Everyone Wants to Build Confidence
A conversation made me realize confidence might be the wrong word
Many people want to feel more confident. But I’ve noticed the idea is strangely fuzzy. It’s hard to define what confidence really is, and even harder to say how to get there.
A conversation yesterday made me think about it differently. It led me to a word I hadn’t considered: presence.
Have you ever been in the same room as someone truly influential?
Someone you admire — a world-class leader, a thinker, a person whose name you knew before you met them? I have met many, and something happens when they enter. In some cases, it’s as if they absorb the room's attention. In others, they seem to exude a quiet sense of peace and wisdom.
I once met Edgar H. Schein at his MIT office. He is known as the father of organizational culture. He effortlessly made the room feel familiar and honest — and at the same time set an implicit rule: no b.s. here.
That is not something you can photograph.
I remember, back in the nineties, magazine ads showed well-dressed men checking expensive watches, walking quickly through modern cities, always in a rush, their jaws clenched. That was the image of the successful, confident, always-on-the-move professional man.
Just imagine the photoshoot. The man was likely a young model with no idea about business, who couldn’t afford the suit he was wearing, let alone the watch.
In this case, the printed medium can only prompt our minds to imagine. It cannot carry what arrives when a truly present person walks into a space. Marketers know which symbols trigger the association — confidence, success, the vibe. But the symbols aren’t the thing.
What’s missing is the person.
Presence, I believe, is what we are actually perceiving when we call someone confident.
And I think it comes from one place: people who know themselves deeply and act in accordance with that. Their presence feels sincere. Aligned. True. And we respond, our defenses drop, we open up, we feel inspired. We trust more easily. We let ourselves be drawn in.
This is also why fake confidence is so easy to detect. We can see the symbols. We can’t feel the alignment.
We chase confidence through accumulation, more experience, more knowledge, more credentials. As if presence were something we could build. We get so invested in becoming confident that we forget to simply observe what is already there.
I have seen children illuminate a room with their innocence, and elders who radiate joy and wisdom. Neither is performing. Neither is trying. Which tells me something important:
Presence is not something we develop. It is something that emerges when the conditions inside us are right.
The Oracle of Delphi left us these words: Know thyself.
For a long time, I thought that meant mapping my reactions, my strengths, my patterns. But I kept running into a problem: I didn’t know how I’d react to things I hadn’t lived yet. My girlfriend often said that she knows me more than I know myself! How could that be possible?
With time, my personality changed. My ideas changed. The map could never be finished. The map was not the territory. A description of the moon is not the moon.
So what does it mean to know yourself?
I think it’s not a destination. It’s a process of acceptance — of this life, this moment, this person I am right now, with what I love, what I struggle with, what lights me up, all of it changing beyond my control but within my field of influence.
When that acceptance becomes real, something relaxes. The self-inflicted tensions, the ones built from belief systems we absorbed without choosing, begin to loosen. A cleaner perception opens. We find ourselves more naturally drawn toward what we’re genuinely good at. We become, as I like to think of it, artisans of our own gifts.
And then, like a good seller who believes in what they offer, we can give freely, knowing it might actually help.
Presence isn’t built. It’s uncovered.
And the only tool for that is the willingness to look honestly at who you already are.
Love,
Jose.
When I was a young and foolish man, I met a wizard. He told me "Magic is the manifestation of your true will. The only trick to magic is to know your true will."
I think presence gets easier once you stop checking how you’re coming across every five seconds.
That self-monitoring is exhausting, and people can feel it anyway.