In other words, confidence is when the pain of not taking action outweighs the pain of taking action. To develop confidence, you need to build self-trust by setting small, achievable goals and celebrating your successes. This will help you establish a track record of wins and boost your belief in yourself. Additionally, confidence is like a muscle that can be developed over time with practice, repetition, and experience. By pushing past your comfort zone, taking risks, and learning from your failures, you can grow your confidence and become the authority you aspire to be.
You are not simply going to feel confident when you speak. What happens is you learn to manage your relationship to uncertainty, your relationship to attention, and your relationship to your own standards. When you are first starting out, having an audience is intimidating. Your imperfections are highlighted. Small errors feel like huge failures. This pressure causes you to over prepare in some ways, and under prepare in others (like in your delivery or ability to adjust). The first step toward confidence is recognizing that you’re supposed to feel uncomfortable when you’re being watched and held accountable.
With experience, speakers begin to recognize their physical responses. They find that their hands shake, their heart rate increases, their mouth goes dry. This awareness allows speakers to no longer be alarmed by their responses, but instead, to manage them through breathing, slowing down and interpreting their experiences. They place their focus on the message and not on feeling observed. This decreases the internal focus, allowing the speaker to communicate, rather than defend. Presence increases when speakers stop focusing on “How am I doing?” and instead focus on “What does the audience need from me?”
So is preparation. Novices may memorize a script, and fall apart if a word goes missing and the script falls apart. Experienced speakers memorize themes or messages, and they can weave these into a speech regardless of the specific words. A speaker who knows the main points they want to make will be less derailed if the projector doesn’t work, or if they get a tough question, or if they have to cut their remarks short. And we accept this imperfect, adaptive speaker as an expert.
That’s where feedback comes in. Positive and negative feedback helps you discover tendencies that might be blind spots for you—say, rushing through your presentation, or not maintaining eye contact, or not leaving enough space for pauses. Although it can be disheartening at first, negative feedback serves as a useful guide that directs your improvement. Eventually, you’ll develop a more detached attitude and be able to identify ways to improve as well as where you’re doing well. And you will develop that all-important experience into expertise, meaning every time you present, you’ll be improving, not just repeating.
Ultimately, though, I believe authority as a public speaker is not about power at all, but about stability. It’s about having enough confidence to know that you can take risks and still find your way back to simplicity. Once you hit this level of confidence, you stop trying to please others and focus on providing something to them. The people in the audience pick up on this, and reward your stability with attention and faith. Something that once made you nervous becomes something that can be used to steer conversations, motivate others to act, or just make things more understandable. It becomes not a personality characteristic, but a learned talent based in experience and mindset.