“It’s hard to be humble when you’re as great as I am.” This quote comes to us from the legendary Muhammad Ali. It’s not hard to find other quotes of his just like this—oozing with in-your-face, unapologetic confidence and swagger. This conspicuous confidence serves boxers well, but what about the rest of us? If we were to walk into the staff meeting on Monday and say something like that, we would arouse disgust rather than admiration from the other attendees. Yet, confidence is a trait we all want. We know intuitively that confidence is desirable. But there’s a fine line between an appropriate projection of confidence and the cocky boastfulness that served Muhammad Ali so well in his profession. This article aims to illuminate the path towards developing humble confidence. To be humble and confident is to be present and noticeable, yet subtle, measured, and inspiring.

How to be humble and confident

Let’s explore eight simple practices to help you develop, refine, and display humble confidence. We’ll consider the reasons for which humble confidence is more effective than rattling, in-your-face confidence and, evidently, much more desirable than no confidence at all. 

1. Always do the work, because you can’t fool yourself

You can hide corner-cutting from others, but you cannot hide it from yourself. Action breeds confidence. Inaction breeds doubt. Applying a thorough and, most importantly, consistent attention to detail in all your work, no matter how trivial the task may seem, is essential for building confidence. A consistent work ethic does two important things. First, doing the work builds self-efficacy, which is the perceived belief that you can complete a task successfully. 

Self-efficacy and humble confidence

Although related, self-efficacy differs from self-confidence, which is more general and encompassing. Since it is task specific, self-efficacy cannot be acquired without doing the task. Self-efficacy is the trait that allows you to say to yourself ‘I can handle this’ whenever an unexpected obstacle obstructs your path. Always doing the work is the only way to acquire this trait.

Secondly, and less evidently, doing the work removes the doubt that others are getting ahead of you. Let’s face this unsatisfying truth; we base much of our self-confidence in comparison to others. We’re constantly told not to compare ourselves to others, but this is nearly impossible. We evolved to be cognizant of the strengths and weaknesses of others in relation to our own. To give a negative example to illustrate this point, it is nearly impossible to feel confident in a collaborative or competitive environment if you are constantly doing less than everyone else. 

To borrow another point from the world of boxing, a select few elite boxers have been known to adopt a peculiar practice: they hold training sessions at 3 am. There is no physiological benefit to training in the middle of the night. In fact, it likely is to the detriment of physical performance given the disruption of sleep. But they do it because it gives them a psychological advantage. They see themselves working hard, preparing mentally and physically, while their opponent is presumed to be sleeping. The repeated drills and exercises build the physical faculties (self-efficacy), while the idea of being more prepared than the opponent removes doubt. 

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2. Be frugal with your words

You wouldn’t begin constructing a new bed frame without first measuring to ensure it will fit in its intended location. We give forethought to our physical actions, but we rarely do this with our speech. 

Speak freely but with an economy of words. It is harmful to creative thought and natural expression to place too many rules on your speech. A simple rule that truly helps to filter out some verbosity is to enter into conversations with the intention to simply say less. 

Listen first, speak last. Listening allows you to be receptive to learning something you may not have known. Perhaps someone else knows the path of least resistance, which is efficient for you, but it also validates the other person’s contributions. 

Ask yourself this invaluable question before speaking: ‘so what?’ Ask this with the intention of clarifying to yourself the following: ‘why is the content of my speech important to the listener?’ What will they do with this information? What do they need to retain? How will they use this? These are pertinent questions that will help you speak succinctly and ensure that your message is valuable to your listeners.

Mindful speech

The suggestion here is that we need to approach our speech mindfully. Staying silent when something needs to be said is not a display of confidence. Conversely, we don’t want to speak for the sake of being heard, without adding value for the listeners. Humble confidence comes from a middle path where the speaker is above all considerate of the needs of others.

