Reduce the Interference

You don’t lack confidence. You’re just watching yourself too closely.

I see this pattern often when I’m coaching speakers. Someone tells me they want to feel more confident. Then I watch them speak.

What I notice isn’t a lack of ability. It’s constant self-checking. Scanning for mistakes mid-sentence. Analyzing word choice while still talking. Looking at themselves so intensely that their mind becomes too busy to let the words come out.

We’ve been speaking since we were little kids. The words come naturally when we get out of our own way.

Some people call this perfectionism. But when I notice it in myself, I see something more specific. It’s the desire to say the right thing. To land the perfect message. And the moment that self-judgment switches on, my thinking brain starts searching for the best possible answer while simultaneously evaluating what’s already coming out of my mouth.

When I’m doing that, it’s hard to find any words at all. And the ones that do come out feel choppy. Forced. A little fake. There’s no flow, just effort.

I think of it like trying to walk while staring at your own feet. You know how to walk. You’ve done it thousands of times without thinking. But the moment you watch yourself do it, something tightens. The ease disappears, replaced by a strange self-consciousness that makes the simplest motion feel unfamiliar.

Speaking works the same way.

The goal isn’t to add confidence. It’s to reduce interference.

This doesn’t mean you skip preparation. You still need to gather your knowledge. You still need to know your material. But there’s a difference between preparing and performing. Preparation happens beforehand. Performance is what happens when you trust that everything you’ve gathered is already inside you, and you let it come out.

The problem is that the thinking mind doesn’t trust the preparation. It wants to keep checking. Keep editing. Keep monitoring. It doesn’t believe the knowledge is really in there, even when it is.

So you have to get out of the way.

I’ve experienced this most clearly in settings that have nothing to do with speaking. On a Vipassana retreat, for example, the practice is simply to observe. To notice what’s happening without reaching for it or pushing it away. And what emerges in that stillness is a kind of clarity that thinking can never produce.

I’ve felt it in facilitation too. When I’m leading a workshop and I stop trying to control the room, something shifts. I start listening differently. Responding from a quieter place. The work becomes lighter, not because I’m doing less, but because I’m doing it without the weight of self-judgment pressing down on every word.

This is what flow feels like. Not the absence of effort, but the absence of interference.

When you practice in a way that builds trust in your own instincts, the inner critic starts to quiet. You stop scanning for mistakes. You stop grading yourself in real time. And what emerges looks a lot like confidence, but it’s really just you, unobstructed.

I think this matters beyond speaking.

Founders often come to me wanting more certainty. More polish. A better pitch. And sometimes those things help. But more often, what I notice is the same pattern I see in speakers. They’re watching themselves too closely. Editing before they’ve even started. Running their thoughts through a filter of “will this sound smart?” before letting them out.

It slows everything down. It makes the work feel heavier than it needs to be.

The truth is, you already know more than you think you do. You’ve gathered more than you realize. And the path to showing that isn’t adding something new. It’s peeling back the layers of self-monitoring that obscure what’s already there.

So if you’re working on becoming a better speaker, or a clearer thinker, or a more grounded founder, try asking yourself a different question.

Not “how do I become more confident?”

But “what interference can I remove?”

The answer might be simpler than you expect. And what’s left, once the noise quiets down, might surprise you.

It usually looks like ease. It usually sounds like you.