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Your competence is based on what you can do, along with how well you can do it. Your confidence is what you think you can do. Does competence lead to confidence, or does confidence lead to competence? Both can be true because the concepts are interconnected.
Confidence gives you the willpower to acquire new skills. With practice, your competence grows. Increased competence increases your confidence. Realizing you are capable of learning leads to a desire to learn more. Confidence grows with the acquisition of knowledge.

Mastodons, those prehistoric animals that looked like fuzzy elephants, may have been among the earliest animals to graze the Cajun prairies, and there may have been more of them than we think.

It was welcome news when rubber rationing was lifted at the end of World War II, and it may have been welcomed more in south Louisiana than in many other places.
Tires, and the inner tubes that kept them round, were the first things to be rationed after major rubber-producing countries such as Malaya and the Dutch East Indies fell to the Japanese.
That may not have caused as much of a problem here as it did in some other places, because a lot of people were still using (or began to use again) the horse and buggy they’d relied on for years.