·with Jade
There's a particular kind of meeting that people describe to me almost word for word, whatever industry they're in. They've done the work, they know the material well enough to explain it to a colleague in the corridor beforehand, and then the room turns to look at them and something goes wrong that they can't quite name afterwards. The sentences come out shorter than they intended, the voice sits higher than it does in normal conversation, and they find themselves hurrying towards the end of a point rather than actually making it. Somebody less prepared says something more confidently twenty minutes later and the room agrees with that instead.
When they tell me about it, the explanation is almost always one of two things: either they lost their confidence, or they should have prepared more. I understand why those are the conclusions people reach, because they're the only two variables most of us have ever been told about, but in my experience they're both wrong, and believing them sends people off to fix something that was never broken in the first place.
Take preparation first, since it's the one people reach for hardest. Preparing answers the question of what you're going to say, which is a genuinely useful question and worth spending time on, but the moment that went wrong in that meeting wasn't a moment of not knowing. The person had demonstrated ten minutes earlier, in the corridor, that they knew it perfectly well. Nothing about their knowledge changed between the corridor and the room, so working harder on the knowledge is unlikely to change what happens next time, which is exactly what people discover when they respond to a difficult meeting by preparing twice as thoroughly for the next one and then have precisely the same experience again. At that point most people quietly conclude that they're simply not built for this, which is both untrue and expensive.
What did change between the corridor and the room was everything underneath the words. Under scrutiny, or even the anticipation of scrutiny, your breathing moves higher into your chest and gets shallower without you noticing, the muscles around your jaw and neck and shoulders quietly tighten, your attention narrows down onto a very small area, and your sense of time distorts so that a pause which lasts a second and a half feels to you like it lasted five. Every one of those has a direct and unglamorous consequence for how you come across: shallow breathing means you simply can't support a long sentence, so your thinking fragments into pieces before it reaches anyone; tension in the jaw lifts your pitch and flattens the range of your voice, which listeners hear, not as tension, but as someone who doesn't quite believe their own argument; the narrowed attention takes away your ability to read the room, so you can't adjust even when you can feel it going badly; and the distorted time perception makes you rush, because silence has started to feel like failure rather than like emphasis.
None of that is a character flaw, and I think it's worth saying plainly that it isn't a sign of weakness or of being unsuited to senior work. It's a physiological response doing exactly what it evolved to do, in a context where what it does happens to be unhelpful. Your body has efficiently prepared you to move quickly away from something threatening, at a moment when what the situation actually required was for you to stand fairly still and speak rather slowly.
Knowing what to say is not the same as being able to say it.
Why the usual confidence advice doesn't survive the room
Most of what gets written about confidence operates right at the end of that chain, on the visible output. Stand like this, hold eye contact for this long, remember that you've earned your place at the table. Some of it is perfectly sensible and none of it is sufficient, because it asks you to control what comes out while leaving completely untouched everything that determines what comes out. Telling somebody to sound more assured while their breathing is high and fast is a bit like telling somebody to run more smoothly without mentioning that their laces are tied together; the instruction isn't wrong, it's just aimed at a part of the system that isn't the problem.
This is also why that advice appears to work and then abruptly stops working, which confuses people enormously. In a low-stakes situation there's very little physiological change to override, so a behavioural instruction is easily strong enough to make a difference and you conclude you've solved it. In a high-stakes one there's a great deal to override, and a reminder to make eye contact turns out to be no match for it. People then assume the technique failed them personally, when what actually happened is that they tested it in conditions it was never capable of handling.
What performers do instead
Actors have been dealing with this exact problem for a very long time, for the entirely practical reason that the job can't be done without solving it. Nobody gets to decide they'll feel less nervous on a press night, and no director has ever accepted an explanation about nerves as a reason for a poor performance. What you can do, and what the training is genuinely for, is arrive in a state where the nerves are present, sometimes very present, and the instrument still works anyway.
That isn't achieved by thinking differently in the moment, which is the part people find hardest to accept because thinking differently is the only lever most of us have ever been handed. By the time you're in the room and it's going wrong, your thinking is one of the things that's been affected, so asking it to rescue you is asking a great deal of the wrong faculty. It's achieved beforehand, by training a small number of things until they're available without deliberation.
The first is breath, used deliberately rather than vaguely. A longer exhale than inhale, low in the body, for about ninety seconds, which is not relaxation for its own sake but the fastest route available to changing the physiological conditions everything else depends on. The thing that makes it work in practice is that you've trained it somewhere unglamorous, in a lift or a corridor or the two minutes before you join a call, rather than only ever having done it in a quiet room with your eyes closed, because a quiet room is not where you're going to need it.
The second is rehearsing in conditions that resemble the real thing, which almost nobody does. The usual version involves sitting down, alone, reading through the material in a room where absolutely nothing is at stake, and then being surprised that the real version felt different. Of course it felt different; it was different in every respect that mattered. Useful rehearsal deliberately introduces the conditions that cause the problem in the first place, which means standing up, out loud, on camera, being interrupted, being asked the question you're hoping nobody asks, and doing it badly a few times somewhere it doesn't count.
The third is having one physical action you genuinely trust to change your state, which isn't a mantra and isn't positive thinking. It might be a shift in how your weight sits through your feet, or releasing your jaw, or deliberately taking the first sentence more slowly than feels natural. What makes it work isn't the choice of action so much as the fact that you've used it enough times to know it does something, which means it's still there when your thinking has gone.
The part nobody puts on a poster
None of this removes the nerves, and I'd be careful of anybody who tells you their approach will. Professional performers feel it before they go on, often more than the audience would ever guess, and the ones who've been doing it for thirty years still feel it. What changes, and it's a considerably more useful change than the one people usually want, is that the nerves stop taking your ability with them when they arrive.
That's a smaller promise than most of what you'll read about confidence, and it's the only one I've ever seen hold up under real pressure. You're not trying to become someone who doesn't feel anything walking into a difficult room. You're training the ability to reach your own capability while you're feeling all of it, which is, when it comes down to it, the only thing anyone in that meeting needed from you in the first place.