There’s always one person, and it used to be me, determined to fill every silence in a meeting. I spoke first and spoke the longest to make sure everyone in the room thought I was the winner. The obvious problem is this is performance masking as confidence, a show staged for an audience that didn’t know, and didn’t want to be, an audience.
I’ve written about this same instinct from the other side of the table, in The quiet strength of being unsure, on years of chairing meetings as a business leader. It took me a long time to learn not to be the loudest voice in the room.
“We often mistake the loudest voice in the room for the most competent.”
Of course, as a leader, your teams look to you for certainty, but certainty and confidence are not the same. Certainty is a conviction that a fact is true. Confidence is a measure of trust in your own capacity to handle whatever the outcome turns out to be. Confidence isn’t believing you’ll be right. It’s trusting yourself if you turn out to be wrong.
For way too long, I conflated the two and created a false impression of boldness that all too often wasn’t backed by anything real. True confidence is one of the ten qualities of a good human I return to constantly - here’s something from my original article exploring true confidence:
“True confidence doesn’t need to announce itself. It doesn’t require validation from others or constant reinforcement through external achievements.”
Confidence is a theme I’ve returned to constantly, because I think too many of us are as guilty as I am of this confusion of confidence and certainty. Many see confidence as a volume setting; you crank up the dial to make people notice. We all know the type; they have a strut, an air of unassailability. They may adopt physical characteristics - we’ve all known the beefy bloke with the tattoos and gym biceps - or perhaps they dress immaculately, sharp suit, crisp shirt and tie. Except when challenged, that armour they’ve embraced may turn out to be the most confident thing about them.
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The people I’ve actually found confident, rather than just loud, tend to do the opposite. They say less about what they’ve done; they are underwhelming at first; they are the ones in the T-shirt and jeans at the back of a room filled with suits. They don’t look to the room to register their presence. In Building Quiet Confidence, I quoted Don Sibet:
“Confidence is silent. Insecurities are loud.”
It’s not so much loud and quiet as performance versus confidence. Less confident people paper over their insecurities. They seek out an audience to validate their presence or contribution. But the moment your sense of your own worth depends on an audience clocking it, you’ve handed that audience the keys. They get to decide whether the thing you did mattered. So you fill the gaps to cultivate the applause.
Katty Kay and Claire Shipman make a similar case in The Confidence Code, drawing together research on how confidence develops through action and competence. Genuine confidence gets built through doing something difficult often enough that you stop needing anyone else to confirm you can do it. Christine Lagarde, one of the most powerful people in the world, still prepares obsessively for every meeting rather than trusting her reputation to carry her through.
“There are moments where I have to sort of go deep inside myself and pull my strength, confidence, background, history, experience and all the rest of it, to assert a particular point.”
What I like about that is how ordinary the source of assurance sounds: preparation, experience and doing the work.
On the flip side, performance has to keep succeeding. Confidence doesn’t. If your worth depends on people noticing you’re right, you can never afford to be seen getting something wrong.
“If you are aiming to be perfect, you will never be confident.”
Real confidence has room for that risk. It doesn’t need every attempt to succeed, because it was never staged as a performance for onlookers to grade. As I put it when I first wrote about building it:
“It’s the difference between arrogance (which needs to prove itself) and genuine self-assurance (which simply gets on with things).”
Needing an audience isn’t a character flaw. It can become a habit, especially if experience has taught you that being noticed is how your contribution gets valued. Perhaps the shift is subtle, but you start to live for the accolades; the praise creates confidence, when it should be the other way around.
Think of the tradie who fixes the actual fault instead of the symptom, then leaves without pointing out how easily it could have gone wrong. Or the colleague who solves something quietly on a Friday afternoon and doesn’t mention it at Monday’s meeting. Neither is hiding their competence. They just don’t need anyone else to certify it.
Quiet confidence works exactly the same whether anyone’s watching or not.
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