There's a version of confidence I spent years observing at school, university and in the workplace.
Shoulders back, voice projected, opinions offered before being fully formed. Walking into rooms with what looked like ease. Saying yes to things that felt too big, because wasn't that the point? I watched, I took notes, and I drew my conclusion: confidence was being the loudest person in the room. Taking up the most airtime. Performing certainty, even when you had none.
So I tried it on. I wanted to claim my confidence loud and proud too! And for a while, it worked — in the way that adrenaline always works. I hit the marks. I looked the part. And then I'd come home and sit very quietly, utterly hollow, wondering why thriving felt so much like running on empty.
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The model I'd inherited wasn't wrong exactly. It just wasn't the whole picture. What I'd been watching all along wasn't confidence. It was activation. And there's a profound difference between the two.
Maybe you recognise this. Not the obvious burnout story, but the quieter one — the exhaustion of being switched on all the time, of performing a version of yourself that requires constant effort to maintain. The confidence that evaporates the moment the meeting ends.
What we got wrong about confidence
The template I'd been following had a name, even if I'd never heard it spoken aloud: the sympathetic performance. Show up big, speak first, project certainty. And the reason it's so pervasive is that, on the surface, it works. And also, there's nothing inherently wrong with any of that — but when it becomes the only template, it leaves a lot of us quietly striving toward a version of confidence that isn’t the sustainable, unshakeable kind.
What took me longer to understand was that the hollowness wasn't a personal failing — it was physiology. When we operate from what Stephen Porges, the neuroscientist behind polyvagal theory, calls the sympathetic nervous system — the fight-or-flight branch — we're drawing on a stress response. We can perform brilliantly from this state. We can hit deadlines, nail presentations, lead difficult conversations. But the sympathetic system is designed for short bursts, not a way of life. Over time, it costs us.
The confidence we associate with high performance — the sharp focus, the decisive voice, the willingness to take risks — often has adrenaline underneath it. Which means it's fragile by design. It depends on circumstances going a certain way. It requires ongoing maintenance. And it can dissolve in an instant when something doesn't go as planned, or when we're tired, or when we simply stop performing long enough to notice how we actually feel.
The nervous system's quieter offer
Polyvagal theory describes a different state entirely: the ventral vagal state, characterised by what Porges calls "safety and connection." When our nervous system registers genuine safety — not performed calm, but actual physiological settling — something shifts. We become more creative, more present, more capable of nuanced thinking. We can take in information without threat-filtering it. We can tolerate uncertainty without needing to control it.
This is a very different feeling to activated confidence. It doesn't surge. It doesn't announce itself. It feels, if anything, like having ground underfoot.
One of my teachers, psychologist and meditation teacher Tara Brach, writes about this as embodied presence — the capacity to be fully here, in the body, without the constant background hum of self-monitoring. When we're embodied, we're not evaluating how we're coming across. We're not anticipating the next thing. We're simply present with what's actually happening, and that presence itself is a kind of quiet power.
The distinction matters enormously for high-achieving women, because so much of what we call confidence has actually been vigilance. Hyperawareness of how we're perceived. Pre-emptive strategies for not being underestimated. It's exhausting in ways that are hard to name, because it looks so much like strength from the outside.
Regulated confidence doesn't require that vigilance. It isn't performing anything. It's simply being settled enough in yourself that you can meet whatever arises.
Why this is harder than it sounds
If ventral vagal safety sounds like something you'd access in a yoga class but not in a board meeting, that's worth sitting with.
Our nervous systems are shaped by experience. If you've spent years in environments that required hypervigilance — not just professionally, but long before that — then activation can start to feel normal. Safe, even. Regulation, by contrast, can feel unfamiliar. Too slow. Like you're not trying hard enough.
This is one of the subtler costs of high-achieving cultures: they can recalibrate what baseline feels like, so that ease gets pathologised and urgency gets rewarded. Many of the women I speak with describe rest as something they have to earn, and being calm as something that makes them nervous. Which is worth pausing on.
The body learns what it needs to learn in order to survive the environments it inhabits. But it can also unlearn. Neuroplasticity — the brain's capacity to form new patterns — means that a regulated nervous system isn't a fixed trait some people have and others don't. It's a state that can be cultivated, practiced, returned to.
Slowly. Imperfectly. Over time.
What building regulated confidence actually looks like
It doesn't look like doing more. It looks like interrupting the doing long enough to notice your body.
A few places to start:
Notice where you hold activation in your body. For many women it's the jaw, the shoulders, the chest. Not to fix it immediately, but just to notice. Awareness before action is the whole game in nervous system work.
Learn what settling feels like for you. Not relaxation exactly — more like a gentle landing. It might come through slow exhalation, through cold water on your wrists, through placing both feet flat on the floor and feeling their weight. These aren't tricks. They're direct communications to the part of your nervous system responsible for safety signals.
Practice being regulated in low-stakes moments. Before the hard conversation, not during it. On a Tuesday morning, not when everything's on fire. You're essentially building a new baseline, and that happens through repetition in ordinary moments, not heroic effort in difficult ones.
When activation comes — and it will — meet it with curiosity rather than judgment. Your nervous system is doing what it was shaped to do. You're not broken. You're just working with old wiring that can, gradually, be rewired.
The confidence I'm interested in now isn't the kind that peaks before a big moment and crashes after it. It's the kind that's still there on a Wednesday when nothing particular is happening. The kind that doesn't depend on external validation to stay intact. The kind that feels less like a performance and more like a home. It’s steady. Quiet. It belongs to you.
What would it feel like to be confident without the cost? I'd love to know where this lands for you, leave me a comment below.
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