Perceived Confidence - the route to real confidence as a speaker

If you've ever sat through a training session and been told to "just be confident," you'll know exactly how frustrating that can be, particularly if you struggle with speaking anxiety. And yet just a few weeks ago it cropped up on a list of advice I saw for young speakers. 

Here's the problem with "be confident" as a piece of advice: it treats confidence like a switch you can flick on. 

It isn't. 

Confidence is a feeling, and feelings aren't things we can just summon on command before walking into a meeting, a pitch, or a room full of people who are watching you a little too closely for comfort.

So if you can't just decide to feel confident, what do you do instead?

Meet perceived confidence

This is the bit that changes everything: how you feel and how you come across are two completely separate things. They don't have to match.

You can walk into a room absolutely terrified — heart racing, mind blank, not entirely sure how to even say hello — and still be perceived as confident by everyone in it. That's not about faking it or plastering on a smile. It's about understanding that confidence, as other people experience it, is really just a set of behaviours. Posture. Voice. Eye contact. Stillness. Nothing more mystical than that.

And the good news is that behaviours can be practised, even when the feeling behind them isn't there yet. 

We can practice behaviours that settle the unhelpful physiological states of nerves, like the heart racing and thoughts jumbling. 

And then, practice exhibiting “confident” qualities. 

Why this actually matters

If you take "be confident" at face value, it does something quite damaging: it makes people feel like the problem is them. They walk into the meeting still feeling nervous and conclude they've failed before they've even started, or worse, they overcorrect and swing into forced, perceived arrogant territory instead. Under-confidence and perceived arrogance sit closer together than you'd think — both are really just people reacting badly to the same underlying discomfort.

Separating "how I feel" from "how I behave" takes the pressure off. You're allowed to feel nervous. You're allowed to not feel ready. The behaviours are the thing you're working on. The emotional state follows. 

The behaviours that build perceived confidence

A few of the big ones worth becoming aware of and then practising:

Posture: Standing small, shoulders up round your ears, arms pulled in — that's your body's natural instinct to shrink and protect itself. Completely understandable, not helpful for your audience or your message. Stand tall and open instead.

Stillness: Shuffling feet, rocking, fidgeting — it all reads as discomfort, even if you're not conscious you're doing it. Imagine roots growing down from your feet into the ground. Plant yourself.

Eye contact: You don't need to maintain it constantly — that's not the goal. Look up and away while you're finding your thought, then bring your eyes back to your audience when you say the important part.

Voice: This includes one of my favourite shifts – I call it suggestion vs statement. "Hi, my name's Guy?" with the pitch rising at the end sounds like a suggestion, like you're not even sure of your own name. "Hi, my name's Guy." landing down with the voice is sure of itself, it’s a statement. Same words, completely different impression. This matters enormously when you're saying anything you actually need people to believe — your name, a price, a recommendation.

None of these require you to feel any particular way first. They're just behaviours that you can exhibit even on a day you feel like a wreck inside.

The bit that really matters: the feedback loop

Here's the part I think gets missed the most, and it's the reason practising perceived confidence is worth doing at all.

When you practise these behaviours and someone responds well to you — e.g. they trust you, they buy from you, they engage with what you're saying — that response feeds back into you. You start to actually feel more confident, because you've had a genuine, real experience of things going well. Do that enough times and the feeling starts to catch up with the behaviour. Eventually you're not performing confidence anymore. It's just become confidence.

That's the whole mechanism. You don't wait to feel confident before you act confident. You act first, and the feeling follows as a result of what happens next. Nobody builds real confidence by being told to have it. They build it by doing something, getting a positive response, and recognising that response as evidence they can trust.

So what do you actually do with this?

Next time you're dreading a meeting, a pitch, or standing up in front of a room, don't waste energy trying to talk yourself into feeling confident. It's not going to work, and even if it did, it's not the thing anyone in that room is actually responding to.

Instead, focus on the behaviours. And practice them. 

Stand tall. Plant your feet. Let your voice land instead of drift upward. Be intentional about your thought landings. Bring your eyes back when you say the important part. Do that, and you'll come across as confident regardless of what's going on underneath — and the more often you do it, the more that feeling starts to genuinely turn up on its own.

Feel the fear, practice ‘perceived’ confidence, and the real confidence will catch up later.