“Let silence be your goal for the most part; say only what is necessary, and be brief about it. On the rare occasions when you’re called upon to speak, then speak, but never about banalities like gladiators, horses, sports, food and drink—common-place stuff. Above all, don’t gossip about people, praising, blaming or comparing them.” – Epictetus, from the book The Enchiridion of Epictetus

3. Be the calmest person in the room

What you wear and how you carry yourself can affect your self-confidence, but nothing leaves a more inspiring impression on people like unwavering calmness. Humble confidence requires peace and clarity. The peace comes from doing the work and the clarity is displayed through succinct and valuable speech, as mentioned above. 

Calmness is the trait most remembered by others in times of tension. I experienced this myself when I led a project at work during our most stressful time of the year. The written feedback I received months later, as part of a general performance review, was remarkable for one particular reason: virtually all the positive feedback citing this project used the word ‘calm’ to describe my performance. They didn’t necessarily remember specific things I had said or done, but they remembered (and appreciated) that I was calm. 

Ryan Holiday’s book Stillness Is The Key is an exemplary work that describes the power of stillness and calm from a Stoic perspective. In the book, he tells the story of John F. Kennedy’s actions during a blockade crisis at the peak of tensions during the Cold War. He summarizes how Kennedy averted a hot war with the Soviet Union in a way that exemplified humble confidence: 

“The lesson was one not of force but of the power of patience, alternating confidence and humility, foresight and presence, empathy and unbending conviction, restraint and toughness, and quiet solitude combined with wise counsel.”

How can you remain calm in chaotic situations? I’ve yet to find better protocols for building the capacity of calmness than mindfulness and meditation. 

4. Keep your chin up

I do mean this quite literally; raising your chin just a bit shows confidence, but it also shows that you’re engaged and listening. This is just one aspect of how posture and movement affect your confidence. Countless studies have demonstrated that a straight, upright posture has measurable, physiological benefits pertaining to confidence and efficacy. 

I would add that slow, deliberate movement is also conducive to developing humble confidence. Try to notice if you’re walking too quickly or fumbling over simple manual tasks. This is an indication that your thoughts are rushed and scattered. Simply acknowledge that you’re rushing, and use a mindful breath to reset yourself.

Here are some clear findings from a randomized control trial published in 2014:

“Upright participants reported higher self-esteem, more arousal, better mood, and lower fear, compared to slumped participants. Linguistic analysis showed slumped participants used more negative emotion words, first-person singular pronouns, affective process words, sadness words, and fewer positive emotion words and total words during the speech. Upright participants had higher pulse pressure during and after the stressor.”

5. Never lose sight of your North Star

The Stoics had their Four Virtues. Buddhism has given us the Noble Eightfold Path. These are clearly-worded guiding principles of which one should be mindful to guide their actions in accordance with their values. Sets of principles like these have stood the test of time for good reason. They are indispensable, and I’m in no position to improve upon them. I have, however, found that rather than keeping track of a list of ideas, it’s useful to define a singular guiding purpose for your life: your North Star

Related article: The Stoic Concept of Summum Bonum: The Stoic North Star

Leaders, especially those capable of acting humbly confident, always know the answer to this question: ‘why am I doing this?’ Knowing your ultimate objective, beyond the more immediate outcomes you’re pursuing, is the utmost way to perform with humble confidence. 

Let’s illustrate with a hypothetical example. If a young clothing designer was working to open their own boutique, having a singular vision, such as ‘I will help people feel confident’, would help to guide not only each clothing design, but also guide each decision in dealing with realtors, lawyers, and banks to get their business off the ground. 

In any situation, whether it’s routine work, a critical meeting, or a confrontation, always know your singular purpose and keep your ultimate objective at arm’s length. For someone who’s not fortunate enough to have a job they’re passionate about (which is very common), this could be ‘I will earn my salary so I can provide for my family’. This guides your actions with precision. It makes you nearly infallible, because when someone challenges you, you can take it as a minor speed bump on your path towards your singular purpose, rather than allowing the challenge to distract or derail you. 

