FOR MOST OF my life, I thought building self-confidence meant overcoming my differences.
I was born with cerebral palsy, a physical disability that’s made me feel different from everyone else. Growing up, I spent countless hours in physical, speech, and occupational therapy learning how to do things most people never have to think about: walking, talking, tying my shoes, holding a pencil. I walked around with braces on my legs. I slept with splints on my hands. From head to toe, my body tremored, stiffened, misfired, and resisted me in ways that made me feel, from an early age, like I was living in the wrong hardware.
Like a lot of people who feel different, I absorbed the message that self-worth comes from fitting in. If I could just look more normal, move more normally, and need less help to get by, then maybe – just maybe – I’d feel good enough. Maybe I’d feel confident in myself.
That mindset couldn’t be further from the truth.
The more I chased normal, the more abnormal I felt. Instead of building confidence, I was building a life around concealment, trying to hide what made me uncomfortable rather than understand it. That kind of self-rejection doesn’t make you stronger. It just puts you at war with yourself.
When you minimise what makes you different, you treat yourself like a problem to solve. You become hyperaware of your deficits, hypervigilant about how others see you, and disconnected from the most authentic parts of yourself.
I didn’t need to become “normal.” I needed to stop seeing my differences as limitations and start seeing them as perspectives. And once I made that switch, I could start using my differences strategically.
That lesson hit me hard in sport.
I’ve played table tennis at a high level for over a decade. I’ve won gold at the U.S. Open and represented Team USA internationally. But despite all that, there’s one basic move I still can’t do properly: hit a backhand.
Because of my cerebral palsy, the muscles involved in hitting a good-old-fashioned backhand just don’t cooperate the way they’re “supposed” to. For years, I tried to fix it. I worked with top coaches, drilled technique, and chased the ideal version of a backhand I saw my peers execute – the version that my body simply wasn’t built to produce. The harder I tried to conform to the standard, the more frustrated I became. And the more insecure I felt.
Eventually, I made a different decision: instead of correcting my odd technique, I would exaggerate it. I would make its wrongness even wronger, its strangeness even stranger. I would stop asking, “How can I be more like everyone else?” and start asking, “How can I make my differences serve me?”
That mindset changed everything. My weird backhand became unpredictable. Opponents didn’t know what to do with it, as they’d never seen anything like it before. What once looked like a weakness to my own eyes became an asset to my game. I started to believe in myself right where my belief had always felt held back.
What changed was not just my technique, but my relationship to myself. I stopped seeing my difference as evidence of deficiency and started seeing it as a source of possibility. In that way, table tennis became more than a sport for me; it became proof that self-esteem grows when you stop waging war against your own nature.
That’s a lesson in self-esteem most of us need to hear: confidence doesn’t come from fixing your differences; it comes from befriending them, owning them, and exploiting their hidden assets.
Modern psychology supports this idea. People build healthier self-esteem when they appreciate their individuality and resist the urge to compare themselves to norms and ideals. Social comparison is brutal. It trains your mind to scan for where you fall short. You see someone who seems more attractive, more charismatic, more successful, more masculine, more socially effortless, and your brain starts building a case against you.
But when you focus on your distinct strengths, you shift from social comparison to self-definition. You stop asking, “How do I measure up?” and start asking, “What do I uniquely bring?”
For me, cerebral palsy forced that question early. I couldn’t rely on doing things the standard way, so I had to become adaptable. I had to problem-solve creatively. I had to develop resilience. I had to learn how to tolerate standing out. None of those traits were side effects. In fact, they became some of the strongest parts of my identity.
That doesn’t mean romanticising struggle. There’s nothing glamorous about pain, limitation, or being stared at in public. But real confidence means holding insecurity with self-compassion. It can say: this is hard, and I’m still strong. This part of me hurts, and it has still taught me something valuable. I am limited in some ways, and deeply capable in others.
My life experiences have taught me that confidence isn’t the absence of awkwardness, fear, or difference; it’s the willingness to stop hiding behind them. It’s the courage to lean into your differences instead of suppressing them. It’s the realisation that you don’t need to become less of yourself to feel better about yourself.
Real self-worth begins the moment you stop trying to fit a mold that was never made for you in the first place.
Dr Dan Rosenfeld’s book, The Confidence Equation: Three Keys to Unleashing Self-Confidence as an Introvert, is out now.
