I Thought Confident People Never Made Mistakes.

Looking back, they just don’t stay stuck in them.

I hated school presentations.

I remember standing in front of the class during an English presentation.

My hands were shaking.

I could barely get the words out.

The entire classroom seemed to be staring at me.

Every mistake felt enormous.

Looking back...

I wasn’t afraid of speaking.

I was afraid of making mistakes in front of people.

That fear followed me everywhere.

I was quiet.

Shy.

Introverted.

Whenever I stumbled over my words, I’d replay the conversation for hours.

I’d ask myself,

“Why did I say that?”

The mistake lasted two seconds.

I carried it for the rest of the day.

Then YouTube slowly changed me.

I spent years recording videos.

At first I sounded terrible.

Over time I became a better speaker.

But YouTube had one problem.

I could edit out every mistake.

Real life didn’t have an edit button.

So I still froze whenever I stumbled over my words.

Then the piano taught me something YouTube never could.

When you’re performing...

You will make mistakes.

The audience hears them.

You hear them.

But stopping only makes them bigger.

You don’t apologize.

You don’t restart.

You simply keep playing.

The music keeps moving.

Eventually...

So do you.

That lesson changed the way I saw confidence.

I stopped trying to avoid mistakes.

I started practicing recovering from them.

When I stumbled over my words...

I kept talking.

When I embarrassed myself...

I smiled and moved on.

The mistake disappeared almost immediately.

Not because people forgot.

Because I did.

Looking back

Confidence isn’t speaking perfectly.

Confidence is trusting yourself after you don’t.

The word confidence comes from the idea of placing trust in yourself.

Not trust that you’ll never fail.

Trust that you’ll keep going when you do.

The most confident people still make mistakes.

They just don’t carry them with them.

For years I believed confidence meant never looking foolish.

Now I think it’s much simpler.

It’s being able to laugh...

take the next step...

and keep speaking anyway.