Confidence isn't built with compliments
What a student truly needs to start trusting themselves.
A twelve-year-old girl, a year into lessons with me, told me one day that she didn’t get it. She played her piece flawlessly. Really flawlessly — everything was there. I said: that sounded good. She looked at me and said: but I don’t feel good about it.
That stayed with me for the rest of the day.
Because that term I had already given her dozens of compliments. Well done. Nice. You’ve clearly practised, I can hear it. And she didn’t believe a word of it. Not because she was being coy, but because she knew compliments were cheap. She had quickly worked out that I handed them out whenever the lesson went well. They were more a weather report than a judgement.
What I understand better now: confidence isn’t built by what others call out to you. It’s built by what you yourself experience. By discovering that something which was hard now feels easier. By playing through a piece that got stuck last week. By sensing the before and after, and knowing that you made the difference.
That sounds obvious. But in practice we often assume that a student who is low on confidence needs a lift. Encouragement, reassurance, compliments. As if the problem were a shortage of positive words.
It almost never is. The problem is a shortage of evidence.
A student who doesn’t trust herself has no argument. She says: I can’t do it. And then I offer her a counter-argument she didn’t come up with herself. That doesn’t work. She draws her conclusions from her own experiences, and as long as those experiences don’t convince her, neither will I.
The question is: how do I help her gather her own evidence?
That calls for a different approach than encouragement. It calls for tasks that are just difficult enough. Tasks that don’t succeed on the first try, but on the second or third. Small enough to actually complete, large enough to mean something. And it requires letting her notice that she did it herself. Not: well done, but: you heard yourself that it was right, didn’t you?
There is also something more subtle at play in students who have received a lot of compliments. They have become dependent on them. They practise for the feeling they get afterwards when they play something well for someone. Not because they’re curious about what they can do, but because they know a reward is waiting. And the moment that reward disappears — in front of a strict examiner, in a new group, in a situation where no one applauds — there is nothing left to fall back on.
That is precisely the opposite of confidence. It is approval-dependency.
I have become more careful with compliments because of this. Not more sparing — I still say when something sounds good. But I try to aim them. Not: that sounded beautiful. But: you solved that transition, do you hear that? It was stuck last week. That’s an observation, not an evaluation. And it gives her something to hold onto when I’m not there.
The difference is small but it’s real. A compliment says what I think. An observation says what she did.
That twelve-year-old is still here. She’s fourteen now. She still makes mistakes, still sometimes plays with uncertainty, but she’s starting to trust her own judgement. Sometimes she says herself: that transition still isn’t right, I need to practise it slower at home. That isn’t something I taught her. It’s something she worked out from what she experienced.
She gathered evidence.
I wonder how many of your students leave their lessons with more hope than evidence.
Confidence isn't a feeling you give. It's a conclusion a student draws for themselves.