How To Build Unshakable Confidence: Where Magick Meets Psychology

Photos by Jemma

Have you ever wondered why visualising success feels so powerful? It’s because your brain actually can’t distinguish between vividly imagining an achievement and truly experiencing it. This fascinating phenomenon occurs because visualisation activates identical neural pathways to real-world performance, making it an incredibly effective tool for building confidence.

Yet despite this knowledge, many of us continue to wrestle with self-doubt and anxiety in our daily lives. Whether you’re attempting to make important decisions or pursuing ambitious goals, low self-esteem can create significant barriers that prevent you from reaching your full potential. 

We believe that developing genuine self-confidence requires a potent mix of positive thinking, proven psychological techniques combined with personal empowerment practises (which is what we would call humanistic magick). When evidence-based methods meet practical exercises, the result is a form of confidence that remains steady even during life’s most challenging moments.

So how exactly can psychology and magick work together to transform your confidence? This question sits at the heart of our approach. By understanding both the psychology behind confidence and the power of intentional practise (e.g. those magickal bits), you can develop techniques that resonate deeply with both your rational mind and intuitive self.

Are you ready to explore how these two seemingly different worlds can combine to create unshakeable confidence? Let’s begin this journey together, exploring techniques that will help you become the confident person you’re truly meant to be.

Understanding the Psychology of Confidence

Building lasting confidence isn’t about quick motivational fixes that boost your spirits temporarily. True confidence grows from much deeper psychological roots. Most people (including us by the way!) use confidence and self-esteem almost interchangeably in everyday conversation, whereas actually self-esteem and confidence represent different psychological constructs. 

Self-esteem comes from the Latin word aestimare, meaning “to appraise or value,” representing your overall sense of self-worth and personal value. Confidence, on the other hand, derives from fidere, meaning “to trust,” and refers specifically to your belief in your capabilities for particular tasks or situations. This distinction matters for several important reasons. Self-esteem works holistically, reflecting how you value yourself as a person, while confidence is situation-specific and relates to particular abilities. For example,  you might excel with high confidence in certain skills (like public speaking) while simultaneously wrestling with low self-esteem. Self-esteem forms your identity core, while confidence operates as a practical trust in your abilities. Improving confidence is relatively straightforward (practise specific skills), whereas enhancing self-esteem involves deeper psychological work.

Research shows high self-esteem predicts success and wellbeing across relationships, work, and health. This means, recognising which side of the confidence coin you’re struggling with helps determine the right approach for improvement.

How your brain processes confidence

At the neurological level, confidence isn’t just a feeling –  it’s a complex process involving specific brain regions and neurotransmitters. When you feel confident, your brain activates “value areas” including the striatum and prefrontal cortex. Dopamine, that famous “feel good” neurotransmitter, also plays a crucial role in confidence by reinforcing behaviours that lead to success.

Your brain’s confidence mechanisms don’t merely affect how you feel; they actively filter information. Studies using MEG technology revealed that after high-confidence decisions, your brain enhances processing of confirmatory evidence while largely ignoring contradictory information. Neuroplasticity, your brain’s ability to form new neural connections, provides the physiological basis for developing confidence. So each time you successfully navigate a challenge, your brain forms new synaptic connections, making similar future situations easier to handle. To put it another way, confidence literally becomes “hard-coded” into your neural pathways through repeated practise and reinforcement.

Ok, so what’s all this got to do with magick? Don’t worry, we will get to that!

Why most confidence-boosting advice fails

Most of the everyday confidence-boosting sources of advice fall short because they try to position confidence as a feeling you must have before taking action, rather than a state you can actively create. This might come in the form of suggesting you can simply “decide” to be confident, when research shows confidence must be earned through external validation and success. Or well meaning, but generic, “be yourself” advice that ignores how identity is constructed from external influences over time.

Some of the advice we have seen from all sorts of leadership programmes offer oversimplified techniques without addressing deeper psychological needs or individual differences (perhaps because this deeper level of thinking is still too weird for the C and D levels?)

What high performers across all fields of industry demonstrate is that confidence isn’t about making oneself feel fearless. Instead, it’s about choosing confident behaviours despite feeling fear. By understanding these psychological foundations, you’re better equipped to build authentic confidence rather than chasing temporary motivation. 

Ok, so this is where the magick comes in.

The Magical Mindset Shift

Transforming your confidence requires more than simply understanding psychological theories, it demands a profound shift in how you see yourself and your capabilities. We don’t have to tell you that this ain’t easy! 

Studies reveal that 85% of individuals struggle with low self-esteem, affecting everything from personal relationships to professional achievements. We’ve found that breaking through these mental barriers and crafting a confident identity often requires a bit of out of the box thinking. This means both practical psychology and what some might call a touch of magick.

