Confidence Begins With One Thing
Of all the qualities we admire in other people, confidence is perhaps one of the most misunderstood. We recognize it when we encounter it, or at least we think we do. We see someone walk into a room seemingly at ease, speak before an audience without apparent hesitation, make a difficult decision, or remain composed while everyone else is becoming anxious, and we say, “That person is confident.” What we don't see is everything that came before that moment: the experiences, the failures, the preparation, the repetition, the embarrassment, the corrections, and all those occasions when that same person was anything but confident. We see the finished product and assume it is a personality trait, when very often what we are witnessing is something that has been painstakingly constructed over time.
I have spent most of my life observing people, first because circumstances required it and later because it became my profession. As a child arriving in the United States from Cuba, I learned very quickly that when you don't understand everything being said around you, you pay attention to everything else. Later, in the FBI, observing people became part of what I did for a living. Whether I was dealing with a suspect, an informant, a witness, a fellow agent, or someone who simply had information I needed, I learned to pay attention not only to what people said but to how they carried themselves when they were comfortable, when they were uncertain, when they felt threatened, and when they knew exactly what they were doing. Over the years, one thing became increasingly clear to me: there is no such thing as a person who is confident about everything.
As I noted in my book, Be Exceptional (HarperCollins), we all lack confidence somewhere. The accomplished physician who is completely at ease in an operating room may dread speaking before two hundred people. The executive who negotiates multimillion-dollar deals may become surprisingly uncertain when asked to dance. A gifted athlete who performs effortlessly before thousands of spectators may feel intimidated in an academic setting. Someone who can command an auditorium may become awkward and hesitant when speaking privately to a person he or she admires. This matters because we have created an unfortunate habit of describing people as either confident or lacking confidence, as though confidence were something you either received at birth or somehow missed out on. Human beings are much more complicated than that. Confidence is contextual, and because it is contextual, it can also be learned.
When people ask me how they can become more confident, I tell them to begin with something so simple that it sometimes surprises them: become confident about one thing. When I was interviewed by Steven Bartlett of the Diary of a CEO fame, I said exactly that. Be confident about one thing—just one. It doesn't matter what it is. Learn to make a bed so well that when you finish, you know it has been done properly. Learn to make a great omelet. Master a cartwheel. Learn to strike a soccer ball exactly where you want it to go. Learn to polish a pair of shoes properly, grow a tomato, sharpen a knife, bake bread, tie a particular knot, play a song on the piano, or make the best cup of coffee in your house. The activity itself is almost irrelevant. What matters is that you become genuinely good at something because, before you can begin building confidence more broadly, you need to know what genuine confidence feels like.
That may seem too simple, but there is an important reason for it. Confidence is not an abstraction when you have actually experienced mastery. Think about something you already do extremely well, whatever it may be, and consider how differently you approach it from something you have never attempted. There is no internal debate. You don't stand there wondering whether you can do it. You simply begin because you have evidence from your own experience that you know what you are doing. Your brain has been there before. Your hands have been there before. You understand the sequence, you recognize the likely problems, and you know how to make adjustments when something doesn't go exactly as planned. There is a familiarity to competence that settles us, and that sensation is what I want people to recognize.
Consider the child learning to kick a soccer ball. In the beginning, almost nothing works as intended. The approach may be awkward, the supporting foot lands in the wrong place, the body is poorly positioned, and the ball goes anywhere except where the child wanted it to go. There may be frustration, embarrassment, even the temptation to quit, particularly if other children seem to do it effortlessly. But the child who continues kicking the ball begins making adjustments, often without consciously realizing it. After fifty kicks there is improvement; after hundreds there is consistency; after thousands, the body no longer needs to consciously calculate every movement. Eventually the child approaches the ball with an expectation about what will happen next, not because someone has told him to believe in himself, but because experience has given him a reason to believe in himself.
There is an enormous difference between those two things.
We sometimes treat confidence as though it can be produced by thinking positively about ourselves, projecting certainty, adopting a particular posture, or repeating affirmations. I have spent too many years watching people under stress to believe that confidence is so easily manufactured. You can certainly learn behaviors that make you appear more confident, and there are occasions when those behaviors can be useful, but appearing confident and being confident are not the same thing. Bravado can be manufactured. Arrogance can be manufactured. Dominance can be performed. Genuine confidence is more difficult because genuine confidence has a history. It comes from attempting something, discovering that you are not yet very good at it, tolerating that discomfort, learning, practicing, improving, failing again, making corrections, and eventually reaching the point where uncertainty has been replaced by competence.
This is also why preparation has always been so important to me. When I entered the FBI, being handed credentials did not suddenly make me competent. The credentials gave me authority; competence had to be earned. There were things I did not know, situations I had never encountered, skills I had not yet developed, and people around me who knew vastly more than I did. Confidence came gradually, as it does in most professions, from study, observation, experience, repetition, and the willingness to learn from mistakes. There is no shortcut around that process, nor should there be, because it is the process itself that eventually allows us to trust what we know and, just as importantly, recognize what we don't know.
Preparation is one of the most reliable ways we have of reducing uncertainty, and uncertainty is one of the great enemies of confidence. When you walk into an important meeting having studied the issues, considered the personalities involved, anticipated the questions you are likely to be asked, and thought carefully about what could go wrong, you enter differently from the person who is hoping to improvise his way through it. The same is true of a presentation, an interview, a negotiation, or a difficult conversation. Preparation does more than give us information; it gives us mental capacity. Instead of using all of our cognitive resources worrying about what we are going to say next or whether we are making a good impression, we have enough mental bandwidth left to observe what is happening around us.
