How to be Confident

Advice for Introverts via a personal anecdote

This post was inspired by a Substack post by Brandon Ellrich entitled ‘How Can You Be Confident When You’re An Introvert’.

Throughout most of my life, I would have dismissed the concept of confidence as an enigma that is entirely beyond me - a positive personality trait that I wished I had but was in no uncertain terms incapable of.

As a dyed-in-the-wool Introvert, I would normally describe myself as having been ‘born without the confidence gene’. The Catch-22 here being that confidence is essentially self-belief, and I happened to inherently believe that I was incapable of possessing it.

This mindset undoubtedly has held me back in my life and, as I am now middle-aged and swiftly rocketing towards ‘old fogeyism’, I look back on my youth with a sense of regret for having not risen to the occasion and vanquishing this demon of my personality.

The reason Introversion and the lack of self-belief held me back in my life is I have always wanted to be a performing artist, specifically as a musician.

I first performed vocals and guitar with a drummer friend as a two-man band when I was a teenager. This was at a family friend’s wedding (we were the warm-up act for the main band) and it was the first time I had ever played music as a frontman live in front of an audience. I had played piano a few times live by then, but always as part of an ensemble and never out front and centre.

In the run-up to the wedding, my friend and I practiced our set relentlessly, dedicated to fine-tuning our performance so we could make a good show of ourselves. The big day came, we were both incredibly nervous, but we went out there with the belief that we were good musicians and capable of delivering a good performance. And we sucked, REALLY BAD! We bombed hard, in fact.

I was mortified and so embarrassed that I didn’t get back on stage for an entire decade when my younger sister (who had become an accomplished performing musician in her own right) basically forced twenty-something me to perform at an open mic night. I had still been honing my craft over the previous decades, improving both as a guitarist and singer, but only in my bedroom and in front of close friends/family.

I agreed to play guitar for her at the open mic while she sang. We had three songs and she sang the first two we had agreed to practice, but for the third she coerced me into singing a song myself. I relented, picked a Jack Johnson song that I knew how to play backwards and, to my eternal surprise, I performed it quite well.

The round of applause I got from the audience was genuine and enthusiastic - unlike the token and limp one born from politeness that I had gotten at the wedding a decade prior. That small and unremarkable round of applause changed my life in no uncertain terms. I loved that sound and the narcissist in me needed more of it like a drug addict. I can never thank my sister enough for giving me the push I needed that day.

I then honed my craft at open mics for a few years before venturing out as a gigging artist, struggling at first to learn the craft as a solo-artist. I finally found my feet with my old band as we performed every weekend for years. I gigged so much and incrementally got so good at it that any and all reservations and anxieties I had about performing live simply evaporated. I even got to the point where I found myself becoming quite bored on stage.

No longer was it something I was nervous about doing - instead it felt like any old job that I knew how to do in auto-pilot - almost like a chore. I was over it - it was passé.

This point came up at my most recent gig where the proprietor of the establishment and I were having a conversation as I set up my equipment. He had poured me a pint when I arrived and suggested something like I probably needed it as ‘Dutch Courage’ or ‘Liquid Confidence’ to go up and perform live.

I told him in no uncertain terms that I did not and told him what I wrote above - that I am so accustomed to it that I have no nervousness whatsoever. He was astonished - completely disbelieving of the idea that anyone could be completely comfortable getting on stage to perform. He insisted, in spite of my repeated denials, that I was brave.

He was himself a musician, a singer, and said he loved singing Karaoke when he was out with his mates but could never do it sober because he got too nervous. I asked him what song he sings at Karaoke and, when I told him I knew how to play it and said I’d be happy to play it on guitar while he sang it to his patrons if he ever wanted to give it a go. He recoiled in horror at the suggestion, stating he could never do such a thing sober.

I overcame such anxieties about performing music live years ago now, but I still think of myself as someone who was born without the capacity of confidence - born without the confidence gene, so to speak. I still hate public speaking and always shy away from anything that resembles it. Even in my third year of University, I struggled with spoken presentations (after preparing and doing several) because I either got tongue-tied or got total brain-fog, forgetting every word in my vocabulary. Thus, I always read from a pre-written script.

There are other areas where my innate lack of confidence rears it ugly head too - The other day I had to ring the Tax Office and I felt physically sick whilst on hold, knowing that I was going to have to talk on the phone to another person when the Musak stopped and someone said ‘Hello’. I am one of those insufferable Millenials who actively dreads actual phone calls, preferring to limit as many conversations as possible to text or email.

I am also the cliched introvert who hates crowds, shies away from social interactions and sits at the back at parties. I tend to avoid such events and normally Irish Goodbye the-fuck-outta-there as soon as I can. I like to be alone and need that time away from other people to recharge my ‘social battery’ before I can spend time with people again.

These last two points hold me back in my music career as I never network with anyone and find it hard to pick up the phone and speak to venues, businesses and pub landlords who might potentially hire me as a performer. I email loads of them of course but, as is the case with everyone, none of them really read their emails other than the most important and pressing ones. Speaking to an actual human being is key in these matters.

