If you know me, you probably heard me asking some rendition of the following question during the summer: should I move across the country?
I had just graduated from my undergraduate degree and the summer meant weekends away, catching fifa matches at bars, seeing my friends every day, and the type of laissez faire attitude that makes you forget what day of the week it is. I was surrounded by people I loved in a city that I knew like the back of my hand, with a good job lined up for the fall.
As the weather became warmer, I felt an uneasy sense of stagnation rise around me. As much as I loved Vancouver, I couldn't shake the feeling that I had outgrown the life I had built in my hometown, noticing how perhaps my comfort was turning into complacency. The fear of settling gnawed away at me, scared that if I stayed, I would turn my ambitions into things I once wanted to do instead of things I was on the road to achieving.
Then came an opportunity to move to Montréal. The problem was that I knew virtually nobody in the city, I didn’t know French, and moving meant giving up a fairly comfortable life for one with very little certainty.
Naturally, I spent most of the summer asking other people what they thought I should do. While people had good advice, it was clear that no one was going to make the decision for me. I think I knew deep down what I wanted to do, I just didn’t feel ready.
Perhaps readiness isn't something we feel before taking the leap, but something we develop because we took it.
We often treat confidence as a prerequisite for action, but feeling ready is just that: a feeling, which is often not a clear indicator of what we are capable of. I eventually realized that no amount of thinking, planning, or asking for advice was going to make me feel entirely prepared to uproot my life and move. So around the end of August, I booked my flight and by September I was gone.
Over the past month, I've been thinking a lot about how we develop confidence.
Starting over in a new city is a peculiar experience. There is the excitement of possibility, but also the discomfort of unfamiliarity. My first week in Montréal was spent living out of a hotel, overwhelmed by the logistics of building from scratch. Even now, there are evenings when the distance from everyone I truly love feels particularly heavy.
Somewhere between the uncertainty and the loneliness, something interesting happens: the unfamiliar slowly becomes familiar, strangers become friends, and the things that once seemed intimidating become ordinary parts of everyday life.
Since I moved, I’ve been reaching out to distant acquaintances, putting myself in unfamiliar social situations, (doing my best at) learning French, and slowly finding my footing in a city that, not long ago, was little more than an abstract idea.
None of these things are particularly extraordinary on their own. However placed together, they amount to something significant: evidence of an ability to navigate the unfamiliar. And with every small thing you figure out, you feel a little more capable of figuring out the next. Thus, confidence follows action, not the other way around.
Every time you do something difficult that nobody is forcing you to do, you give yourself evidence that you're capable of more than you previously believed, challenging your self-concept.
The best way to change your understanding of who you are is not through positive affirmations or convincing yourself that you're fearless, but through experience. Moving hasn’t suddenly made me a confident person, but it has shown me that I can make a decision, follow through with it, and navigate the terrain that comes next.
Not every risk is worth taking, and sometimes things don’t work out. But even in that case, there is value in discovering you can survive those outcomes too. For me, it’s too early to say whether moving will turn out to be one of the best decisions of my life or not. However, I do know that if I hadn’t left, I would be sitting in Vancouver wondering “what if”. And had I waited until I fully felt ready, I would have never done it. There will always be reasons to wait. Readiness comes from the process of doing.
So, whatever that thing is that you've been putting off until you feel more confident, consider the possibility that confidence isn't what you're missing. Consider that you don't have to believe you're capable before you begin. Sometimes, beginning is how you learn that you are.
