Confidence isn't volume: what trusting yourself really means

A meeting. Someone has been talking for ten minutes — fast, loud, with big gestures and without a single “maybe”. Then a colleague who has been silent until now speaks up, and in two sentences says the thing that changes the direction of the whole conversation. And yet after the meeting most people will say that he was the confident one. Do you recognise the scene?

If confidence sounds like volume in your mind — a quick answer, a solid performance, an opinion on everything and never an “I don’t know” — you’re not alone. That equation is built deep into our culture, from school desks to job interviews. But it is wrong. And as long as you believe it, you will be measuring your own confidence with the wrong ruler — and perhaps feeling deficient exactly where you are in fact solid.

In this piece we take that myth apart: where it comes from, why volume is often a defence rather than strength, what quiet confidence is and how you can recognise it in yourself. On what confidence actually is and how it connects to self-awareness, I’ve written in the main piece — here we go into one single but important corner: the difference between performance and certainty.

The myth we absorbed from our surroundings: confidence as performance

In her book Quiet (2012), Susan Cain describes how Western culture moved, over the twentieth century, from a “culture of character” to a “culture of personality”: people used to be judged by what they were like — honest, hard-working, dependable — but with the rise of cities, commerce and salesmanship it became more important how they presented themselves. Performance displaced substance. Cain calls this the “extrovert ideal”: the belief that the ideal person is sociable, quick, loud and always ready for the stage — and that anything else is a flaw to be corrected.

This ideal isn’t merely a cultural anecdote; it can be measured. Research on group dynamics has shown for decades that groups most often choose as leaders those who talk the most — not those who say the most sensible things. MacLaren and colleagues (2020) tested this directly and found that the amount of talking predicts who will be recognised as the leader in a group, regardless of intelligence or personality traits. The literature has given it an almost mocking name: the “babble hypothesis”. A group simply reads volume as competence — even when there is no connection between the two.

The consequence: if you grew up in a school that rewarded raised hands, and you work in an environment that rewards fast talkers, you have learned to equate confidence with decibels. But what a group is able to recognise, and what confidence actually is, are two different things.

Incidentally — the cost of this myth isn’t only the injustice done to quiet people. It is expensive for the groups themselves: if influence goes to the loudest rather than the most thoughtful, decisions get made by decibel. And it is expensive for the loud: anyone who has built influence on performance has to keep the performance up — every day, in every room, without a break. Few people imagine how exhausted people who “have such a way with words” can be.

Arrogance isn’t an excess of confidence — it’s a deficit of it

Here is a distinction I consider one of the most important in my work: confidence and arrogance are not two points on the same scale. They are not “a little self-belief” and “too much self-belief”. They are two different mechanisms.

Confidence is an inner assessment: I trust that I can do this, and that assessment survives questions, criticism and defeat. Arrogance is a defence: an outwardly inflated image that has to be confirmed continually, because inside it isn’t solid. The psychologist Michael Kernis (2003) formalised this difference by distinguishing between secure and fragile high self-esteem: both people speak well of themselves, but the first stays stable when something goes wrong, while the second needs constant feeding from outside — admiration, wins, comparisons — and wobbles at every doubt.

It is precisely fragility that explains why arrogant people tolerate contradiction so badly. In a well-known series of experiments, Bushman and Baumeister (1998) showed that the most aggressive reactions to criticism come not from people with low self-esteem, as you might expect, but from those with a high but unstable, narcissistically tinged self-image — because for them criticism hits not an opinion but a foundation. We call this, carefully, narcissistic fragility: the bigger the facade, the thinner the wall behind it often is.

So an almost paradoxical conclusion holds: the person who has to be the loudest in the room, who can’t bear questions and who never says “I was wrong”, is in fact showing you where they are afraid. Real confidence can afford silence — because it doesn’t need anyone to hear it in order to exist.

So what is quiet confidence

If volume isn’t the measure, what is? Quiet confidence shows up in three small but very recognisable behaviours.

The first is calm persistence. Not persuading with all your might, not retreating at the first objection — but the ability to say “I understand your reservation, and I still see it like this” and stay kind while doing it. A confident person can hold a position without defending it like a fortress, and can also change it without falling apart in the process. On that stance — how to stay yourself in the presence of others — I write in the piece on differentiation.

The second is boundaries without drama. “I won’t be taking that on.” “That doesn’t work for me.” No raised voice, no long apology, no ultimatum. A boundary stated calmly is one of the most reliable signs of inner solidity — because only someone who doesn’t need the other person’s approval to know that they have a right to it can set a boundary calmly. How you learn this, I’ve described in detail in the piece on setting boundaries.

The third is admitting “I don’t know”. It sounds like weakness, but it is the opposite: research on intellectual humility (Porter and Schumann, 2018) shows that people who can acknowledge the limits of their knowledge are more open to learning, take opposing views better, and are paradoxically more persuasive to those they talk with. “I don’t know, I’ll check” can only be said by someone whose worth doesn’t hang on knowing everything. Arrogance can’t afford that sentence — and that is exactly how you recognise it.