So, introversion and a lack of confidence holds me back in much the same way that Brandon Ellrich alludes to in his post that triggered my writing of this essay. So why can I get up and perform music at the drop of the hat with no anxiety or nervousness? How can an Introvert like me become confident at doing something they shake at the very thought of?

Well, I alluded to the ‘how’ above - Practice and repeated exposure. You have to take the plunge (and inevitably fail at first), then do it again and again (ad infinitum) until you get good at it. Quite simply, you have to hone your craft over time, gradually and incrementally. There is no other way. No short-cuts - no easy way. You have to man up, get over yourself and just do the fucking thing.

In University (studying music as a mature student), I had many conversations with the younger students that were akin to the one I had with the pub landlord recently - a disbelief in how comfortable I was with getting on stage and performing live.

Many felt they weren’t yet ready for it and had a narrative in their heads that they were going to practice until they were so good that they couldn’t help but crush it on stage. This is feasible, but neither practical nor realistic as a game-plan. In fact, I think it is a cope, one developed to allow them to avoid getting on stage.

I have seen the most incredibly talented musicians fall apart completely due to nerves when they get on stage. They can be the single most technically proficient and skilled craftsperson on their instrument in the entire world, but Red-Light-Syndrome (freezing, stage-fright, brain-fog) will rattle their cage and reduce them back into seeming novices and a quivering mess.

This is because they (playing proficiently and performing live) are two distinct and separate disciplines, requiring distinct skill sets that only come from years of study and practice. That’s why, someone like me (who is by no means a virtuoso musician) can outshine a far more accomplished player on stage - I have developed the skills needed to get on stage and perform whereas the virtuoso who mastered his craft playing in his bedroom for decades cannot because he focussed entirely on one skill and not the other.

I always tell talented young musicians who are nervous about performing live, ‘You can be the best musician in the world in your bedroom, but getting on stage is a completely different skill - one you can only master in the same way that you did the first. You get up there, you suck (which is normal and absolutely normal), you think about what you can improve upon and then you repeat that cycle until you don’t suck anymore’.

This is why I am no longer anxious about performing live. I didn’t fake confidence, I’m not even sure I could if I tried. Instead I did the thing for so long, incrementally improving as time passed, that I got to a point where I knew I could do it. I didn’t convince myself to believe in my capability of doing the thing, I proved to myself that I was capable of doing it with a large body of incontrovertible evidence.

This is a concept I struggled to articulate until I heard the American entrepreneur Alex Hormozi describe confidence in much the same way as I have above. When I heard him make the point in this way, I instantly knew that’s what had happened with my musical performance confidence. Why I had it there but in no other aspect of my life.

I had stacked so much evidence, so much undeniable proof, that I could perform live well that lacking self-belief on the matter became unreasonable; impossible, in fact. Every handshake after a gig, every compliment, every round of applause - they all stack up over time and build real confidence.

In fact, I think that is what confidence is - evidence-based self-belief. Sure, some people are naturally more confident than others (I’m sure Nature and Nurture both play a role), but I expect that their innate confidence comes from the belief that they can handle any situation or hardship that crops up.

This confidence (I believe at least) is born from their past experiences where that was indeed the case - they handled the things that life threw at them and came out the other side. It’s a theory anyway.

That’s how one becomes confident - by doing ‘The Thing’ enough to get so good at it that it becomes an undeniable fact that you are capable of it. You have to prove it to yourself. Then, it becomes something more than self-belief in a blind faith fashion - it becomes knowledge - an awareness of a fact. You don’t believe you can do it, you know you can.

Obviously, this takes time. Study, practice and a whole lot of dying on your arse (British slang for bombing on stage) before you develop your skills to this point. That in turn requires commitment, dedication and a healthy helping of anti-fragility. A big part of that is giving yourself permission to suck, forgiving yourself when you do and getting back on the horse and trying again.

My nervousness after my first failed gig scared me away from the stage for ten whole years, so I know exactly what those who need to read this feel and how difficult overcoming that mental barrier seems to be. I needed my sister to give me that push and the one piece of evidence to start my own stack of undeniable proof.

Like the one great iron shot you play in a terrible round of golf, its the little wins that you will remember, give you the self-belief that you can play well and will motivate you to do it all again the next weekend. Eventually, you’ll be shooting par, if you keep at it and don’t give up.

I still sucked for a long time after that debut, and I still now perform plenty of songs poorly even now - I just forgive myself for them because I know they are a normal part of the steady process of improving. The key for me is to remember the songs I played well, the songs that got a positive reaction from the crowd - they are the great iron shots that bring me back to the tee to do it all over again.

Sadly, as I said previously, there are no short-cuts - no work-arounds - no magic spell. One has to put in the work. My next challenge on this front for me is to work on my phobia of speaking to people on the phone, something I have to get over if I want to develop my gigging musicianship from what it is now (an occasionally paid hobby) into the life sustaining business that I want it to become.

If I do enough repetitions and make enough calls that result in actual paid performance work, I will slowly start to stack up evidence that I can do it. Theoretically, I will eventually become convinced by this evidence that I am capable of speaking to clients on the phone, pitching my services and procuring work via this method. I’ll let you guys know how I get on in a couple of years.

Until next time, thanks for reading - The Common Centrist (Pete Brennan)