Confidence Isn’t the Same as Competence

“Be confident.” It is advice performers hear all the time. Walk into the audition room with confidence. Make bold choices. Believe in yourself. Own the space. Stop worrying about what people think. All perfectly reasonable advice. Except there is one small problem: what do you do when you don’t feel confident? 

The performing arts can be a strange place to build confidence. We work in industries where rejection is commonplace, employment is unpredictable and our work is regularly judged by other people. Actors audition. Dancers compete for contracts. Singers put themselves forward. Creatives pitch ideas. We can prepare meticulously, do excellent work and still hear no. 

Often, we hear nothing at all. 

And yet, amongst all of that uncertainty, performers are somehow expected to remain confident. 

The more I work with performers – and the more conversations I have with actors, casting directors, coaches and other industry professionals throughThe Drama Coach Podcast– the more I wonder whether confidence is actually the wrong thing to chase. 

Perhaps we should be chasing competence instead. 

You don’t have to feel confident to be good 

Confidence and competence are not the same thing. 

You can feel enormously confident about something and not be particularly skilled at it. Equally, you can be highly competent and still experience nerves, self-doubt or uncertainty. 

Most of us have probably met examples of both. 

The difficulty for performers is that we often interpret a lack of confidence as evidence of a lack of ability. 

“I’m nervous about this audition, so perhaps I’m not ready.” 

“Everyone else seems more confident than me.” 

“I don’t feel like I belong here.” 

But nerves tell us remarkably little about how capable we actually are.

I have been acting, teaching and coaching for more than twenty years, and I still encounter situations that make me nervous. There are still auditions that matter to me. Rooms where I feel slightly out of my depth. New challenges where I don’t immediately know what I’m doing. 

Experience hasn’t removed uncertainty. 

What it has given me is evidence. 

• Evidence that I can prepare.
• Evidence that I can learn.
• Evidence that I can take direction.
• Evidence that I can make a mistake and recover.
• Evidence that I can walk into a situation feeling nervous and still do the job. 

And perhaps that is much more useful than confidence. 

Competence gives us something to work on 

One of the problems with telling somebody to “be more confident” is that it is surprisingly difficult advice to act upon. 

How? 

If you don’t currently feel confident, simply instructing yourself to feel differently rarely works. Competence, however, is practical. 

• You can work on your voice.
• You can develop your movement skills.
• You can analyse text.
• You can practise self-taping.
• You can take a class.
• You can improve an accent.
• You can learn more about the industry.
• You can watch great work and ask why it works.
• You can practise taking direction.
• You can become more comfortable with improvisation.
• You can prepare. 

None of those things guarantee that you will walk into your next audition feeling fearless. But they do give you something solid to stand on when you get there. 

This is one of the reasons I believe continued learning matters so much for performers. As I explored in the first article in this series, the strongest performers I encounter tend to remain curious. They don’t assume that reaching a certain level means the learning is finished. That curiosity gradually creates competence.And competence creates evidence. 

The confidence trap 

There is another danger in chasing confidence: we can start trying tolookconfident. We perform it. 

We make ourselves bigger. Louder. More certain. We try to appear as though we know exactly what we are doing. 

But in performance, that can sometimes take us further away from the qualities that make someone interesting to watch. 

• Listening.
• Responsiveness.
• Curiosity.
• Vulnerability.
• Playfulness.
• The willingness to change. 

Some of the most compelling performers aren’t demonstrating how confident they are. They are deeply engaged with what is happening in front of them. 

They aren’t proving.They are doing. That distinction matters. It also takes some of the pressure off. 

You don’t need to walk into every creative space believing you are the best person in the room. You don’t even need to know whether you are. 

You need to be able to work. 

Preparation builds trust 

Perhaps the word I am increasingly interested in isn’t confidence at all. 

It istrust. 

• Trust that you have done the preparation.
• Trust that your training is there when you need it.
• Trust that you can respond if something unexpected happens.
• Trust that you don’t need to control every moment.
• Trust that if something goes wrong, you will deal with it. 

This kind of trust is quieter than confidence.

It doesn’t necessarily announce itself when you enter a room. 

And importantly, it doesn’t require the nerves to disappear first. 

I see this with the people I coach. Often the goal at the beginning is, “I want to feel more confident.” 

But sometimes the breakthrough comes when we stop trying to eradicate the nerves and start giving the person something concrete to do. 

• What do you want from the other character?
• What are you listening for?
• What is happening physically?
• What have you prepared?
• What can you control here? 

Attention moves away fromHow am I coming across?and towardsWhat am I doing?That shift can be enormously freeing. 

Confidence from the inside out 

I have thought about confidence for a long time, both professionally and personally. It is something that has informed my coaching and my writing, including my work around what I think of as “confidence within”. 

Increasingly, I don’t think confidence means reaching a point where self-doubt disappears. I’m not convinced that point exists. 

Perhaps genuine confidence is knowing that doubt can turn up and you don’t have to obey it. 

You can be nervous and audition. Unsure and create. Inexperienced and learn. Rejected and continue.You can enter a room without knowing exactly how you will be received and still trust yourself enough to find out. 

For a performer, that feels far more sustainable than trying to maintain an unshakeable belief in your own brilliance. 

Build the evidence 

So if your confidence has taken a knock – perhaps after a run of unsuccessful auditions, a difficult review, a quiet period of work or simply one of those weeks where everyone else appears to be progressing faster than you – it might help to ask a different question. 

Instead of: 

How can I become more confident?

Try: 

What can I become better at? 

Find something specific. 

Work on it. 

Then find something else. 

Not because you need to endlessly “fix” yourself. A creative career can become exhausting if every spare moment turns into self-improvement. 

But because skills give us evidence. 

Every class, rehearsal, performance, audition, conversation, mistake and piece of preparation adds something to the bank. 

Over time, you begin to know that whatever happens in the room, you have something to draw upon. And perhaps that is the confidence performers actually need. 

Not certainty that everything will go well. 

But trust that, whatever happens, you will know what to do next.

Main image: Photo by antonio molinari on Unsplash