"Everyone else seems so sure"

Look round the table at that Monday meeting. The others speak in finished sentences. They say "clearly" and "obviously". Nobody looks as if their heart is going. You draw the natural conclusion, which is that they're sure of themselves and you're the odd one out.

The conclusion is natural because of what you can see. You have a full view of your own insides, including the rehearsed sentence, the dry mouth and the running commentary. Of everyone else you see only the outside. You're comparing the two, and the outside always looks calmer.

They're making the same comparison about you. From across the table you look composed as well. If anyone has ever been surprised to learn that you were nervous before a talk or an interview, you've already had proof of this, and you probably wrote it off.

There's research on how big the gap is. In one set of experiments, people giving short speeches rated how nervous they looked, and their audiences rated them too. The speakers thought their nerves showed much more than the audiences said they did. In a follow-up, some speakers were told about this finding beforehand, and observers rated their speeches as better. Just learning that nerves mostly don't show seems to have helped.

A related set of studies had students walk into a room wearing a T-shirt they found embarrassing. The wearers guessed that about half the people in the room would notice it. About a quarter did. People's attention is mostly on themselves, and that includes the people you imagine are watching you.

Then there's the question of how common your private experience is. In 1978 two psychologists, Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, described a pattern they'd seen in more than 150 successful women, who believed despite degrees and promotions that they weren't really bright and had fooled everyone. They called it the impostor phenomenon. A 2020 review pulled together 62 studies covering more than 14,000 people. Depending on the questionnaire and the cut-off, between 9 and 82 per cent of those studied met the bar for impostor feelings. A range that wide tells you the measuring is rough, and I wouldn't lean on any single figure. What the review does show is that these feelings are common in both men and women, among students and among people well into their careers.

So in that Monday meeting, the chances are that at least one other person was holding a sentence they didn't say. Most people hide it, and so most people who have it think they're the only one.

There's a second fault in the comparison. Even when someone truly is sure, their sureness tells you little about whether they're right. In a series of studies with American students, some of them working in project teams for weeks, people who overrated their own ability were seen by their teammates as more competent and were given more influence. They weren't any better at the task. Groups, it seems, reward the look of confidence.

I should be fair about what that means, because it cuts both ways. It means the colleague who says "obviously" may know no more than you do. It also means that looking unsure has a real price, and that's a reason not to pile extra hedges on top of a good point. Chapter 12 comes back to that.

You may have heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect, usually told as "stupid people think they're clever". The original 1999 paper had a second finding that gets less attention. The best performers tended to place themselves lower than they deserved compared with others, apparently because they assumed everyone else found the tasks as easy as they had. The statistics in that paper have been argued over ever since, so I'd treat it as a suggestion and no more. The suggestion is still a useful one. If something comes easily to you, you may not count it as a skill at all. You assume everyone can do it, and you measure yourself by the things you find hard.

Of course, some people really are sure. Some are calm by temperament. Some have done this exact thing two hundred times. A few simply don't notice their own mistakes. I'm not claiming that everyone is secretly terrified. The second group is the interesting one, because their sureness came from repetition, and that route is open to you. Chapter 10 is about it.

Here's what I'd take from all this. You don't know that the colleague who spoke had no doubt. You can't know. She may have had the same thought you did, that someone must already have checked, and said it anyway. From the outside, a person who has no doubt and a person who has doubt and speaks look the same. The room can only see what people do.

That's encouraging, I think. You can't arrange to have someone else's insides. You can do what they did.

One small thing to try. Pick someone you think of as confident and ask them, in passing, whether they get nervous before presentations, or interviews, or whatever your own sore point is. Ask a second person if you can. You aren't looking for comfort. You're checking a belief you've held for years on the strength of how people look.