Appearances can be deceptive. It’s natural to look at those around us and assume that they are all brimming with confidence and it is only us that is lacking in this department.

But a lack of confidence can affect absolutely anyone and just because someone appears to be confident, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they feel themselves to be so all of the time.

When I ran a confidence building course a couple of years ago I spoke to a couple of friends about what I was doing and I told them about the content of the course. “Gosh, that sounds like something that I should do!” a few of them responded. Whenever someone said this it always took me by surprise because these were not the ‘sort’ of people I had assumed would want to do the course. These were generally outgoing and seemingly confident friends of mine.

But I guess it just goes to show that what is going on inside a person can be very different to what is visible to people from the outside. When we become anxious we often worry that it must be screamingly obvious to anyone and everyone who happens to be in the vicinity. We assume that we must be sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb. Anxiety feels awful and because it is so all-consuming, we therefore assume that others must have noticed and that we must also look awful.

But actually feeling anxious is much less obvious than we assume. Even if we do go into a situation not feeling desperately sure of what we are doing, the chances are that noone else has even noticed (they are probably too busy thinking about their own confidence!)

Takeaways!

• Lacking confidence is entirely normal and more people than you will ever realise (even those you know well and have always seemed like the confident ones) lack confidence in certain situations too. So you are not alone.
• The flip side of not being able to see the lack of confidence in others, is that others can’t see a lack of confidence in you. So when you are anxious it’s much less obvious than you assume it to be. The benefit of this is that you can sometimes pretend to be more confident than you actually are. You can act confidently even when you aren’t feeling particularly confident. This is something you may do in the early days of your confidence building journey and we’ll go on to talk about exactly how.