EPISODE 56 · BUILD CONFIDENCE AROUND THE EXPERTISE YOU HAVE
You don’t need an answer to every possible question to make a useful contribution. Explore how to recognise your experience, respond honestly and stop measuring yourself only against the most polished person on stage.
How to Speak With Authority When You Doubt Yourself
IN THIS EPISODE
You may have written the book, prepared the presentation and helped people with the subject, yet still wonder whether you belong in front of the audience. Self-doubt can make the one thing you don’t know feel more important than the experience you can genuinely bring to the conversation.
In this episode, you’ll explore the confidence questions that come with speaking, writing and being seen as an expert. The conversation looks at comparison, unfamiliar questions and the stories you tell yourself after a difficult moment, alongside the value of relevant peers, practical feedback and a clearer view of your own work.
Expertise doesn’t mean knowing every detail of a subject or being the right person for every audience. Consider the experience you have, the particular area you understand and the next step you can help someone take. That gives you a more realistic basis for preparing a session than trying to become impossible to question.
Your audience’s starting point matters too. Something that feels familiar to you may still be useful to a person learning to apply it. Explain the scope of your knowledge clearly and deliver within it, rather than dismissing a contribution simply because someone elsewhere in the profession knows more about another part of the field.
A question can come from a situation you haven’t encountered or a different part of the subject from the one you teach. That doesn’t erase the knowledge you do have. Listen carefully, identify what you can answer and be honest about the part that needs further investigation.
You can also use questions to improve future material. They may reveal an example worth researching, an assumption that needs explaining or a related area your audience wants to understand. Approaching the exchange with curiosity lets you keep learning without pretending to have an immediate answer to everything.
After a presentation, a small stumble can become the centre of your attention while the rest of the experience fades into the background. Review what actually happened, what the audience needed and which parts of your delivery worked. That makes the reflection more useful than treating one difficult moment as a complete assessment of your ability.
The episode includes an example of naming an inner critic as a way to notice that pattern. You can consider whether that kind of prompt helps you pause and examine the thought rather than accepting it automatically. Keep the focus on identifying a specific lesson and a practical next step, without turning every imperfection into a statement about who you are.
When you feel behind, write down the work you have completed and the experience you have gained. A finished project, useful client feedback or a presentation you prepared well gives you something concrete to assess. Include the areas you are still developing so the picture is accurate rather than simply flattering.
Comparison becomes more informative when you remember that another speaker’s polished performance is only the part you can see. You don’t know every rehearsal, adjustment or uncertain moment behind it. Use strong examples as opportunities to learn while judging your own progress against the work you are actually doing.
Speaking and writing can involve long periods of working alone, which makes it easy to stay inside your own assessment of an experience. A relevant peer or mentor can offer another view, ask useful questions and help you identify what deserves attention. Seek specific feedback rather than only asking whether you were good enough.
Industry relationships can also give you a place to discuss preparation, audience questions and the ordinary challenges of delivery. You can learn from how others handle those situations and share what you have discovered yourself. That exchange keeps development connected with the work, rather than making confidence something you must solve entirely on your own.
Write down three specific examples of useful work you have done and one skill you want to improve. Ask a trusted peer for focused feedback on that skill, then choose a small preparation step before your next presentation or writing project.
Consider the scope of your experience and what the intended audience needs. You can make a useful contribution without claiming complete knowledge of every part of the field.
Discussed from 02:06
Listen to the perspective behind the question, answer within your knowledge and be honest about what needs further investigation. An unfamiliar question can also help you identify something useful to research.
Discussed from 06:06
Notice the situations that trigger a harsh response and compare the thought with what actually happened. The episode explores naming that voice as one way to recognise the pattern.
Discussed from 07:03
People may already know something about the subject and still value the way you explain it. Your experience, examples and interpretation can help them understand it differently.
Discussed from 09:49
Write down specific work, feedback and progress alongside the areas you are developing. That gives you more evidence than judging your ability by one uncomfortable moment.
Discussed from 15:03
Relevant peers, associations and mentors can provide a place to ask questions and seek focused feedback. Choose people who understand the work and can help you identify practical next steps.
Discussed from 17:43
PREFER TO READ?
Transcript from the episode recording, with speaker names added and paragraphs formatted for readability. Automated transcription may contain errors; the audio is the original record.
Brad Hauck 00:17
Welcome to the Experts Journey Podcast. Today we're going to talk about a topic that comes up quite a bit when you're talking with speakers and authors who are making their way and trying to cut into the world and build their fame and their brand. And that is imposter syndrome. So it's a well-known syndrome. I'm sure we've all experienced it sooner or later. But today we thought we'd dig into that and maybe come up with some answers for you to help you deal with that if you're going through it. Good morning, Dixie.
