Andrea sat across from me, frustrated. Her boss wanted to hear her opinions in meetings, her reasoning, her voice. Her response was familiar: “I need to be more confident in my decision-making first.”
For months, Andrea waited. She gathered more facts. She rehearsed what she might say. She watched others speak, wondering when her confidence would arrive like a package left on her doorstep. It never did, because confidence doesn’t precede action. It follows it.
Confidence is a feeling, and feelings are unreliable guides for action. They change based on how you slept, what happened in your last meeting, whether the quarter is tracking. Build your leadership on a feeling alone, and you’ve built it on shifting sand.
Jim Murphy in Inner Excellence makes a distinction between confidence and presence. Presence is the highly valued discipline that keeps your mind where your body is. You can have shaking hands and ten percent confidence, yet still be fully present with your words, your breath, the person sitting across from you. High performers feel the same fear as everyone else. They just don’t make certainty a condition for showing up—but they do lean on courage. Courage is different from confidence. Courage is taking action in the presence of fear, not in its absence.
Andrea finally stopped waiting. In her next meeting, she summoned her courage and shared her thinking. It was imperfect and unrehearsed. She lacked confidence but was fully present. The discomfort she felt wasn’t a warning signal— it was a growth signal. No one questioned her competence. What they noticed was her leadership.
Courage is a muscle. Confidence is the result of using it.
THE QUESTION
Where are you waiting for confidence to arrive before you act?
“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.” – Eleanor Roosevelt