You were born confident, but something happened along the way.
- jefferiesart
- Jun 21
- 3 min read
We often talk about losing confidence and needing more confidence, making it sound like something we can learn like riding a bike, but confidence isn’t a skill you can learn, it’s a feeling, an emotion; which is actually good news because it means we are all naturally confident.
Confidence depends on our belief and trust in our knowledge and ability to do something. Grammatically, the word ‘confidence’ is an adjective and ‘confident’ a noun, so why are so many of us treating it like a verb and studying to gain more skills to try and feel more confident?
We certainly do need skills to do something with confidence. When you use a foreign language at work, to be understood and respected by your peers you need to study the grammar and vocabulary of the language to be able to express what you need to say; you also need to be able to pronounce the words clearly.
But there’s obviously something else connected with confidence because if it was just a matter of knowledge and ability, I wouldn’t be seeing people with 10 or 20 years of knowledge and experience, suddenly suffering a lack of confidence when speaking up in high pressure situations.
But here’s the thing, these individuals aren’t actually lacking confidence, what they’re lacking is access to their confidence. Now that might sound like I’m being pedantic, but when you realise that you’re lacking access to confidence rather than confidence itself, what you do about it is completely different.
The question then becomes, not ‘How can I get more confidence?’ but ‘What’s blocking my access to my confidence?’ and the answer invariably is fear. So studying more vocabulary and using ‘Fake it till you make it’ techniques to try to hack confidence doesn’t work.
Don’t believe me? Try this analogy: The strong muscles in your legs allow you to move and walk. However, it doesn’t matter how strong your leg muscles are if you sever the nerve between your brain and your legs, you can’t move them. When that connection is broken no amount of developing those leg muscles is going to help you walk. In the same way, it doesn’t matter how much you study and practice; it doesn’t matter how much knowledge or vocabulary you have, if you cannot access your knowledge or skills in a high-pressure situation you cannot use them.
That’s the situation many of my clients come to me with, they have good language skills, excellent knowledge on their topic and years of experience, but under the pressure of a cross functional meeting or in front of senior stakeholders, their mind goes blank. Why? Because at a sub conscious level at that moment staying quiet feels safer than speaking incorrectly, making a mistake, and failing. They could speak with confidence but anxiety and the imagined consequences of getting something wrong and failing are blocking that connection.
So question isn’t how can I be more confident? The question is what’s blocking the connection to my natural confidence and how can I remove or reduce it in high stakes situations so that I can perform whatever task I need to… and that’s exactly what I help my clients find out.
There is no single answer to this question, because people are complex. However, there are a number of techniques that work well to reduce the fear enough to allow enough of a connection to your confidence to start speaking. Over time and with positive experience our nervous system learns that the skills we have are enough and the link to confidence when speaking up in this particular situation in front of this particular audience is connected.
On the 20th May I’m giving a short workshop in Munich for the Healthcare Business woman’s Association on what I’be found to be the 3 most helpful techniques to reduce this fear. The event is open to both members and non-members of the HBA, and to both men and women and as I write this there are still places available. If you’re interested in attending you can find all the info including how to sign up on the link below.
If you’re not in the Munich area, I’ll be repeating the workshop virtually on the 10th September. DM me for joining information for the September event.
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