You don't have to look confident to be confident

I wonder if we have made confidence into something it isn't.

Think about a student in a room where everyone is introducing themselves. One person speaks easily and seems completely comfortable, while another takes a little longer to answer. It is very easy for the second student to think, They are confident. I'm not. But how do we really know?

We often associate confidence with how someone appears, how easily they speak or how quickly they have an answer. When we don't behave that way ourselves, we can assume something is missing. But confidence does not always look like that. You can take a moment to think and still be confident. You can listen to someone with a different point of view and still be comfortable with your own.

I sometimes wonder if, in teaching young people to communicate confidently, we also create a pressure to perform confidence. To say the right thing. To sound certain. To appear comfortable even when they aren't. Maybe a better starting point is being able to bring your authentic self into the conversation. Saying what you genuinely think, rather than what you think will make you sound confident. Being honest about what you know and what you are still figuring out. I think confidence grows when you become more comfortable doing that.

There will always be situations where a young person feels unsure or finds themselves in a room where someone else seems much more confident. That does not mean they don't belong. Maybe confidence is not about having everything figured out or looking like you do. It is about being comfortable enough with yourself to let your authentic self come through, even while you are still figuring things out.