I once told a therapist that I felt like my lack of confidence in my own abilities was holding me back. He told me that I couldn’t have confidence in my abilities until I achieved something. Despite the fact that I thought that therapist was full of it, I still bought into that BS he fed me that day for years.

Everything I’ve been able to accomplish, from going back to school and getting two degrees and everything I’ve done in WordPress has come from me suspending my disbelief in my self.

Over time I found the strength to go out on a limb and trust myself that if I tried new things and believed in myself  I could get good at new things. If I hadn’t done that, I’d still be stuck in the same trap.

What my therapist told me, that I needed to accomplish something before I could have confidence was a catch-22. Thing is there is a grain of truth to what he said.

You can only get so far on “I think I can.” You have to build on success.

This week, we merged a plugin I wrote for Pods — Pods Frontier Auto Templates — into Pods itself. That plugin was not my first WordPress plugin, but it was the first WordPress plugin that worked and people actually used.

When I presented the idea as a feature for Pods, I’m not sure if Scott had me make it as a plugin because he didn’t see the need for it in Pods, or if he didn’t think I was ready to be doing development in Pods itself. The latter would have been a very fair assessment at the time.

Either way, I was determined so I made it as an add-on plugin and source material for tutorials. And it worked. It stopped people from asking for what they saw as a missing feature in Pods, and we had almost no bugs with it.

When I started working on merging it into Pods itself, I was so overcome with emotion I actually had to stop and come back to it. Everything I’m doing now with CalderaWP, with client work, etc. — when I say “yah I can do that” whether I currently know how or not, that’s building off of the confidence I got from that plugin. What I got from getting positive feedback on it, from it not needing a lot of improvements or bug fixes past the first version, from seeing it pass 1000 downloads, etc.

This is one of the reasons I tell everyone who is getting into WordPress development or any type of programing that they have to find an open source project to get involved in. When you’re starting out, you need support and guidance from more experienced developers. I got that and more from Scott and Phil. You also need to be able to find a small thing you can do, inside of the larger thing, to carve out, improve and feel awesome about doing it.

Tell People They Are Awesome

You are awesome.

The WordPress ecosystem is full of people who are trying something for the first time, or the forty-second time and have no idea if anyone appreciates what they are doing, finds it useful, or is using it. When you try out a new plugin, theme or service and you like it: say it. Call the author out on Twitter, leave a review, write a blog post… whatever — just say “you’re awesome.”

You never know what telling someone you appreciate what they created will do for them or who will see what you said and try it out.

And yes, this applies way beyond our little WordPress world. The internet can be a cold, impersonal and cynical little place. A simple “you made something awesome” goes a long way to change that for someone, so don’t forget to say it.