"Confident people don't feel this"

At some point in this you'll have thought about someone who doesn't get the beam. They walk to the bar as though the bar's theirs. They say the thing in the meeting without a run-up. You put this down to a quality they have and you don't, and the word for the quality is confidence, and the audience's last line is that confidence is something people are issued with.

I'd question that in two ways. First, the spotlight studies weren't done on a nervous subgroup. They were done on ordinary students, whoever turned up, and the effect appeared across them. Overestimating how much you're noticed is what people do, not what a certain kind of person does. The confident-looking person at the bar, if you put a T-shirt on them, would overestimate the headcount too. That's my extension from the samples rather than a finding, and I'll say so, but it's the plain reading of who was tested.

Second, confidence isn't a possession. It's a description, from outside, of what someone's attention is doing. The person crossing the bar without apparent trouble is, I'd guess, mostly looking at their friends at the far end, or thinking about what they'll order. Their attention is out in the room. Yours, on the same walk, is on your own walk. From the outside, one looks confident and one doesn't. From the inside, the difference is where you're pointing.

That's better news than it sounds, because where you're pointing is something you can change on the spot, and chapters 19 and 20 are about pointing it outward. It's worse news for the belief, because the belief lets you off. If confidence were issued, there'd be nothing to do but wait for it. An earlier book, You wouldn't say it to a friend, deals with the sentence you say to yourself about not being that sort of person, and the same applies here. You aren't a sort of person. You're a person whose attention, in rooms, goes inward, and this book is a set of reasons and ways to send it out.