Dixie Carlton 00:46
Good morning, Brad. How are you doing today?
Brad Hauck 00:48
Good, thank you.
Dixie Carlton 00:50
Excellent. I'm glad we're talking about this topic because it is a thing that does come up frequently for me with clients that I'm working with, and as I'm also coaching as well as developing people's books. And as authors and speakers and anyone who gets themselves into any kind of a spotlight, there is always that fear of being found that I'm only faking it till I make it. Well, let's actually really unpack that because there's a confidence issue. There's ways you can deal with this. And it's not uncommon for even incredibly famous people to experience this level of there's the double personality.
And there's the one that you put out there on stage, and the one that you then step off stage and feel like this is the real me, and I'm not funny, I'm not this, or I'm not the expert, or I'm not whatever people want me to be when I'm on stage all the time. And it does play into our feelings of confidence, our feelings about what we do and this crazy world that we inhabit where we are speakers and we are doing the thing that for 90% of the population, it's the scariest thing in the world to stand up in front of people and speak.
Brad Hauck 02:06
So absolutely. I see it with lots of different people. Authors are the same. You write a book about a topic, and everyone expects you to be the expert on that topic. And often you're only a couple of steps ahead of everybody else.
Dixie Carlton 02:19
Yeah.
Brad Hauck 02:20
But you know, once upon a time, someone said to me about being a teacher. How can I be a teacher? I don't know everything about this topic. And it's like, you don't need to know everything about this topic. You need to know more than the people you're teaching, which in some cases means staying one step ahead. In some cases, it means staying one step ahead in the book when you're given a subject you've got to teach you've never taught before. The other case it might be that you're on the edge, like I am, with AI, and you're staying one step ahead of people who are following along behind in your teaching then.
And I think that really applies to speaking and to authoring books and all those sorts of things, that people are buying the next step. They don't necessarily expect you to be their leader for the rest of their lives.
Dixie Carlton 03:03
Although also, well, yes, in many cases it's the next step, what we also forget so easily is that for us, what's the next step is maybe still 10 steps ahead of the people who are the average level of knowledge in our audience or of our reader base. So for example, you might know a lot more about AI than what you actually give yourself credit for at times. And when you're thinking about this is what I need to stay in in front of in terms of ahead of the curve, you may actually be a couple of years ahead of what people who are still just early late adopters are getting their head around.
And if your audience is mostly middle or late adopters, they're going to find what you have to say feels like 10 years ahead of the curve. So when we stop and look at the amount of knowledge that we accumulate through the research we do, the books we write, the number of times we have conversations with our peers in our particular re specific in industry types or our knowledge sectors, we are constantly gleaning information that the average person doesn't get. And I'm not saying that everyone out there is average, but you know, most people don't look hard at specific topic matter.
Whereas we do that because that's what we are required to do. It is part of what makes us able to get out there and do that. And then that comes to the whole concept of confidence. If we're confident in what we know and we're confident in our subject matter, then we should be able to feel confident enough to hold a conversation with pretty much anyone around a table or in a boardroom about what we want to talk about. So why would you not feel confident unless you feel that you are working with people who specifically are streets ahead?
Let me give you an example. We've just both been to the professional speakers conference. And there you've got people who are CSPs who have been speaking for 20, 30 years, some people who earn tens of thousands of dollars every time they get booked. And you've also got people who might only earn hundreds of dollars or thousand a handful of thousands of dollars, or are relatively new to it, and are so easily intimidated by what they see on the grand stages. Now, we've all been there. And I know that even some of us who have been there for many years still feel overwhelmed or intimidated by the people that we think of as being the grandfathers and the grandmothers of the industry.
Now I look at certain people that were on stage last week and I think, I could never do that. Wow, she's amazing. She just seems to flow with this energy. And I know for a fact that she's someone who gets off stage sometimes and says, was that okay? Yeah, that was great. Are you sure? Yeah.
Brad Hauck 06:06
How many times have I heard that? I still get off stage and I'll say to someone, don't do okay. The number of people get sick before they go on stage still is amazing. But you know, you I think you're caught up in those conversations inside your own head where you're like, okay, I've written this about this topic and I've done all this information, but what if someone asks me a question that I can't answer? And that's often people have said to me, that's where they see I'm going to be an imposter because I can't answer their question.
But that's not the point. People are always going to be able to ask you questions about a topic because they're coming at it from a different perspective to what you're coming at it as. So you might know this side of the topic really well and not so much on that side, but they're working in that side. So they're going to have different questions. And sometimes getting asked a question is not a bad thing because it opens up the option to learn more, but also gives you the option to realize that maybe there's more areas for you to bring in.
