Confidence-Building Technique That Doesn’t Feel Like You're Lying to Yourself

Title shorten because of HN size limitation.

tl;dr: Explaining to yourself why you will be successful at an exam or performance boosts your actual performance.

"Participants who provided reasons for future success performed better on the test than participants in either the failure-explanation or control groups – successfully solving 17.80 puzzles (out of 25) vs. 15.15 and 15.22, respectively."