This question began with a verse about David.
In the King James Version of 1 Samuel, David “encouraged himself in the Lord his God.” Other translations say he strengthened himself or found strength in the Lord. (1 Samuel 30:6)
I kept wondering:
What did he actually do?
Did he find a mirror?
Did he look directly at himself and say:
I am strong.
I am capable.
I am definitely not about to be stoned by my own men.
The text does not describe a mirror or give us David’s self-talk transcript.
And this was not a minor confidence dip. His city had been burned, the families had been captured, and his grieving men were discussing whether to kill him.
The source of his strength also matters. The verse does not say David discovered that he was secretly amazing. It says he strengthened himself in the Lord. His next move was to seek direction from God. (1 Samuel 30:6–8)
So this is not a biblical endorsement of shouting compliments at your reflection before breakfast.
Still, the phrase stayed with me.
Can the story we make available to ourselves before a difficult moment change what we are capable of doing inside it?
Then two programming interviews gave me a more personal version of the question.
The interview I had already won
Before one programming interview, I looked up the person who would be interviewing me.
Their public profile suggested they had considerably fewer years of industry experience than I did.
That is not a criticism of the interviewer. Fewer years do not mean less intelligence, weaker judgment or an inability to assess someone. They may have been excellent at all three.
But the information changed the size of the event in my head.
This no longer felt like appearing before a mysterious technical authority.
It felt like a conversation with a peer.
I remember thinking:
I should kill this interview.
I walked in with roughly the confidence of David asking who this “uncircumcised Philistine” was.
To be clear, I did not call the interviewer an uncircumcised Philistine.
That would have changed the interview in a different and much more measurable way.
But David’s posture was in my head. Goliath was physically enormous; David kept changing the comparison. He remembered the lion and the bear, and he framed the fight in relation to the God he trusted rather than only the opponent he could see. (1 Samuel 17:26, 36 and 45)
My situation was considerably less heroic.
Nobody had a spear.
There was probably a shared coding window.
But I entered relaxed. I explained myself clearly. My memory seemed available when I reached for it.
I performed well.
The interview my brain promoted into a tribunal
Another time, I interviewed with AWS.
There were two directors involved.
My brain did not interpret this as:
Two experienced people would like to discuss software.
It interpreted it as:
The Council has assembled.
I was shaking.
During a whiteboard exercise, I was asked to do a simple sorting task—something I could normally complete in about five minutes on my own.
Suddenly, sorting looked like undocumented mathematics from a lost civilization.
I took far too long. I forgot basic things I knew. The knowledge had not disappeared, but my access to it felt unreliable.
My brain contained the source code and had apparently revoked my read permissions.
The comparison is not an experiment.
The companies were different. The interviewers were different. The questions, preparation, sleep and stakes may all have differed. I also know the outcomes, which makes it easy to write a tidy explanation backwards.
But I remember the subjective contrast clearly.
In one room, confidence left my working memory available for the task.
In the other, fear seemed to use part of that memory to watch me perform.
The mind can resize the opponent
This is the part I find more interesting than generic positive thinking.
The problem did not become easier because I said nice things to myself.
In the first interview, my confidence had receipts. I knew my experience. I had prepared. The interviewer’s profile changed my interpretation from judgment by authority to technical conversation.
In the AWS interview, the titles changed the interpretation in the opposite direction.
The code was not necessarily harder.
The audience became larger inside my head.
That is why the David and Goliath story fits. David did not deny that Goliath was large or repeat that size was imaginary. He changed which facts controlled his attention.
Goliath’s height was one fact.
The lion, the bear, his previous experience and his trust in God were also facts.
Perhaps self-encouragement is sometimes less about inventing confidence and more about retrieving evidence that fear has temporarily hidden.
A question can choose which evidence arrives
There is a famous survey experiment that has been living in the back of my mind.
In 1988, researchers changed the order of questions about university students’ dating lives and their overall life satisfaction. When the dating question came first, the relationship between dating and life satisfaction became dramatically stronger.
The students had not acquired partners between questions.
Tinder had not even been invented.
The proposed explanation was temporary accessibility: asking about dating made dating-related information easier to retrieve when the next judgment arrived. (Strack, Martin & Schwarz, 1988)
The famous result did not age as cleanly as the anecdote. Later work failed to reproduce such a large effect and found that question-order effects on life-satisfaction judgments were generally weak compared with information that was already chronically accessible. (Schimmack & Oishi, 2005)
So I do not want to use the dating study as proof.
I want to borrow its question:
Can a small cue change which part of the mind answers next?
That is closer to what I mean by an induction cue. In the research literature, “accessibility cue” or “prime” may be more familiar terms.
Perhaps saying:
I am bad at maths.
does not remove any mathematical knowledge.
It tells the mind which folder to open.
Previous failures become easier to retrieve. The unfamiliar shape of the problem becomes more noticeable. The possibility of embarrassment is already running before the numbers appear.
