"Fear Is What Holds People Back." The Real Science of Confidence in Women Entrepreneurs.

"I think fear and fear of the unknown and perceived failure is what holds people back."

Whitney Wolfe Herd said that after building and taking public a company most people told her not to start. In 2014, she left Tinder, the app she'd co-founded, in the middle of a very public sexual harassment lawsuit that came with online abuse and a media storm painting her as a liar. She was 25. Months later, with the backlash still fresh, she launched Bumble anyway.

"If I had listened to everybody around me when I was starting Bumble, there'd be no Bumble," she's said. "It was a stupid idea, according to everybody." At 31, she became the youngest woman to take a company public and the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world. She didn't wait to feel ready. And it turns out, according to decades of research, that's exactly how confidence actually works.

What the Research Actually Says About Confidence

Most people operate on a quiet assumption: confidence comes first, and action follows once you have enough of it. Psychologist Albert Bandura's research on self-efficacy, first published in 1977 and confirmed by decades of study since, found something closer to the opposite.

Confidence is built primarily through what Bandura called mastery experiences, the direct experience of doing a hard thing and getting through it, not through feeling ready beforehand.

This reframes the whole problem. If you're waiting to feel confident enough to start the business, make the pitch, or raise your prices, you're waiting for something that mostly gets built by the very action you're postponing. Courage, in the research sense, doesn't follow confidence. It tends to come first and generate it.

Why This Is So Hard to Believe in the Moment

None of this makes fear disappear, and it isn't supposed to. Wolfe Herd wasn't fearless when she started Bumble. She built it while still absorbing the fallout from Tinder, still facing public scrutiny, still genuinely uncertain it would work. The research backs this up too: mastery experiences that involve real difficulty, not easy wins, are the ones that build the most durable confidence. The version of courage that counts isn't the version without fear in it. It's the version that acts anyway.

What This Looks Like: Confidence in Women Entrepreneurs

I've coached a founder who spent nearly a year waiting to feel ready before reaching out to a single potential investor, certain that confidence would eventually arrive if she just prepared enough. It didn't, not from preparation alone. What actually shifted things was one uncomfortable, badly-rehearsed first pitch that didn't go perfectly and didn't end her business either. The confidence she'd been waiting for showed up afterward, built directly from having survived the thing she was afraid of.

Wolfe Herd's own account tracks the same pattern. She wasn't handed certainty before she started. She built Bumble, scaled it, took it public, and has since described the entire decade as one continuous set of twists she pushed through rather than one she felt fully prepared for at any single point. "I realized, with all the twists and the turns, Bumble and I, we weren't done," she's said, describing a company, and a confidence, still being actively built rather than arrived at.

What This Means for You

If you're waiting for the fear to quiet down before you act, that moment may simply not be coming on the schedule you're hoping for. The research suggests a different order entirely: the smaller, survivable version of the scary thing, done imperfectly, is usually what actually builds the confidence you've been waiting to feel first.

In my experience as a life coach, this is often the exact shift that unlocks momentum. Not talking yourself into feeling ready, but choosing one real, slightly uncomfortable action and letting the confidence catch up afterward, the way it was always going to.

You don't need to feel ready. You need one thing you're willing to do or take one small step while you don't.

Ready to Act Before You Feel Ready?

If you've been waiting for confidence to arrive before you make the move, you don't have to keep waiting. Book a Free 30-Minute Chat with Asi Efros to talk through what one real next step could look like 👉 Book your free 30-minute chat here

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