Confidence Comes Second

In the 1999 film Three Kings, George Clooney has a line that has always stuck with me:

“The way this works is: you do the thing you’re scared shitless of, and you get the courage after you do it, not before.”

It resonated because I’d always wanted it to work the other way around.

I wanted to feel confident enough to do the scary thing before doing it. I wanted to feel completely fear-free, relaxed and at ease. Then I would speak up. Then I would take the risk. Then I would allow myself to be seen.

But I know now, from experience, that it rarely works like that.

Confidence comes second.

First, you have to go through the uncomfortable and vulnerable experience of feeling anxious and doing the thing anyway. You have to discover that your racing heart, shaky hands and self-conscious thoughts are not signs that you need to escape.

You have to “survive” the moment so that your nervous system and memory can update.

The nervous system needs evidence

You can tell yourself a hundred times that giving a presentation isn’t dangerous. You can read books, watch videos and understand intellectually that an audience is unlikely to attack you for losing your place.

But the anxious part of your brain isn’t easily persuaded by logic. It learns through experience.

If you avoid speaking, your brain learns: That situation must have been dangerous. Thankfully, we escaped.

If you speak but spend the entire time hiding behind your notes, avoiding eye contact or rushing to get it over with, you may come away believing: I only survived because nobody could really see me.

The software doesn’t update because it hasn’t received any genuinely new information.

To learn something different, we have to give ourselves a different experience:

I felt anxious, but I stayed.

People could see that I was nervous, and nothing terrible happened.

I stumbled over my words, found my way back and carried on.

I didn’t look completely confident, but people still listened.

This is how the nervous system begins to learn that we can be exposed without being destroyed.

The armour that keeps us stuck

Most of us develop ways of protecting ourselves from being truly seen.

In public speaking, that might mean memorising every word, gripping the lectern, reading directly from slides or speaking as quickly as possible.

But our armour isn’t always physical. Sometimes, it is a persona.

We adopt a polished “presenter voice” that doesn’t sound much like us. We become more formal, animated or authoritative than we would be in an ordinary conversation. We carefully control our movements and expressions, performing what we think a confident speaker is supposed to look like.

These habits make sense. They are attempts to keep us safe.

If people are judging the polished presenter rather than the real person underneath, rejection may feel less personal. We are visible, but only from behind the protection of a role.

And preparation and performance skills are not the enemy. Knowing what you want to say, giving your talk a clear structure and thinking about how you deliver it can make it easier for an audience to follow you.

The problem begins when preparation becomes armour and performance becomes hiding. When we secretly believe that our ordinary, imperfect self is not confident, interesting or credible enough to hold the room.

The persona may reduce our anxiety in the moment, but it also prevents us from discovering that we could be ourselves and still be accepted.

If I believe I survived only because I memorised every sentence, I will feel compelled to memorise every sentence next time. If I believe people responded well only because I performed confidence convincingly, I never get to learn how they might respond to the real me.

Our nervous system is left with the same belief it had before: I am only safe when I am hiding.

The things we use to protect ourselves can quietly become the things that keep the fear alive.

Growth requires a period of vulnerability

When a crab grows, its hard outer shell cannot grow with it. Eventually, it has to shed that shell.

For a period afterwards, its new shell is soft. The crab is exposed and vulnerable until the new shell hardens.

There is no way for it to grow while remaining permanently protected by the old shell.

I think something similar happens when we grow as people.

We reach a point where our existing armour has become too restrictive, but letting go of it makes us feel exposed. We have to spend some time without the protection we’re used to.

That vulnerable period is not evidence that something has gone wrong. It is part of the process.

Public speaking asks us to step outside our shell. To stand in front of other people without knowing exactly what they will think. To risk forgetting something, stumbling over a sentence or revealing that we care.

There is no way to be truly seen without also becoming vulnerable to being judged.

That is what makes it frightening. It is also what makes real connection possible.

Letting go of looking confident

One of the biggest shifts we can make is to let go of the need to look confident.

Trying to appear confident creates a second job. As well as communicating our message, we’re monitoring our voice, our hands, our face and the audience’s response.

Can they see that I’m nervous?

Do I look like I know what I’m doing?

Was that pause too long?

Our attention turns inwards, away from the people we are trying to reach.

What if the aim wasn’t to look confident?

What if the aim was simply to communicate something honestly and clearly to another person?

You can be nervous and still be engaging. You can lose your place and still recover. You can pause, breathe and take your time. You can allow people to see a little of what is actually happening for you.

Often, the moments we most want to hide are the moments that make an audience trust us. Not because nervousness is something we should perform, but because people connect with people, not perfectly controlled presentations.

Growth doesn’t mean overwhelming yourself

Of course, “do the thing you’re scared of” is easy advice to give and much harder advice to follow.

It also doesn’t mean relentlessly throwing yourself into the firing line.

There is a difference between stretching your nervous system and overwhelming it. If an experience feels so intense that you become completely flooded, shut down or desperate to escape, it may not teach you that you can cope. It can leave your brain even more convinced that the situation was dangerous.

Growth is not about forcing yourself through the most terrifying experience possible. It is about taking risks that are challenging but manageable, then staying present long enough to discover something new.

That might mean looking up from your notes for one sentence. Allowing a pause without immediately filling it. Contributing once in a meeting. Speaking without rehearsing the exact wording twenty times. Letting your voice shake without apologising for it.

Then, as those experiences become more familiar, you can stretch a little further.

The aim is not to prove your courage by enduring as much distress as possible. It is to build enough safety that you can remain open while doing something difficult.

Each manageable experience creates a little more evidence that you can cope.

Over time, you begin to trust yourself. Not because you know that every presentation will go perfectly, but because you know perfection is not required.

Perhaps that is what confidence really is.

Not the certainty that nothing will go wrong, but the knowledge that if something does, you will still be okay.

We often imagine that confident people act because they are not afraid. In reality, many of them have simply had more experiences of feeling afraid, taking the risk and coming through the other side.

The courage comes after.

And then, eventually, so does the confidence.

To find out how our training could help you, head to our courses pages to read more.