Feeling Calm Confidence At Work
“I want to come across with calm confidence,” she told me on our first call together. It’s actually a common request, so I want to unpack it a little bit for you, my lovely reader …
It sounds so simple, but the thing that prevents this is usually not that you are highly anxious all of the time, and it is not that you lack confidence in every area of your life.
What you are seeking usually lies a few layers deeper.
Take the example of a patient going to a GP and saying, “Give me sleeping pills. I just want to sleep through the night.” A very good GP will want to know why the person is not sleeping in the first place, and deal with those underlying issues first.
It is the same when someone says they want calm confidence.
As a leadership psychologist, I am not interested in simply helping someone look calm and act confidently. I want to understand what is preventing them from feeling it already.
Because for most empathic professionals, they are conscientious, good at their job, insightful, trusted and relied upon.
And yet, in the moments that matter most, something awkward happens … They prepare more than they need to. They adjust their tone mid-sentence. They choose their words carefully. They monitor the other person’s reaction while they are still speaking. And afterwards, they replay the whole exchange, wondering whether they said too much, too little, or not quite the right thing.
From the outside, this is often invisible. From the inside, it does not feel like calm confidence – it feels like effortful micro-management.
That is why I do not start with posture tips or assertiveness scripts. Because if what you are saying does not feel true to you, it will not be received in the way you want it to be.
So the real work is not simply becoming more confident. It is understanding what happens in those moments when your awareness of other people starts to override your own judgement.
Calm confidence gets lost in the ‘credibility gap’.
The credibility gap is the gap between your actual capability – your judgement, insight, leadership potential, and what you are fully capable of contributing – and how that capability comes across in the moment, when you edit yourself, soften your message, and become more focused on managing other people’s reactions than on expressing what you really think.
When that gap closes, your credibility grows and other people respond to you in ways you deserve: they trust your judgement more, they feel your conviction, they experience you as credible, they acknowledge your value, and see your leadership capability.
That is what calm confidence actually is – the sense that what is happening inside you and what you are expressing are finally aligned.
If this resonates, try my free self-assessment to discover your credibility gaps, in the CREDIBILITY CHECK-IN
Jessbaker.co.uk/CredibilityCheck
Go straight into action with the CREDIBILITY SHIFT audio guides, which also comes with an ebook and lots of coaching questions to help you move forward in your own time.
Jessbaker.co.uk/CredibilityShift
Go straight to solutions
Jessbaker.co.uk/CredibilityCatalyst
Drop a comment below or email me if you prefer. I write from the heart, from my personal experience, and draw on my decades of helping empathic professionals get promoted, and enjoy their leadership roles.