6. You’re right, wrong, or need more time 

When working with others on complex or conflicting information, it’s useful to enter the situation knowing there are only three possible ways to interact with knowledge or opinions. The three possibilities are: 

• You’re right. In this case, speak up with clarity, conviction, and frugality of words.

• You’re wrong. In this case, you need to admit that you’re wrong and allow the path of least resistance to unfold without your ego getting in the way. This is fundamental to humble confidence.

• You need more time. If you don’t know the answer or need more information, don’t be afraid to demand more time to come to your conclusion. This, too, is a strong display of humble confidence. 

Delineating the possible outcomes like this provides clearer avenues. Like the aforementioned clarification on frugal speech, it’s important to allow yourself to respond with your opinions and knowledge fluidly, without the hindrance of rigid rules. However, entering a situation knowing these three possibilities helps to check your ego, and reminds you that you’re there to add value even if it means being wrong or lending the spotlight to someone else. 

7. You’re as good as anyone, but not better or worse

Don’t try to be better than everyone, and definitely do not resign yourself to inferiority. Take the middle path when it comes to the inevitable comparison to others. There will be people who have skills that you don’t have. A humbly confident person is not envious of this. They recognize that each person has specialized along different lines, and they leverage other peoples’ unique strengths. Ultimately, your potential and persistence will showcase the unique value that you bring, and you will be rewarded for that.

8. Aim for perfection, but be willing to accept failure

You aim for perfection, but you embrace the possibility of falling short. You treat no detail as minor and you polish your work with the utmost care. You send it out to the world and move on to the next task seamlessly. If it comes back for correction, then the correction is simply the next brick to lay. 

This reminds me of a principle that Grant Cardone elaborates in his book The 10x Rule. The underlying idea of the book is that we need to set goals ten times more ambitious than our intuition would have suggested. Then, we must scale our efforts with this ten-fold expansion of our potential. This idea has some validity, but this 8th tip on how to be confident and humble differs in one critical way. Cardone’s emphasis is on quantity, which has value, but my emphasis here is on quality. If you treat each task as the most important thing you do all day, with the utmost focus and care, even if it’s a simple email to a peer or the washing of one window of the hundreds of windows you need to clean that day, it will lead to the kind of results that make you feel humbly confident.

This relates to our 1st tip of doing the work, and can be guided by the 5th tip of keeping your North Star at your side, but the emphasis is on perfection. Many people say that it’s unhealthy to strive for perfection. This is only true if we are not simultaneously willing and able to accept failure. Striving for perfection leads to fewer failures, not absence of failure.

Why is it important to be humbly confident? Humble confidence ruffles fewer feathers

Another inherent benefit of humble confidence is that it ruffles fewer feathers. Having a boastful, in-your-face confidence certainly has its advantages, but those are tempered by the opposition it will garner. Those who are threatened by it may work against you behind your back. When your confidence is overly evident, those who feel they need to match or beat it will be signaled to do so immediately. Conversely, a humble confidence that is apparent yet subtle will serve you in guiding your actions but will find itself less often on the radar of those whose egos will be bothered by it. 

As you may have guessed, I developed these tips because displaying confidence doesn’t always come naturally to me. Fundamentally, I am confident in my abilities and I have high self-esteem. The challenge for me, at times, is demonstrating this in collaborative or competitive environments. I am drawn to and fascinated by figures who display sparkling, abundant confidence, such as the aforementioned Muhammad Ali or his contemporary equivalent in terms of swagger in combat sports, Conor McGregor. 

However, I know that this kind of in-your-face confidence is uniquely useful in the entertainment sphere. Several times, in my career I have found myself in leadership positions. One conclusion that I have taken from those experiences is that good leadership and sound conduct in general is a balancing act. It requires an honest acknowledgement of strength and weakness, high standards, compassion, and above all, clarity of thought. 

“I have observed that those who have accomplished the greatest results are those who ‘keep under the body’; are those who never grow excited or lose self-control, but are always calm, self-possessed, patient, and polite.” – Booker T. Washington