“We all think we know confidence when we see it. I’m not so sure.”
Hey Rollers,
I was watching the Springboks play the Barbarians yesterday when I found myself thinking about confidence.
In particular I was thinking about two players: Riley Norton and Henry Pollock.
(And Henry Pollock wasn’t even playing which says something about the young lad!)
Now I’ll be honest, my first draft of this newsletter was mostly judgement and went something like, “Riley Norton looks classy and Henry Pollock is a twat.”.
It was very easy to go down that route, but it certainly didn’t capture the essence of what had actually got me thinking. Because it wasn’t really about who is better, more talented, or more deserving of attention. It was about how differently they seem to carry themselves.
Riley Norton appears to go about his business with very little fanfare. He scored a try and there was no checking of his pulse. He just seems to show up, do the job, and move on to the next thing.
Henry Pollock, on the other hand, seems to embrace the spotlight. There is energy, personality, and a willingness to let the world know he’s there. The word windgat comes to mind.
And as I found myself naturally gravitating towards one style over the other, I started wondering why.
Neither approach is necessarily right or wrong. In fact, both seem to be working pretty well.
That got me thinking about how quickly we all seem to recognise confidence when we see it. Or at least how quickly we think we do.
The interesting thing about confidence is that it might be one of those words that everyone understands until they’re asked to define it. Ask ten people what confidence looks like and I suspect you’d get ten different answers.
For some, confidence is someone who walks into a room and immediately takes charge.
For others, it’s the person who sits quietly and only speaks when they have something worth saying. Some people associate confidence with expression. Others associate it with composure.
They’re just different signals, and I wonder whether we sometimes confuse the signal for the thing itself.
The more I think about it, the less convinced I am that confidence has a particular look.
I’ve met people who are incredibly confident and incredibly quiet. I’ve met people who are incredibly confident and impossible to miss. I’ve also met people in both camps who weren’t confident at all.
Which makes me think confidence probably isn’t what we’re seeing. What we’re seeing is personality. Communication style. Personal preference.
Confidence is something else entirely. In fact, this whole line of thinking took me back to an idea I’ve spoken about before.
I don’t think confidence is a feeling.
I think it’s evidence.
Evidence collected over time that you can handle what comes next. And if that’s true, then confidence doesn’t need to look a certain way.
It doesn’t need to be loud. It doesn’t need to be quiet. It doesn’t need to announce itself at all. It just needs to be there.
I’m challenging myself to become less interested in what confidence looks like and more interested in where it comes from.
Because once you start looking there, the theatrics matter a lot less than the proof.
And that could just be the irony of confidence.
The more interested we become in how it looks, the further we move away from where it actually comes from.
Until next week.
Keep rolling.
Justin 👊
Take Action in 3 Minutes:
Think about someone you consider genuinely confident.
Now ask yourself:
What specifically makes you think that?
Is it what they do?
What they say?
How they carry themselves?
Or is it something deeper than that?
You might discover that you’ve been using a definition of confidence without ever consciously deciding what it means.