, really sad story. But it turns out it was the beginning of an incredible one. To help him get over his stutter—which speech therapy sessions couldn’t seem to cure—his uncle bought him an Eminem album, which nine-year-old Sheeran latched on to, teaching himself to rap every lyric. Miraculously, the rapping cured his stutter.

At sixteen he dropped out of school and moved to London, without his parents, to start pursuing his career in music. Did he get invited by the gods of music? Did Michael Jackson come back from the dead to tell Sheeran he would one day smash Jackson’s concert records? No. Sheeran simply made a choice: “I was s*** scared when I first went to London. But it was just something I knew I had to do.”

Sheeran quickly figured out the trick to music—hard work. He knew that everyone with a guitar was trying to play at least one gig every week. So Sheeran did one almost every night; his first year, he performed three hundred shows.

By seventeen, he was gaining a bit of local renown, and industry “experts” started telling him to stop using his loop pedal, to stop rapping, and to turn his songs into techno ditties. Sheeran listened at first, but he soon took his own route. He didn’t enjoy techno and he liked rapping (so did his small group of fans), so he decided to do it his way, continuing to be the authentic ginger-haired rapper-singer-songwriter that he was. “I [didn’t] care anymore. I just want[ed] to play songs that I enjoy[ed].”

A couple of years later, in 2009, he met a young lady named Angel. She’d been living on the streets off and on, and a charity offered her a place to stay for the Christmas season; she met Sheeran when he did a show at that homeless shelter. Based on her life, he wrote the international hit “The A Team.” That song, based on Angel’s story, became part of his story and even made history—going seven times platinum in the United States, and multi-platinum in almost a dozen other countries.

With “The A Team” blasting across radio stations around the world, he was propelled into fame. To date, he’s sold more than 150 million records, set the record for the highest-grossing concert tour of all time, and sold the most concert tickets in one tour ever for his 2017–2019 Divide tour.

It’s easy to look at him now, with the lights, the glitz, and the glam, and assume that his confidence makes sense. But imagine you’re a scrawny redheaded kid from Halifax in the United Kingdom who has a lazy eye and a stutter, someone who cries every day before going to school and who later becomes a couch-surfer.

Sheeran shouldn’t have had enough confidence to make it happen like that. So our idea of confidence must be wrong. It can’t be that confidence is just something we have. It must be something we create.

And that’s good news. Because if Sheeran can create it, so can you.

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