Somewhere along the way, we started treating confidence and certainty as the same thing, and it has cost a generation of capable people their best decade of work.
Certainty is a guarantee about the outcome. It rarely exists outside of arithmetic. Confidence is something else entirely — it's a decision to act well regardless of the outcome, built through preparation, repetition and a track record of surviving being wrong.
“The most capable leaders I've worked with are, almost without exception, less certain than the room expects them to be.”
The most capable leaders I've worked with are, almost without exception, less certain than the room expects them to be. What they have instead is confidence: in their process, in their ability to adjust, in their capacity to recover if the decision doesn't work out.
If you are waiting for certainty before you lead, apply for a new role, or start the thing you keep putting off, you will wait considerably longer than you have left. Confidence is available now. Certainty was never coming.
