The knuckles are white, a stark contrast to the green felt. Inside his chest, a hummingbird is trying to escape, a frantic, useless fluttering against his ribs. He can feel a single bead of sweat tracing a path from his temple down his jaw. If anyone looks closely, they’ll see it. They’ll know. But they aren’t looking at his face. They’re looking at his hands.
And his hands are perfect.
The chips cascade from his right hand to his left, a fluid, seamless ribbon of stacked color. The sound is a soft, satisfying clatter, a sound drilled into his muscle memory over 199 hours of practice. His fingers cut the deck with an economy of motion that feels alien to the panic screaming in his skull. He isn’t feeling confident. He is performing competence. The players at the table don’t see a terrified rookie on his first night. They see the mechanical grace of a professional. They see authority.
We have the equation backward. We’ve been told for decades that confidence is a feeling we must cultivate internally before we can act. We read books, we say affirmations in the mirror, we try to wrestle our imposter syndrome into submission, all in the hope that one day we’ll wake up feeling ready. We believe the feeling is the cause, and the competent action is the effect. It’s an intuitive idea that also happens to be profoundly unhelpful.
I used to despise the phrase “fake it ’til you make it.” It felt dishonest, a recipe for being exposed as a fraud. The entire concept hinges on pretending to possess an emotional state you don’t have. But what if it’s not about faking a feeling at all? What if it’s about diligently practicing the physical mechanics of a role until they are so ingrained, so automatic, that they form a new reality? This isn’t faking. It’s rehearsing.
This isn’t faking. It’s rehearsing.
Diligently practicing physical mechanics until they are automatic, forming a new reality.
The Embodiment of Composure: Emma W.
Consider Emma W., a conflict resolution mediator. Her job is to sit in a small, windowless room with two people who are often at their absolute worst. The air crackles with resentment and decades of unspoken history. Her value in that room is her complete, unshakable neutrality and calm. If she betrays anxiety, if her voice wavers, she loses control of the room, and any chance of resolution evaporates. For a fee of $979 an hour, clients aren’t paying for her opinion; they are paying for her composure.
I watched her once. Two business partners, their faces flushed with anger, were shouting over each other. The logical part of my brain, the part that likes to feel in control, would have intervened, raised a hand, said “Gentlemen, please.” It would have been a disaster. It would have been a plea for control, not an assertion of it.
Emma did nothing of the sort. She sat perfectly still for a full 9 seconds. Then, with deliberate, unhurried slowness, she reached for a glass pitcher of water. Her movements were economical. She poured a glass, the water a clear, silent stream. She placed the glass in the exact center of the empty space between the two men. The soft thud of the heavy-bottomed glass on the wooden table was louder than any word she could have spoken. The shouting stopped. They both looked at the glass. Then they looked at her. She hadn’t asked for control; her physical actions had simply taken it.
I spoke to her about it later. I asked if she felt calm in that moment. She laughed. She said she could feel her heart pounding in her ears and had a fleeting, absurd image of just flipping the table. She wasn’t feeling calm. She was embodying calm. She has practiced the physical ritual-the slow pour, the deliberate placement, the steady hands-so many times that it has become an anchor. Her body performs calm, and in doing so, it communicates calm to the room and, eventually, signals it back to her own anxious brain. Her hands convince her head, not the other way around.
Performance Over Emotion
This is the performance of absolute confidence. It’s built not on emotion, but on mechanics.
Disastrous Presentation (9 years ago)
I was woefully underprepared on the subject matter, and I knew it. I spent the entire morning trying to psych myself up. I did the power pose in the bathroom. I told myself, “You are an expert. You belong here.” I walked on stage, and my voice cracked on the second word. My hands shook so much I couldn’t properly use the laser pointer. My attempt to project a feeling I didn’t have was transparently false.
Successful Presentation (Years later)
This time, I ignored my feelings entirely. They were a storm, and I was not going to try and calm the ocean. Instead, for 29 minutes before going on, I practiced only two things: walking from the wings to the lectern, and delivering my opening line. Over and over. I focused on the length of my stride, on the way I would place my notes down, on the precise cadence and volume of those first 19 words. When the time came, I didn’t think about being confident. I just executed the physical sequence I had rehearsed. My body knew what to do, and my voice followed. The confidence didn’t come first. The competent, practiced action came first, and a feeling of genuine assurance followed about 19 minutes later.
It’s easy to dismiss this as semantics, but the shift in focus from internal feeling to external practice is everything. It’s the difference between wishing for a skill and building one. Casino dealers are a perfect embodiment of this principle. A new dealer’s first few weeks are a masterclass in this philosophy. They aren’t taught theories of confidence. They are drilled, for hundreds of hours, on the precise, repeatable mechanics of the job: the pitch of the cards, the arch of the shuffle, the stacking of chips. This relentless, hands-on training is where authority is forged. You can see it in any top-tier casino dealer school, where the repetition is less about memorization and more about engraving the actions onto the nervous system.
When the mechanics are second nature, the mind is freed up. The dealer isn’t thinking, “How do I shuffle these cards?” The muscle memory handles that, leaving their conscious mind free to observe the players, manage the pot, and control the flow of the game. The outward display of effortless skill is what the players interpret as confidence, and that perception is reality. It creates a feedback loop. The players trust the dealer’s authority because their hands are flawless. The dealer, seeing that trust, begins to inhabit the role more fully. The performance becomes the person.
It’s a strange thing to admit, but sometimes our own psychology is a lagging indicator of our ability. You can have the skill long before you have the self-belief that accompanies it. My disastrous presentation wasn’t a failure of confidence; it was a failure of rehearsal. My successful one wasn’t a triumph of self-belief; it was a triumph of focusing on the tangible, the physical, the doable. I just found myself thinking about this the other day, scrolling mindlessly through social media. You see all these polished performances online, these digital projections of success. It’s so easy to get caught up in the appearance of things, to accidentally interact with a piece of someone’s history and suddenly feel like a clumsy intruder in a life that moved on. A digital misstep. It’s a reminder that performance is everywhere, and how we manage our physical and digital bodies creates the world we live in. We are always sending signals, whether we mean to or not. The question is whether we are rehearsing the right ones.
Building Competence, Brick by Brick
So, where do you start? Don’t start with your feelings. They are fickle and unreliable passengers. Start with your hands. Start with your posture. Start with your voice. Pick one, single, physical mechanic of competence in your field. Is it the way a surgeon holds a scalpel? The way a programmer’s fingers move across the keyboard? The way a teacher stands at the front of the room? The way a leader listens, with stillness and complete focus?
Isolate it. Break it down. Practice it.
Do it until you can’t get it wrong.
Don’t do it to feel confident. Do it so your body executes perfectly.
That single, automated piece of physical excellence is the first brick. You lay it down, and then another. You build the house of competence, and one day you look up and realize you’ve been living in it all along.