Dixie Carlton 07:03
It's always a learning curve when people ask you questions, for sure. And, you know, there are things that we can do to boost our confidence. And there are a couple of methods that I use specifically for dealing with imposter syndrome. And I teach this quite frequently. But the first thing to do is identify exactly what is going on in your head. Is it really yourself? Is it your imposter syndrome or your inner critic? What's triggered that? Uh so uh one of the things that I like to share with people is if you know you have this inner critic, this voice, this judgment voice, this imposter, identify that being, give it a name, and then make sure you understand where he, she, or it comes from.
And I call mine Boris, and I can Boris is a name that I came up with that I thought, yeah, I'd never call my child Boris. This is not a name that I would give someone that was cute and cuddly. So Boris is someone that for me always represented the big standover bully kind of person. So I call my imposter syndrome Boris. And I have got to the point where I will say, bugger off, Boris. You don't belong in this conversation in my head. You can step aside. You, as an external entity to me, have no right to stand in judgment of what I'm saying, doing, or about to do, or what I've achieved, etc.
So the best thing I ever learned was to identify and name the imposter or the inner critic because that helps you to put it where it needs to be when it rears its ugly head. And then the other part of that is ensuring that when you know what your triggers are, what will give you those causes for whatever your Boris version is that pops up, start thinking about how that works. Like if it's something where you are worried frequently that someone's going to ask you a question that you don't know the answer to, or if you just got off stage and you were asked a question that you didn't know the answer to, and you feel like, oh, I messed that up, I should have done better.
Maybe you need to be a little kinder to yourself. Maybe you need to say, yeah, but I answered all of those other questions really well. Or maybe it's something about, goodness, my technology failed, or my microphone didn't work properly, and I stammered through my way through the first part of it. Okay, take a deep breath and know that you still do significantly better than 99% of the room could have done in the same situation. And that's where experience and confidence grows.
Brad Hauck 09:49
Exactly. And I think also it's a case of thinking about the fact of why people are in the room, whether they're coming to see you as an author or a speaker or an expert, why are they there? More often than not, they're there to hear something from your perspective. And I think that's really important. They're not just there to hear about the topic, they're to hear about how you put it and how you see it. Because there's no doubt that most of the information that people put out in the world, if someone's in your talk, it's because they're interested in that topic, which means they probably read something about that topic in the past because that's their area of interest.
So it's not like they're uneducated necessarily. They could already have a lot of information, but they want to hear how you put it. And sometimes that the way you put it is what cuts through, whether it's written or speaking or whatever. So again, it's more than just you're expected to be the know-all of everything. It's just not that. And so you should take that pressure off yourself because of that fact.
Dixie Carlton 10:48
Yeah. And lots of things can go wrong. We know that there have been times where people that we have been quite close to or have seen fail on not fail, but have had these challenges on stage where wardrobe malfunction falling off the stage. I know two people who have literally done that. The microphone or the technology completely falters. The wardrobe malfunctions are always interesting. And sometimes we don't know that someone's experiencing a wardrobe malfunction, but they're critically aware of it. And they're walking around thinking, oh my goodness, I have to make sure I don't turn side on because everyone will see that my zip suddenly broke at the back.
So there are those kind of things that can go wrong. But there are also, I remember seeing a woman several years ago at a major conference, and she was a very experienced speaker, and she completely forgot where she was at. Now, this was a speaker's conference, and everybody paused and waited for her to reset, get back on track, and she didn't. And the audience was an audience of a thousand professional speakers in America. And she's hesitating and she's pausing, and everyone's getting uncomfortable. Everyone's trying to pour out their empathy and sympathy towards her on the stage, and she's just growing more and more agitated.
So she steps off the stage eventually and then draws some deep breaths and obviously does whatever she needs to do. And the MC came on and said, Look, we'll just give her a minute, not a problem, everything's fine. Everyone was very generous and supportive of her. Someone made sure she knew that. I was talking to her after the whole event. She's so she said, Look, people were being really kind. I just froze, I just had a moment. She came back on stage about five minutes later, and she started out really well again, and then she faltered again.
And this time she managed to pull it together and carried on. But again, this was critical for her, and she was devastated. But everybody was incredibly kind and thoughtful towards her predicament. Because there, but for the grace of God goes every single one of us, right?
Brad Hauck 13:09
Yeah, absolutely.
Dixie Carlton 13:11
We have to allow for the fact that, yep, sometimes we're just gonna have one of those days or one of those moments where it just doesn't flow. And maybe we just need to remember to be really kind to ourselves.
Brad Hauck 13:24
Yeah, and sometimes it's worth having a chat with someone about it rather than bottling it up and stressing over it. I think we tend to be in our own heads far too much. We certainly do. And often spend a lot of time alone working on our own because either our partner's away doing other stuff or whatever. So um, and that's not always a good way to be when you get in that mindset. Often these days, if I start to question, you know, things like that, I will often have a chat to ChatGPT, to be honest, because at least it's a voice coming back at you.
