The quiet strength of being unsure

I've helmed countless meetings as a business leader, but it took me a long time to learn not to be the loudest voice in the room.

I’ve helmed countless meetings as a business leader, but it took me a long time to learn not to be the loudest voice in the room.

There’s a tension for a business founder and leader between ensuring your team has the space to express their opinions and views on a decision and being the person who ultimately has to own it. I know, too often in my early days, I used the force of personality to push through and override a roomful of staff. Over time, I learnt the art of waiting for my turn.

We often mistake the loudest voice in the room for the most competent. My teams might look to me as the leader to tell them what to do, to be the voice of certainty, but the reality is different; there is a difference between confidence and certainty.

“The term confidence, though, is ambiguous. One aspect of confidence is interpersonal. If you are confident, then you project an attitude of competence and authority to others. A second aspect of confidence is certainty. The more confident you are about a particular outcome, the more sure you are that the outcome will happen.”

As a leader, I need to both project certainty and display confidence in that certainty. Certainty is a conviction that a certain fact is true; confidence, on the other hand, is a measure of trust. It is the belief in our capacity to achieve an outcome, regardless of what that outcome might be. Conflating the too leads to leads to a specific type of failure known as overconfidence bias. This is where an internal sense of boldness is mistaken for an objective guarantee of success.

Recognising this gap is a prerequisite for intellectual humility. True experts often display high confidence in their methods but low certainty in their predictions. They understand the variables. As Justin Kruger and David Dunning famously noted in their research on cognitive bias, the person with the least competence often possesses the highest level of certainty. They simply do not know enough to be worried.

In our daily lives, the pressure to be “sure” can be paralysing. If we wait for certainty before we act, we may never start. Whether it is beginning a creative project, entering a new relationship, or making a career change, there is no data set that can guarantee a result.

The goal is not to become more certain. The goal is to develop “confident uncertainty”. This is the ability to say, “I do not know what will happen, but I have the skills and the resilience to handle it.”

This shift reduces the shame we feel when things do not go to plan. If we were certain and failed, we were wrong. If we were confident but uncertain and things went sideways, we were simply navigating reality.

When we stop chasing the illusion of certainty, we become more honest team members and more reliable friends. We stop pretending to have all the answers and start showing up with the quiet assurance that, whatever happens, we can figure it out together.