That is something I came to value enormously in the FBI. When we become anxious and uncertain, our attention tends to turn inward. We begin monitoring ourselves: How am I doing? Did I say the wrong thing? What does this person think of me? What am I going to say next? Am I losing control of this conversation? All of that internal chatter has a cost because while we are attending to ourselves, we are not fully attending to the other person. Preparation quiets some of that noise. Competence quiets even more of it. The better prepared you are, the more freedom you have to listen, observe, adjust, and recognize what others are communicating. Confidence, when properly developed, doesn't make us less observant; it gives us the freedom to become more observant.
Perhaps this explains why some of the most genuinely confident people I have known have also been among the quietest. They did not need to dominate every conversation, remind everyone of their accomplishments, or insist upon having the last word. They could listen without feeling diminished. They could ask questions without worrying that the question might reveal something they didn't know. They could acknowledge someone else's expertise without experiencing it as a threat to their own. Most importantly, they could say, “I don't know,” and remain perfectly comfortable doing so.
That kind of humility is not the opposite of confidence; very often it is evidence of it. It is insecurity that so frequently demands that we pretend to know more than we do.
There is another part of confidence that becomes apparent only when things go wrong, and sooner or later things always go wrong. The presentation falters, the business fails, the relationship ends, the decision proves incorrect, the criticism arrives, or something happens for which we could not possibly have prepared. It is at these moments that we discover whether our confidence depended entirely on succeeding. A person who believes confidence means always being right will eventually be shattered by reality. A more durable form of confidence comes from knowing that even when circumstances turn against us, we are all capable of observing, thinking, adapting, learning, and continuing.
This is why doing difficult things matters so much. Every time we face something that makes us uncomfortable and nevertheless move through it, we create evidence about ourselves. We discover that embarrassment is survivable, that anxiety eventually subsides, that mistakes can be corrected, that ignorance can be remedied, and that failure, painful as it may be, does not have to be permanent. The first time we do something difficult, we may have little more than hope to sustain us. The tenth time, we have experience. Eventually we acquire a personal history that tells us, I have been uncertain before. I have been afraid before. I have been unprepared for what happened before, and somehow, I learned what I needed to learn and found my way through it.
This is where becoming confident about that first seemingly insignificant thing becomes so valuable, because once you have experienced the progression from incompetence to competence, you understand something fundamental about yourself. You remember when the omelet was terrible, when the cartwheel was awkward, when the soccer ball went everywhere except where you intended. You remember not knowing how to do the thing that now seems effortless. That memory becomes useful when you confront the next challenge because you can remind yourself, quite accurately, There was a time when I couldn't do that either.
There is enormous freedom in understanding that being bad at something is not the same as being incapable of becoming good at it. Too many people confuse being a beginner with being a failure, and as a result they retreat from precisely the experiences that could enlarge their confidence. They don't want to look foolish, make mistakes, ask basic questions, or reveal that they don't know what they are doing. Yet every expert we admire once stood exactly where the beginner stands. There was a first day, a first attempt, an embarrassing mistake, a question they were reluctant to ask, and probably a moment when they wondered whether they would ever become proficient.
What ultimately grows from these experiences is something deeper than confidence in any particular skill. We begin developing confidence in our ability to learn. We begin trusting that we can prepare ourselves, that we can tolerate uncertainty, that we can acquire knowledge we do not presently possess, and that we can recover when our efforts don't produce the result we hoped for. That is a far more useful form of confidence than simply believing that we will succeed, because no one can promise us success. Life is too unpredictable for that. What we can develop is the belief, grounded in experience rather than wishful thinking, that whatever comes, we will engage it thoughtfully and do what we can with what we have.
Over time, this becomes a form of self-trust, and self-trust may be the closest thing we have to enduring confidence. You don't have to know that you will give the perfect speech; you know that you have prepared and can recover if you lose your place. You don't have to know that every decision will prove correct; you know that you will pay attention to the facts and change course when the evidence requires it. You don't have to know that you will never fail; you know that failure will not relieve you of the responsibility to learn, adapt, and try again. Confidence, understood this way, is not the absence of doubt. It is the knowledge that doubt does not have to control what we do.
So, if you lack confidence, don't begin by trying to transform your entire personality. Don't attempt to become the most commanding person in the room or imitate someone whose outward certainty you admire. Begin smaller. Find one thing and learn to do it exceptionally well. It can be something so ordinary that no one else ever notices. Make the bed properly. Perfect the omelet. Practice the cartwheel. Kick the soccer ball a thousand times until you know where it will go. What matters is not the activity, but what the activity teaches you about yourself.
Become confident about one thing so that you know, in your bones, what confidence feels like. Then take that knowledge with you to the next thing that frightens you, challenges you, or makes you uncertain. You will still experience doubt because we all do, and you will still encounter situations in which you feel completely out of your depth because that is part of being human. But now you possess something you did not have before: evidence. You have already taken yourself from not knowing to knowing, from awkwardness to competence, from uncertainty to confidence.
And once you have done that with one thing, you know you can do it again.
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