How Small Wins Build Confidence, Self-Trust and Lasting Change

Claim Something — why evidence of progress matters in personal growth, mental health and recovery

I signed up to run my first marathon in early 2016, knowing the race distance was five times further than I’d ever run.

The race was the Brisbane Marathon on Sunday, 7 August 2016, and I had about eight months to be ready. I’d just turned 40 and had been running for a while. However, with only a couple of shabby ten-kilometre runs under my belt, an enormous gap lay between where I was and where I wanted to be.

I started training and keeping records of distance, time, and pace for each run. Pretty basic stuff, but I wanted to know whether I was improving, because as the distances increased, how I felt after a single run was hardly a reliable measure of progress. The record was harder to argue with as five kilometres became seven, and I eventually started reaching ten comfortably. Fifteen kilometres stopped looking so impossible, and the longer weekend runs slowly crept up as well. Now and then I’d scroll back and realise a distance I’d struggled with a month or two earlier had become an easy run.

Some runs were still awful. My legs felt heavy, the pace slowed, and sometimes I walked when I’d planned to keep running. But a bad run couldn’t wipe out all the good ones I’d already logged. I had evidence of progress, and I’d scroll back across it when doubt crept in.

I thought I was simply keeping a running log, but I was building something much more useful.

The Way Through Principle 4 - Claim Something

The fourth principle in The Way Through is Claim Something, and the truth behind it is simple; small proof matters, and the value lies in building evidence you can trust.

If you’re new to the series, the first three principles are Move then Begin, Build A Base and Know What You Carry.

I’ve never found “believe in yourself” particularly useful advice when belief is often the thing you’re short of. How are you supposed to feel confident about something you’ve never done before? What helps is having something real to point to. Belief relates to proof, and without achievement there is no proof, making the whole concept flawed. You see, sometimes you feel confident and sometimes you don’t; it’s a binary proposition, and sometimes your recent history has given you a decent case for doubting yourself.

With the running, I didn’t need to convince myself I was becoming someone who could run a marathon, the evidence, or kilometres, were sitting there in my running log. I’d got out the door and done the work, not once but countless times. Something I couldn’t do before was now something I could do, and I had evidence to back me up.

I’d followed through.

That’s the part of claiming something I find most useful. You take something you’ve built, improved, learnt or stuck with and allow yourself to own it. Nobody else needs to be impressed; the value comes from knowing your actions changed something.

Why small wins build confidence

We give confidence too much credit at the beginning.

People wait to feel ready before applying for a promotion, going back to university, joining a gym, publishing something, or finally having a conversation they’ve been rehearsing for weeks. Trust me, I’m no stranger to the trap of waiting to be ready because there is a comfort to be found in waiting for that perfect time to start something.

Often, you don’t.

The trick, in my experience, is starting even when you don’t feel ready. Confidence follows action, and confidence comes from evidence. How can you gather that evidence if you haven’t started? Starting, regardless of stumbles, mistakes, and doubts, gives you those small wins that eventually form a body of evidence.

That’s how small wins build confidence in real life.

I’ve seen this at work. Earlier in my career, one difficult conversation could occupy my head for days. I’d rehearse what I was going to say, rethink it countless times, and then replay the whole thing afterwards. The confidence I needed to have these conversations was never going to come until I actually started having them. Writing works much the same way, as does public speaking and almost anything else we’re trying to improve or master. Progress leaves proof before we feel accomplished. That progress is the evidence that you claim, and that evidence leads to confidence.

The problem is noticing it.

Personal growth is easy to miss

Something odd happens once we get better at something. We downgrade it;

Yeah, but I can do that now.

Exactly. If you can do it now and you couldn’t before, there’s your evidence.

Personal growth is often easier to see looking backward because while you’re in the middle of it, most days don’t feel important. You’re practising, getting things wrong, making minor adjustments and slowly becoming more capable.

Then one day you notice the meeting that once tied your stomach in knots barely gets a second thought, or ten kilometres is now your normal run, rather than a distance you weren’t sure you could finish.

Tracking progress doesn’t mean turning your life into a spreadsheet; rather, it means looking back occasionally before moving the goalposts again.

We do the opposite with failure. One mistake from years ago can stay beautifully preserved in our heads, complete with every embarrassing detail, while months of steady improvements get barely a thought. We keep remarkably detailed records of our failures and surprisingly poor records of our progress.

That’s a lousy way to keep score.

Small Wins in Mental Health Recovery

This principle was most apparent for me when I started applying it to my mental health and recovery, over twenty years ago.

There were many points when I had reason to doubt myself. Things had gone badly; I’d made choices I regretted, and sometimes simply getting through life felt much harder than it should have.

What helped wasn’t some sudden breakthrough. It was a series of ordinary things done consistently, like looking after myself, asking for help, and talking to someone when something wasn’t right. None of it looked especially dramatic from the outside, but the pattern slowly changed. A rough week didn’t always spiral into something worse, and I started recognising when I was struggling sooner. Eventually, situations that once sent me straight back to old habits began ending differently. Sometimes the clearest evidence of personal growth is simply that the same situation no longer elicits the same response from you.

Those moments mattered because they showed me I could still influence what happened next, and while I couldn’t control everything, I wasn’t powerless either.

And sometimes, that’s enough to rebuild trust in yourself.

What My First Marathon Taught Me About Self-Trust

By the time I stood at the start line on that August morning in 2016, there were still 42.2 kilometres ahead of me. My training record couldn’t promise how the day would go, but it’d already shown me something useful; I wasn’t the bloke who’d struggled through those first few kilometres anymore.

Behind me were months of runs, plenty of ordinary ones and a few horrible ones, with distances that once seemed out of reach gradually becoming distances I’d already covered. I’ve now run 16 marathons, which still feels a little absurd when I think about where I started, but the more useful lesson arrived before I finished the first one.

I had built evidence I could trust.

Whatever you’re working on, look back every so often. Personal growth, work, mental health, or something you’ve simply decided you want to get better at. Somewhere behind you there will usually be proof that you’re not where you started.

Notice what used to be hard, notice what you handle differently now, and don’t dismiss it the moment it feels normal.

Claim it!

Small proof matters. Build evidence you can trust.