I didn’t have the answers.

Not long ago, after a conference that should have left me energized and clear, I felt the opposite. Lost. Scattered. Ideas swimming in every direction with no anchor, questions piling up faster than I could process them.

What are my next steps? Where do I put my energy? What’s going to move the needle? Why do I feel this way? How do I move through this?

I sat with all of it, for longer than was comfortable and after all that sitting, after all that wrestling, after all that searching, the only answer I could find was:

I don’t know.

And here’s what I had to learn in that moment, one of the hardest lessons I’ve ever had to sit with:

Not knowing is not the same as failing. And saying “I don’t know” out loud might be the most courageous thing a person can do.

That realization didn’t come from nowhere. It came from 800+ conversations with extraordinary women who taught me something that took me decades to understand.

The confidence I was sold as a kid was a lie.

THE VERSION OF CONFIDENCE I WAS TAUGHT

Growing up I watched confidence perform itself everywhere around me. The loudest guy in the room, the one with the answer before the question finished, the one who never wavered, never doubted, never admitted uncertainty.

Bravado. Exterior strength. The facade of having it all figured out.

I know now what that actually was: a mask. A performance put on by people who were terrified of being found out. The loudest voices in the room are often the ones most afraid of silence because silence is where the truth lives.

I never performed that version, not once.

I was the wallflower. The kid who sat at the back of the classroom praying the teacher wouldn’t call on me. The one who hid, partly because of painful shyness, partly because of the bullying that made me want to disappear rather than be seen.

I didn’t have the bravado, I didn’t have the loud answers, and for a long time I thought that meant I didn’t have confidence.

I was wrong, I just hadn’t found the real thing yet.

WHAT 800 WOMEN SHOWED ME CONFIDENCE ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE

Across 800+ conversations I witnessed something that completely dismantled everything I thought I knew about confidence.

The most powerful women I interviewed weren’t the ones with all the answers. They were the ones willing to say they didn’t have them, and keep moving anyway.

I watched women share painful experiences with their whole hearts open. I watched them feel emotion in real time, in front of me, in front of an audience, without apology. I watched them say “I don’t know how it’s going to happen, I just know it will” and mean every word of it.

That’s not the absence of confidence, that’s the purest form of it.

Because real confidence isn’t knowing the answer. Real confidence is trusting yourself enough to sit in the question.

I watched women build confidence through DOING, not waiting until they felt ready, not waiting until the fear went away, but moving forward anyway and letting the confidence come from the doing itself. Repetition. Action. Showing up before you feel qualified to show up.

And underneath all of it, the thread that ran through every single one of those conversations, was this:

Confidence comes from within, from self love, from the radical realization that you have everything you need already inside you and that you don’t have to seek external validation to feel good about yourself.

When that lands, when it really lands, everything changes. It’s not confidence anymore, it’s inner peace, and inner peace is unshakeable in a way that bravado never could be.

THE PERMISSION PIECE NOBODY TALKS ABOUT

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable for men specifically.

After 800 conversations I know this with certainty: women don’t lack confidence. They lack permission.

Permission to speak without being interrupted. Permission to lead without being questioned. Permission to take up space without apologizing for existing in it.

And here’s what that reveals about the confidence men perform: it was never really confidence at all. It was permission masquerading as confidence. We were handed the room and told we’d earned it, we were never interrupted so we never learned to doubt ourselves, we were handed permission by default and we mistook it for an internal quality we’d developed.

That’s the lie.

Real confidence, the kind that doesn’t crumble when the room goes quiet or the answers don’t come, has nothing to do with having it all figured out. It has everything to do with trusting yourself enough to sit with not knowing.

WHAT I KNOW NOW

After that conference, after all those questions with no answers, I learned something I wish someone had told me decades ago:

You don’t have to know right now, you don’t have to have all the answers. What you have to do is trust that the answers will come, sit with yourself, tune in, and give yourself permission to not have it figured out yet.

Ask for help. Ask for support. That’s not weakness. That’s the most confident thing you can do.

The kid at the back of the classroom didn’t lack confidence. He just hadn’t been shown yet what real confidence actually looks like.

800 women showed me.