There’s a beautiful irony I’ve watched play out with almost every student I’ve ever worked with. They come to me wanting to feel more confident — in exams, in class, when someone puts them on the spot. And almost universally, their instinct is to cover more ground, faster. Get through more practice questions. Move on. Keep moving.

What they don’t realise is that the very thing they’re rushing past is the thing that would give them what they’re looking for.

When I slow a student down and ask them to really sit with a concept — not just recognise it, but explain it back to me in their own words, pull it apart, question why it works — there’s almost always a moment of resistance. It feels inefficient to them. Indulgent, even. Like we’re spending time on something they already “kind of get” when there are harder things waiting.

But that discomfort is the work. That friction of genuinely not being sure you understand something, and then pushing through until you do — that’s where confidence is actually made. Not in the performance of knowing, but in the experience of having truly figured something out.

The rush to move forward usually comes from anxiety. And anxiety, I’ve found, is almost always a signal that the foundations are shakier than the student wants to admit. Covering new material feels like progress, but it’s often just building higher on ground that hasn’t been settled. Eventually, something wobbles.

When a student finally lets themselves go deep on the basics — really deep — something shifts. They start answering questions before I finish asking them. They stop second-guessing. The confidence they were chasing by moving fast turns out to have been waiting for them all along, just underneath the surface of the thing they were so eager to skip.

Thea Macarthur-Lassen