One powerful technique combining psychology and magical practise involves creating a sort of confidence persona, a superhero version of yourself. It’s an authentic version of yourself that embodies the confidence you aspire to achieve. We mentioned earlier that confidence-boosting sources of advice fall short because they try to position confidence as a feeling you must have before taking action, rather than a state you can actively create. This state can begin with this technique.

For example, the confidence persona that we tap into is in our identities as witches, and the mental associations with spellcasting. For Beyoncé, this is in her alter-ego Sasha Fierce and the mental associations with her stage outfits and shoes. This kind of “state transformation” isn’t about becoming someone else but accessing a more confident aspect of yourself, focusing on authenticity rather than modeling someone else’s confidence. Also this isn’t about pretending! It’s about strategically accessing parts of yourself that already exist, and as a spiritually minded person perhaps you already have a kind of superhero persona that has all the tools the “everyday you” can benefit from? 

By repeatedly acting as your confident self, you actually become that person through neuroplasticity, which is your brain’s ability to form new neural pathways based on repeated behaviours and thoughts. 

Now that we’ve explored the mindset shift necessary for building confidence, let’s look at some practical psychological techniques that offer concrete steps you can take today to enhance your confidence from multiple angles, including a bit of magick. When psychology meets magickal practise, you can create multisensory experiences that reinforce confidence at deeper levels of awareness.

Evidence-based visualisation methods

Visualisation is far more than just wishful thinking. It’s a scientifically validated technique that creates real neurological changes, and is probably the best bridge between magickal and psychological techniques. This is because it is said that visualisation works because your brain processes imagined activities similarly to real experiences, essentially “pre-programming” your neural pathways for success, and spiritually minded people have been using these techniques long before science started proving its efficacy. 

Visualisation involves creating vivid mental images of yourself achieving your goals and living your desired reality through visualising your desired outcomes. To create the right state to visualise your goals, find a quiet and comfortable space where you won’t be disturbed. Close your eyes and imagine yourself confidently engaging in the activity. For example, see yourself in your mind easily speaking in public, acing interviews, or effortlessly achieving your goals. This has to be an experience that is as vivid as possible. Engage all your senses and feel the emotions associated with your success. The more real and detailed your visualisation, the more effective it will be in reprogramming your mind.

If you struggle to hold space for yourself in this way, you can guide yourself through this by recording a guided meditation that you can follow as you visualise. Similarly, you might find it helpful to work with an instructor who can guide you through the specifics by tailoring a guiding meditation script specifically for you.

Using magickal symbols and talismans effectively

Research appears to validate what magical practitioners have known for centuries, that “lucky charms” and other superstitions genuinely enhance performance through boosted self belief. Magickally minded people might choose to create sigils and talismans as part of their toolbox of lucky charms. 

However you choose to create your talisman, you’ll want to ensure that resonates with personal meaning. To give your talisman its power, you can hold it while visualising yourself at your most confident, mentally programming it with this energy. Additionally, physically anchor positive emotions to your talisman through touch and visualisation.

Your talisman then serves as a physical reminder of your potential for success, triggering confidence precisely when needed most. A client of ours carried a small stone in her pocket during an important meeting. When she touched it, she recalled the confidence visualisation we practised together. Is it magick? Psychology? We like to think of it as both, as for us the line between them often blurs when we look at how our minds respond to meaningful symbols and rituals.

Evening reflection and reinforcement using Tarot

Many magickally minded people will begin their day with a tarot card. Instead, pull a card at the end of your day with mindful reflection in order to process the day’s experiences and prepare for tomorrow. 

This quiet evening reflection allows you to acknowledge your feelings, let go of the day’s stresses, and perhaps give you some much needed space to foster gratitude. As you pull a tarot card, you can ask “What went well today?” or  “What could I have done differently?” and interpret the images with this context in mind. This helps extract valuable lessons from your experiences, building resilience and reinforcing a positive self-image.

How wonderful to have even just five minutes before bed to reflect on our day through a lens of learning rather than judgement? This simple practise with tarot creates a different kind of self-talk and creates powerful neurological connections that can strengthen your confidence while you sleep. 

Where Magick Meets The Psychology of Confidence

So now we see that building unshakeable confidence requires a unique blend of psychological understanding and magickal practise. We believe that through this powerful combination, you can transform self-doubt into lasting self-assurance that serves you in every area of life.

Remember that genuine confidence stems from consistent action rather than temporary motivation. Each time you lean into your inner superhero, practise your visualisations, adjust your self talk at the end of the day, you strengthen the neural pathways that support confident behaviour. These small daily actions create significant long term changes in how you view yourself and how you approach challenges.

To put it another way, confidence building isn’t about momentary bursts of inspiration, it’s about the quiet, consistent practises that gradually reshape your relationship with yourself by combining evidence-based techniques with empowerment practises that resonate with your spiritual beliefs. This means rather than choosing between psychology or magickal practises, embrace both approaches to create a confidence building system that resonates with your authentic self. How wonderful would it be to look back six months from now and marvel at how differently you approach challenges, all because you began this journey today?

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