The question arrives after the conclusion has begun loading.
A self-description is a compressed prediction
Now consider the negative version:
I am bad at technical interviews.
The sentence may be accurate.
It may also be an instruction.
Immediately before the task, what has the speaker told their attention to do?
Watch for failure?
Remember previous embarrassment?
Prepare an explanation?
Or relax, because the secret is finally out?
We use these compressed predictions constantly:
I’m bad with names.
I’m not creative.
I have no sense of direction.
I can’t speak in public.
The label takes several experiences and turns them into a forecast.
Forecasts can alter preparation. If I am “bad with names,” I may stop repeating the person’s name immediately after hearing it. I expect the information to leave, so I give it no reason to stay.
If I am “not creative,” a bad first idea becomes evidence that the session should end instead of the normal entrance fee for reaching a better idea.
Identity saves the cost of reconsidering.
It can also make improvement look like a category error.
Pressure can spend working memory
One plausible explanation for my AWS experience is that anxiety competed with the task for limited mental capacity.
Part of the mind worked on sorting.
Another part ran a background process:
Two directors are watching.
You are taking too long.
They can see you taking too long.
Thinking about the time is taking more time.
That process did not come with a cancellation token.
Laboratory research on mathematical problem-solving has found that pressure can reduce performance by consuming working-memory resources needed for the task. In one study, participants with higher working-memory capacity showed the largest pressure-related performance decline on demanding mathematics problems. (Beilock & Carr, 2005)
That study was not a programming interview, and it does not prove what happened to me.
It does make the mechanism less mysterious.
Sometimes pressure does not reveal that knowledge is absent.
It interferes with retrieval and execution while the knowledge is still there.
Why “I am brilliant” is not the obvious fix
If negative identity language can hurt, the obvious solution seems to be standing before a mirror and announcing:
I am an exceptional programmer.
Unfortunately, the mind may request documentation.
Experiments on positive self-statements found that repeating an implausibly positive identity statement could make some participants with low self-esteem feel worse rather than better. The study concerned mood and self-esteem, not technical performance, but it warns against treating disbelief as a volume problem. (Wood, Perunovic & Lee, 2009)
A randomized field experiment with children found that effort-focused self-talk—“I will do my very best”—improved mathematics performance among children with negative competence beliefs. Ability-focused self-talk—“I am very good at this”—did not show the same benefit. (Thomaes et al., 2020)
The useful contrast may not be negative versus positive.
It may be unsupported identity versus credible orientation.
I am a genius.
asks the mind to accept a verdict.
I have solved problems like this before.
retrieves evidence.
I will explain the next step carefully.
gives attention a job.
And “David strengthened himself in the Lord” points somewhere else again. His confidence was not merely self-esteem. It came from a relationship, a remembered history and a source of strength outside the frightened self.
The survey ambush I want to run
I keep imagining an almost disappointingly ordinary experiment. Recruit people who already believe they are bad at maths and give them a survey containing mostly unrelated questions:
Do you prefer tea or coffee?
How many hours did you sleep?
How satisfied are you with your mobile provider?
Please solve this equation.
The maths problem would be easy but dressed in enough words to look unpleasant. One group would first complete:
Compared with most people, I am bad at maths.
Another group would complete a neutral sentence; a third would receive no cue. Everyone would then face the same problem.
My prediction is that the negative-identity group would take longer, abandon the problem more often or perform worse—even at similar ability. A larger version could separate a private self-description from saying it aloud, because public embarrassment is a different mechanism wearing the same lab coat.
I would measure accuracy first, then response time, persistence and confidence. I would also preregister which result matters most. Otherwise, with enough measurements, the statistics may eventually encourage themselves.
If the negative cue hurts performance, a self-description may change immediate access to ability. If only a public admission hurts, evaluation is the better explanation. If nothing changes, the sentence may reveal a stable belief without acting as a short-term instruction.
There is a humane reason to be careful
“Stop saying you’re bad at it” can become another way to silence someone.
A person may be realistically describing a skill gap, disability, lack of training or repeated exclusion. Replacing honesty with compulsory confidence does not create competence.
Sometimes:
I struggle with this.
is the sentence that makes help possible.
The important variables may be permanence, timing and purpose.
Is the statement a diagnosis?
An identity?
A request?
A defence?
Or a prediction spoken at exactly the moment the mind is deciding where to place its effort?
What I currently think
I do not think words magically create ability.
I think a credible internal story may change which parts of our ability remain accessible under pressure.
The first interview did not give me experience I lacked.
The AWS interview did not remove experience I had.
The frame changed what my attention treated as the main problem.
In one case:
Solve the technical question.
In the other:
Survive being evaluated by two directors while also solving the technical question.
That second task requires considerably more memory.
What I still cannot tell is whether spoken words themselves create a meaningful immediate effect—or whether they merely reveal the deeper belief already deciding how large the opponent appears.
Until the next strange question,
Osagie