Years ago, one of our summer college interns told a hilarious story about a highly embarrassing moment in her senior year of high school. Prior to prom each year, her high school hosted a fundraising event where seniors modeled dresses, suits, and tuxedos from local stores to get students excited about prom.
She was asked to model a floor-length dress, and each student was paired with a classmate who’d escort them up a set of stairs, across a stage, and back down. The objective was simple, except for the fact that nothing is really simple in a long dress and high heels, particularly stairs.
She successfully made it up the stairs and across the stage, but on the descent, she caught part of the dress in the back of her heel and tumbled her way down the last three stairs. Thankfully, nothing was broken. She reported only a bruised arm and a bruised ego. The guy escorting her did his best to catch her, but gravity had taken effect, and she tumbled forward at warp speed.
She remembers being face-down on the gym floor, with over a thousand people having witnessed the event. As she stood up, she had a hilarious thought to turn this tragedy into triumph. She jumped to her feet and hoisted her arms above her head like an Olympic gymnast who’d just nailed a dismount. Her classmates erupted into applause, and she took a bow.
I love the courage this young woman harnessed to turn what could have been something humiliating into something hilarious. Her pivot is the very definition of capable. She could have spiraled into shame. Instead, she decided to laugh at herself.
This young woman faced a great deal of anxiety growing up. At times, her anxiety was pretty debilitating. As my coauthor and counselor Sissy Goff wisely reminds us, anxious girls often bend toward perfectionism, performance, and pleasing. They can put an overwhelming amount of pressure on themselves, and they struggle in failing, falling, or even in laughing at themselves.
It takes work to get to a place where you can pivot from perfectionism to self-effacing humor. As we write in our new book, Capable, these are learned skills. “Capable” kids have practiced coping and learned competence for life’s challenges.
We’d argue that competence is deeper than confidence. This world is full of influencers on social media who are portraying a deep confidence that likely is masking a deeper insecurity.
I talk often about how a boy’s arrogance is almost always a cover for his insecurity. The bigger the bravado, the more likely the uncertainty. I’ve experienced this to be true with adult men as well. I’ve found myself in rooms full of fascinating and intelligent people where one man is consuming 90 percent of the conversation.
Similarly, some of the most controlling women I’ve encountered are also some of the most fearful. Anxious girls can be highly controlling in their academics and relationships, and they often develop rituals that they start to believe keep them safe in the world. If their siblings won’t agree to play the game they want to play (and in the way they want to play it), they sometimes lose it. If their parents accidentally reverse the order of nighttime routines, they start melting down. If they underperform on a test they prepared for, they can go off the deep end.
On the outside, these kids and adults look confident and capable. They are, in fact, very capable. They are trying hard, are smart and conscientious, and care and feel deeply. Sometimes all the caring, feeling, and trying just gets the best of them. They attempt to manage the internal storm with external control.
That equation always falls short. We want to chase something more substantial than false confidence or fear dressed up as control. Let’s consider the pursuit of competence. Competent people aren’t perfect; they are simply skilled and practiced.
Previously, Sissy has offered an ideal definition for anxiety—that it’s an overestimation of the problem and underestimation of myself. The problem is too big, and I’m too small. The situation is impossible, and I’m incapable. When kids embrace this definition, begin to recognize how the voice of worry is whispering it to them—and then learn to talk back to the worry—they feel competent. They begin to believe they have more control over their emotions than their emotions have over them.
They figure out that the worry lies and distorts and is working overtime to convince them they can’t manage. Seeing kids develop the competence to talk back to worry is one of the most rewarding parts of our work. Seeing parents learn to do the same is equally rewarding.
I’ve seen worry distort parents’ competence more times than I could describe. They start believing their child should have had a different parent. They become convinced their own past will define their child’s future. They trade hope for despair.
If you find yourself stopping off at any of those beliefs, may we remind you that you are exactly the parent your child needs? You care deeply. You are trying hard. You wouldn’t be reading this if that weren’t true. You want good things for your child. Your work right now is simply to identify what’s in the way and to practice the skills to become capable and competent in the face of fear.
Let’s look at five ingredients to consider as we work toward helping kids feel competent.
- Timing is everything. Common wisdom has long told us it takes 21 days to form a new habit. But research from the University of South Australia reveals that “healthy habits can take two months to a year to form.” Ben Singh, one of the researchers, goes on to remind us that forming healthy habits and breaking unhealthy ones is necessary for long-term wellbeing.
- Create incentives. When kids are struggling to build consistency in habit formation, it can be helpful to create incentives. Sissy often recommends “brave beads” that can be placed on a bracelet or necklace to serve as a reminder of the times kids have demonstrated courage in the face of fear. She talks about how anxiety has no memory. It will work to convince kids they’ve never tried scary things and have always failed in the face of fear. Brave beads help combat that distortion as a visual tool. Similarly, I often recommend “calming coins” as kids are practicing regulation. Create a space where kids can calm down, then place two jars in that space: one full of toy coins and one that is empty. Each time kids go to the calm-down corner and practice coping, have them drop a coin in the second jar to see the evidence that they’re practicing regulation with consistency.
- Practice receiving feedback. Feedback is necessary for growth. Many coaches require athletes to watch videos of their performance to gain perspective, enhance performance, and build insight. In graduate school, we were required to record a counseling session during our internship to review with our supervisor and classmates to identify potential areas of growth. I’ll be the first to say it wasn’t pleasant sitting in a room watching myself on camera. It was even less enjoyable to have professors and fellow students pick apart the session. Regardless, it was a valuable exercise, and I still think back on what I learned. To prepare kids well for their vocational lives, it’s important to practice giving feedback for performance evaluations, team assessments, peer reviews, and even group projects throughout school, where kids often grade one another. When your child gets stuck in receiving feedback, ask questions like “What did you hear me saying?” or tell them to “Report back what you just heard,” to see what they’ve integrated.
- Assess the Stress. Adolescents often report being stressed. Adults do as well. The assumption within the declaration is that something negative is in play. This certainly could be the case. But it’s possible something positive is taking place. There are three kinds of stress: positive, tolerable, and toxic. Positive stress is often described as normal stress or worry that may be intense but resolves itself quickly. Tolerable stress is longer lasting but can be mitigated with healthy relationships. Toxic stress is intense, prolonged adversity without support. Think about positive stress like opening night of the school play and tolerable stress like applying to college or navigating a sports injury. Toxic stress would be abuse, neglect, extreme poverty, or violence. It’s important to differentiate between the three and consider what it would look like to allow the kids and adolescents in our lives to experience positive and tolerable stress for the sake of building capability.
Begin by defining the different types and helping kids make connections, even giving concrete examples of each. Share about a time you experienced the first two and talk about what helped you navigate the stress and the competence you built in the process. Thinking in this way affords us the opportunity to build durability in kids. Working to only eliminate stress could serve to build fragility, which doesn’t lead to kids feeling competent or capable.
We all want to be able to rebound as quickly as that young woman did after falling down the stairs. She had learned competence through challenge. Learned competence is costly, but it’s lasting—and worth it.
David Thomas is the coexecutive directors of Daystar Counseling in Nashville, Tennessee. With Sissy Goff, he is the co-author of Capable, ©2026. Content published with permission from Bethany House Publishers.
The post Competence Is Deeper Than Confidence appeared first on Christianity Today.