The start of the new year is traditionally a time of resolutions. And resolutions set goals. Some tackle self-improvement by developing new skills, and others set goals to achieve, but what they have in common is that they are challenging.

Chances are that many of the items on our resolution lists require creativity—the capacity to imagine a different reality, not quite knowing how to make it happen but deciding to pursue it anyway. The fuel for creativity, regardless of what our specific goals are, is creative confidence. The good news is that psychological science shows that creative confidence can be built and provides four groups of strategies to develop it.

Creative confidence, or creative self-efficacy, is a belief that we can successfully complete tasks in the creative process, from coming up with original and valuable ideas, to judging which are the best and most feasible ones, to taking action to develop them into performances or products. Research that jointly analyzed results from 41 studies with more than 17,000 participants shows that those who have greater creative confidence tend to do better on tests of creative thinking and be more creative in what they do, whether students in elementary school science class or professionals at work who are evaluated by their supervisors.

Intuitively, we know that confidence helps us achieve goals. But it is less intuitively obvious that we can develop creative confidence. The starting point is a growth mindset about creativity. Scientists have found that when people have such a mindset—believing that creative potential can be developed through experience and learning—they are also more likely to have creative confidence. In turn, the confidence enables people to come up with more original and higher quality solutions to creative problems.

Four kinds of strategies help build creative confidence:

We can build creative confidence by observing our own behavior and reflecting on past successes. This is the strategy of If I could do that, I should be able to do this, too.

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