Introversion isn’t a lack of confidence

Because we mistake volume for confidence, we easily label quiet people as insecure. But introversion and low confidence are two entirely different things. Introversion is a property of the nervous system: introverted people fill up faster in the presence of strong stimuli — noise, crowds, long social occasions — and need silence to recover their energy. That is not fear and it is not self-doubt; it is a mode of functioning. An introverted person can be deeply confident, and an extroverted one full of doubt — you see only the surface, not the interior.

Interestingly, quiet people even have an advantage in certain circumstances. In a study of leadership, Adam Grant and colleagues (2011) showed that introverted leaders achieved better results than extroverted ones when leading proactive teams — because they knew how to listen, leave room for other people’s ideas and actually use them, rather than holding the stage the whole time. Volume opens doors; listening builds.

So if you are a quiet person who has felt “not enough” all their life, let me say it plainly: perhaps your problem was never confidence. Perhaps you were only measuring yourself with a ruler made for somebody else. The question for you isn’t “how do I get louder”, but “where did I learn that my form of presence doesn’t count” — and that is entirely different work: not fixing yourself, but returning the message to sender.

Loud doubt and quiet certainty: what is really going on inside

And now the most interesting part: the outside and the inside often don’t match — in both directions.

Outwardly commanding volume can hide great inner doubt. Anderson and colleagues (2012) showed that overconfidence often works as a strategy for gaining status: people who perform more confidently than their actual knowledge warrants gain influence in a group — because the group reads confidence as competence. Performance, then, can be a learned currency rather than a reflection of an inner state. Many a person you experience as unassailable in a meeting is at home in the evening chewing over whether they were good enough — I write about this particular gap between outward success and inward doubt in the piece on impostor syndrome.

And the other way round: outward reticence can rest on entirely solid inner certainty. A person who says nothing in a meeting may not doubt themselves at all — they may simply be weighing things up, because they don’t need to speak in order to exist. Their confidence produces no sound, but it does produce decisions: they say calmly what they think when they have something to say; they don’t change their position depending on who is in the room; and they don’t fall apart when they’re wrong.

The conclusion to take away from this: confidence cannot be measured from the outside. It is measured from the inside — by how you feel when the applause dies down, not by how you sound when you speak.

How to recognise quiet confidence in yourself

Because quiet confidence isn’t measured in decibels, it is easy to overlook in yourself. Here are some signs you can look for — not on stage, but in small moments:

• You can say “no” without a long apology — and afterwards you don’t spend hours chewing over whether you were too harsh.
• Criticism hurts you but doesn’t fell you. You can hear it, take what is useful from it and leave the rest — without doubting everything you are for three days.
• You don’t need the last word. You can step out of an argument that is going nowhere without experiencing it as a defeat.
• You can praise others without feeling smaller for it. Someone else’s strength doesn’t threaten yours.
• You ask for help when you need it — because for you a request isn’t proof of incompetence.
• Your opinion survives a room where nobody shares it. You may voice it quietly, or not at all — but inside you don’t lose it.

Notice what these signs have in common: none of them happens on a stage. They all happen in small, invisible moments — in an email you don’t write three times; in an evening when you don’t chew over a meeting; in a request you make without detours. Confidence isn’t measured at the peaks but in the background, when nobody is watching and there is nothing to be won.

If you recognised yourself in several points, you have more confidence than you think — only in a form the culture doesn’t know how to measure. If you didn’t, that is no verdict: confidence isn’t a trait you’re born with, it is something that gets built. And it is built — perhaps the most important sentence in this piece — through actions, not through volume. Exactly how, I’ve described in the piece on building confidence through small actions.

A view from the therapy room: when the mask gets too heavy

In my work I meet both sides of this piece. I meet quiet people who have heard all their lives that they aren’t assertive enough, and who concluded from that that something is wrong with them — even though their quietness was often exactly the place where they were most themselves. And I meet loud people whom performance has exhausted: for years they held up an image of command and one day realised that nobody — not even they themselves — knows them without it. As a former actor I know that second side from the inside too: you know how certainty is played, and that is exactly why you know how little it has in common with the real thing.

The good news is that both can be helped by the same step: moving attention from the sound to the foundation. Not “how do I sound”, but “what am I standing on”. In therapy that means exploring when the volume had to be born in the first place — who had to be performed for, whose approval had to be won — and slowly building what performance cannot replace: an inner sense that you are all right even when nobody is watching. If you recognise yourself in this and would like to walk that road with someone, you can get in touch.

Until then, tonight perhaps just this: next time you are in a room with someone very loud and you feel small beside them, remember — volume measures the need for an audience, not strength. Your silence may have firmer foundations than their stage.