Right, confidence. Nobody says this part out loud so I will. You don't wait around to feel it. You decide it. First thing, before you've earned any of it, and it doesn't matter one bit whether there's evidence sitting there or not. Same goes for feeling ready. Don't wait for that one, it's not coming. Twenty years in and I'm still not ready, if I'm honest with you, never have been. You go first and the confidence shows up late, after the fact, a bit embarrassed it doubted you. That's just the order it happens in. Everyone's got it backwards.
You already know how to do all this, mind. You were born knowing it. Look at any four-year-old. He'll stand there and tell you straight he's going to be a champion, a pilot, the strongest bloke who ever lived, and he'll dare you to say otherwise. No proof, no record, nobody's permission, and he's never once felt he needed it. Nor did you. Then school got hold of you for a dozen years and quietly trained it out, sit still, hand up, wait your turn to be picked. And why would they do that. Because someone who already reckons he's enough is a pain to manage and you can't sell him a thing. You can't lord it over a man by deciding if he's worthy when he went and decided that for himself years ago. So go and take it back off them.
Picture three blokes at the one door. One of them gives it a knock and stands there waiting, polite as you like, for someone to let him in. Another has a quick think, reckons the odds aren't worth it, and off home he goes. The last one doesn't break stride, walks straight through like the whole room's been sat in there holding its breath on his account. And the daft thing is it works. Rules go soft around a man like that. Exceptions turn up from nowhere to suit him. Total strangers pick his cause up off the floor and start carrying it for him. There's so little of that going about that the world's never even built itself a defence against it.
The next bit took me years to get through my thick skull. People will take you at whatever price you've gone and hung round your own neck, nothing more. Turn up looking cheap and the room's already knocking you down a peg before you've so much as pulled out your chair. Turn up like you cost an absolute fortune and, funny enough, most of them just quietly cough up, no argument about it, because next to nobody ever bothers turning the tag over to check it's real. They're reading your face instead. Your shoulders. How fast the words are tumbling out of you. And they'll swallow whatever story that lot's busy telling them. So go and tell them a better one, then.
Here's one from my own life. Years back, long before a soul was paying it, I decided an hour of mine was worth five grand and I started carrying on like it was settled. The market hadn't signed off on that, course it hadn't, but I wasn't going to let the market be the one holding the pen. You decide your own worth, you live like the thing's already done and dusted, and it'll surprise you how quick everything round you starts shuffling itself about to fit.
Reality's a negotiation, see, and your trouble is you've spent years sat on the wrong side of the table making the other bloke's argument for him. Pack it in. Quit talking yourself down. Quit saying sorry for the room you take up. And quit scanning every room you walk into for that little nod off someone that says you're allowed to be in here. You're not owed that nod and you never needed it to begin with.
Here's a practical one, and it's back to front from what most people will tell you. Your body leads and your head trails after it, not the other way about. So take your voice and slow it right down. Let your shoulders drop. Take that breath you keep forgetting you're allowed. Sit like the building's yours, and the dirt under it, and the road out the front while you're at it. Hold someone's eye a beat longer than feels comfy. Do that lot and the feeling of being confident just turns up of its own accord, because you've gone and built the thing from the outside in.
It rubs off, too. Walk in sure and the room goes quiet and leans your way. I've watched it happen in pitch meetings more times than I can count and I still don't fully know why it works. People want someone else to be certain so badly they'll follow whoever bothers to be. That's it. No deeper trick to it than that.
Nerves make me talk. I'll keep explaining a decision long after everyone in the room has already nodded along and moved on, and I can hear myself doing it, and I carry on regardless. My wife points it out. So do my business partners. It's a habit I've been trying to break for the better part of twenty years and some days I manage it and plenty of days I don't. The short version is you're almost always better off saying less than you want to.
The push always comes. For me it tends to be my own price read back at me across a table, slow, everyone gone quiet to watch. I used to cave on it and tell myself later I'd just been reasonable. That was a lie I told myself for years. These days I sit in the silence and wait. It's uncomfortable. I've made my peace with that.
A no is just weather, anyway. That's all it is. It tells you a bit about the room, the timing, what mood some stranger you'll never clap eyes on again happened to be in, and absolutely nothing about what you're worth. The cheap version of you hears one no and marks himself down then and there. The version I'm on about hears the same no, gives a nod, and goes and knocks the next door at exactly the rate he was knocking before. Nothing changed in him. Why would it.
And give over comparing yourself to everyone else, for pity's sake. Every minute you burn measuring yourself against the next bloke along is a minute you've spent wearing his insecurities round instead of getting on with whatever you actually wanted. Run your own race. At your own number. Let the scoreboard sort itself out down the track, it always does in the end, and half the people you were busy measuring against weren't even running.
Walk at the pressure, don't bolt from it. Those nerves you get before the big room, the proper churning ones, that's just fuel. Same chemicals firing as when you're excited about something, only they've thrown a darker coat on. Pressure's a bit of a privilege when you think about it, it only ever gets handed to the people who actually made it into the arena in the first place. So feel the thing, take your one breath, and go in regardless.
I talk to a billionaire and the kid making my coffee the exact same way. Not as a virtue thing, I worked out a long time ago that the second you're impressed by someone you've handed them the room. Most people agreed to be impressed by status without ever noticing they agreed. I didn't. Big names stop looking big once you mean it.
Own the whole of your story while you're at it. All of it. The wins, sure, but the scars too, and the times the whole lot went up in your hands and you had to go back to the start with nothing. And if you've ever done anything worth the doing, there'll be a fair few of those. A man who's ashamed of his own past can be threatened with it for the rest of his life. The man who tells it himself, flat, no drama, gets in first and hands his enemies an empty gun to point at him.
I sat on an idea once for the better part of two years because the timing never felt quite right. Someone else built more or less the same thing and did very well out of it. I had to sit and watch them do it knowing I'd got there first in my own head and just hadn't moved. And the strange thing was it stung worse than the times I'd actually had a go at something and watched it fall over. At least when I tried it and failed I'd been in the game. This other thing I'd just talked myself out of, quietly, with very sensible reasons, every month, for two years.
People who call all of this a con are missing what it's for. The confidence on its own does nothing. What it does is buy you the reps, gets you into the room and the attempt enough times that you actually get good. I faked a lot of it in my twenties, walked into things I had no business walking into. By the time I was any good at them I'd stopped noticing I was doing it. I don't really think about whether it's real or not anymore.
So be your own loudest voice in there. The world hands out doubt for nothing, by the bucket, forever, you'll never be short of it. You don't need to be stood there chucking more on the pile yourself. Talk to yourself the way you'd talk to someone you'd staked everything you own on, because when you actually sit and think about it, that is exactly what you've done.
You'll be too much for some rooms, I'll warn you now. Too loud. Too certain. Too unwilling to apologise for wanting a good deal more than the people sat around you have settled for. Good. Leave it exactly as it is, don't go sanding it down to fit. That itchy too-much feeling is just the signal you've gone and outgrown the room you're in, nothing more sinister than that, so get up and go find yourself a bigger one.
So sort the posture out. Slow the voice down. Put your number up where they can see it. Walk in like the meeting genuinely couldn't get going without you in the chair. The meek don't inherit a thing if it never once crossed their mind they were owed more than they got. Be too much. Be a pain to ignore. Those doors were always going to swing open for somebody or other, so you may as well decide it's going to be you, and go through them like they'd been stood there propped open waiting on you the whole time.