And it can often be a voice of reason because it is reasonably stable. Obviously, I'm not gonna follow all of its advice, but it's really good sometimes just to say, I'm feeling this and I'm doing that. And I don't see why. One of the things I recently did was I listened to a little five-minute manifestation every morning to keep my head straight, to get my brain on the right track every day on what I'm trying to achieve. And I actually had my AI write that for me, and it wrote it based on all the conversations that we'd had.
And then it did the voice and everything, actually. So and it it was really good. It was far more powerful than I would have written about myself. And it came back and it said things like, You are probably in the top five to one percent of people who know about AI in the world, who are doing this stuff for you on the cutting edge. Because it knows it can do the research what other people are doing and see what you're talking about. And so it actually came back with a very positive message for me, and that's actually helping each morning just listening to that.
So there is things that you can do, but talking to someone who's always a really good place to start.
Dixie Carlton 15:03
Absolutely. And, you know, there is a saying that we will, with our feedback, we will concentrate on or pay our attention mostly to the 1% in the audience that didn't like what you did, rather than worrying about the 97% or the even the 87% who loved it. And maybe there's just a few in the middle there. You have to really remind yourself to focus on the positive feedback. The other thing that I think we can do is, and I was talking about this to someone who was having a moment today about feeling specifically like, I don't know if I'm cut up for this.
And I reminded her, but you hold this office, you have done this much, you have achieved this level of success in your writing, you have achieved this level of success in your in your speaking career, you've achieved this. So I said to her, write these things down. And I think when we write down, or someone encourages us, including ChatGBT, write down with a pen on a piece of paper specifically what you have achieved in the last little while. Put that beside the bed and read it when you first get up in the morning. Because you will know that you can own those successes.
And it does help you to move past the failures or the feelings of failure.
Brad Hauck 16:24
Yeah, often we have those feelings of failures when we feel like we're not achieving what we think we should be achieving. But it's very valuable to look back at what you have achieved. Because sometimes you're like, Oh, I'm not, I'm no good, I can't do this. And then you look back and you go, hang on, I've got this and I've got a degree, and I did that, and I've done a book. And sometimes it's really worth looking back and going, okay, who else has done things? And so not many people. So it's really worth actually having those things and telling yourself occasionally, hey, you're not a failure.
You've achieved all these things. You're having a moment, that's okay. You're allowed to have those, but it doesn't mean that you're an imposter. Okay. You are who you are, you're qualified, you wouldn't have been able to do those things if you weren't. So embrace it. Just take a breath.
Dixie Carlton 17:16
Absolutely. That is a very good piece of advice. So, what's your top tip now, after everything we've just unpacked as we wrap this up? What is your top tip for someone who has just started to think, yes, I want to do the speaking, but I'm so underqualified, or I don't think anyone would listen to me, or I'm not sure if I'm there yet, or someone who's got all of that self-doubt about getting into the speaking industry specifically.
Brad Hauck 17:43
I think it's really simple. Get around other speakers. It's one of the reasons why so many people's members of Professional Speakers Australia or global speakers. And it's because if you're around people who do what you do, you talk about it, you're involved in it. And it's a well-known fact the five people you're nearest to are going to set the bar of where you're going. Yeah. I've heard it that said a lot of times, but it really is true. When you hang out with other speakers, it encourages you, it gives you someone you can talk to, you can bounce ideas off them.
That's definitely where I would start.
Dixie Carlton 18:16
Yeah, that sounds great. Very cool. My advice would also be find a buddy, someone who you can actually say, this is my mentor, this is the person who will help me because they've gone through it, they'll shine a light for me and teach me maybe how to shine a light for the next person when it's my turn. And that it's all about paying it forward. And that the people who understand the need to pay it forward will be the ones who are the most supportive and helpful when you have those moments.
Brad Hauck 18:46
Exactly. Well, if this episode has you thinking about writing a book and you're not sure how to shape your ideas, reach out to Dixie at indieexpertspublishing.com. She'll help you turn what's in your head into a clear, compelling book that builds authority. And if you're doing the work but not getting enough clients, start with clarity. If you want help sharpening your position and building marketing with AI that actually converts, join me and my authority multiplier coaching community at bradhauck.com. Take the step it fits where you're stuck right now, and we'll catch you in the next episode.
Dixie Carlton 19:16
Excellent. Thanks, Brent. See you soon.
YOUR HOSTS
Brad HauckAI & digital marketingAuthor, international speaker and digital marketer helping experts build authority online.
Dixie CarltonPublishing & authorshipAuthor, speaker and publishing expert connecting books, marketing and professional speaking.
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