How To Build Confidence - Even if You're Quiet, Shy, or Introverted

In this empowering episode, Eimear shares insights on building authentic confidence, especially for introverts and quieter personalities. Through personal stories and practical strategies, she reveals how confidence isn't about being the loudest in the room, but about trusting yourself and taking purposeful action.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

00:00 Introduction: Embrace Self-Trust and Soar

00:45 Building Confidence for Introverts

02:43 The Myth of Inborn Confidence

04:22 Personal Story: Overcoming Childhood Humiliation

07:32 The Power of Amplifying your Ally Voice

16:48 Mind-Body Connection: Managing Nervousness

22:08 Golf, Attention and Focus: The Key to Confidence

28:09 Conclusion: Confidence is a Skill

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Confidence is a skill that can be built, not a personality trait
• Introverts often make better leaders due to their listening skills
• The equation for confidence: Belief × Action × Purpose
• Managing your internal dialogue is crucial for building confidence
• Success comes from focusing on the next step, not the final outcome

QUOTABLE MOMENTS

"Confidence is belief with boots on. It gets to work."

Eimear Zone

"Our life is what our thoughts make it."

Marcus Aurelius

"It's really easy to hit a good shot when you're feeling good, and it's really difficult to hit a great shot when you're feeling bad."

Pádraig Harrington

PRACTICAL TOOLS

1. The Ally Voice Exercise - Identifying and amplifying your supportive inner dialogue
2. Box Breathing Technique - Four-count breathing for nervous system regulation
3. The Next Step Focus - Breaking big challenges into immediate actionable steps
4. Body Awareness Practice - Recognizing and working with physical sensations of nervousness

RESOURCES

📚 Choose Yourself Book

Share your insights: Use #ChooseYourself on Instagram 

📖 Recommended Reading: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

BONUS TIPS FOR INTROVERTS

• Remember that nervousness and excitement create the same physical sensations
• Focus on one small step at a time rather than the entire challenge
• Write down your ally voice statements to counter the saboteur voice
• Develop your own pre-performance ritual to manage nervous energy
• Trust that confidence can be quiet and still be powerful

The three fundamental principles for building confidence:

1. Choose which voice to amplify (ally vs. saboteur)
2. Work with your body, not against it
3. Manage your attention and focus on the next best step

CONNECT WITH EIMEAR

📱 Instagram: @eimearzonecoach

💻 Website: eimearzone.com 📧

Email: hello@eimearzone.com

Subscribe to Girl, Choose Yourself on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

© 2025 Eimear Zone Coaching. All rights reserved.

Transcript

Transcript: How to Build Confidence (Even If You’re Quiet, Shy, or Introverted)

Hi and welcome back to the podcast. I'm Eimear Zone your host, and today we're going to talk about building confidence, even if you identify as somebody who's very quiet, somebody who's been described, or you describe yourself as, quite reserved or shy or introverted. Because here's the thing, confidence is for everybody. It's not just the domain of the extroverts. It doesn't have to be loud. It really is a skill that benefits us all. And I want to democratize it, and pull the curtain back on how you build it, because many of the people that I used to look up to and say, "Oh, they're so confident." And then I got to look behind the curtain a little bit, and went, "Oh, you're an introvert." I thought confidence was for the extroverts and the loudest people in the room, not true.

I think for many of us, maybe this will resonate. Maybe you're overthinking before you speak, self editing before you allow yourself to speak. Or perhaps it's the idea of knowing you want to put yourself out there, but you're just too nervous, you can't muster the courage, the confidence to be able to do that, and you're feeling quite stuck, or maybe you feel like I used to, that confidence was for other people.

By the end of this episode, I'm hoping that you will have seen that that's not the case. It's for us too, and that you will take away three powerful practices that I'm going to share with you that you can start using immediately to build your confidence.

The research is on our side, my fellow introverts and ambiverts. That's a new term I'm hearing a lot, and it seems to be that mid territory between extrovert and introvert, where you do quite well in large groups, but you maybe need a little longer to recharge. And you really like that downtime and the quieter time and smaller conversations and group settings as well. I think I may be an ambivert, but interesting to hear that new term.

The research really shows that confidence isn't this personality trait you're born with, that you either have it or you don't. Remember that old advert for a makeup brand? I think it was Maybelline, "Maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's Maybelline." It's Maybelline, right? They're not born with it. Some people are, very few, but most people have built their confidence.

Many studies actually show that introverts make better leaders, because we tend to listen more and reflect and think more deeply before we act. The truth about confidence is that you don't have to be the loudest person in the room. It's not all about "Look at me." It's about trusting yourself enough to be exactly who you are.

I remember, anybody who feels this nervousness and doesn't feel very confident can track that back to a story in their past about a time that felt very difficult. I have a story about when I was in elementary school. I was quite young, and I have this excruciating memory that just thinking about now is making me deeply uncomfortable. I was in a classroom and was humiliated by a teacher. I'm sure she thought she was doing the right thing, it was a teaching moment for me, but I was a very young girl. I had been chatting at the back of the class, an energetic young child in school, and I guess the teacher was not having the best of days. She called me to the front of the classroom to explain what I had been talking about. She humiliated me, made me stand there, and it was like an interrogation. She just kind of ripped into me and then shamed me and sent me back walking to the back of the classroom.

I never forgot it. I think for years afterwards, I decided I just needed to be quiet, that my voice shouldn't be heard. I also had this message in my family - I'm one of seven, and I think my mother was just very busy, and it was like children are seen and not heard. And that permeated me too. It's like your voice doesn't matter, it shouldn't be heard.

For years afterwards, I perfected this art of hanging back. In class, I wouldn't raise my hand, even if I knew the answer. I was a relatively good student, quite studious, and I just became what was expected or wanted: quiet, reserved, reticent, careful, and that really fed into perfectionism later. Don't offer it up. Don't risk sharing that thing unless you're absolutely sure that it's perfect and can't be attacked, and you do nothing. When you're in the grip of perfectionism, you produce so little because you're just not prepared to risk it.

It took me a long time to grow out of that and to learn my way out of that, and I don't want that for you. Everybody wants to be confident. And what is it? We feel confidence's presence, we know when we're feeling it, and we definitely feel its absence.

By the way, just a side note here. When I was looking at some data preparing to record this podcast episode, I was looking through some old notes, and there are fascinating correlations between confidence and really positive outcomes. Confidence apparently predicts:

- How well you'll cope if your company goes through a reorg

- How many interviews and job offers you'll receive on a job search

- How quickly you'll return to work or normal life after a car crash causing an orthopedic injury

- Your performance in sport

I definitely believe that last one. We've seen it in tennis - if you're watching a match and you see somebody who's just losing it, they begin to unravel. And then there's the person who can really keep their focus and keep their belief.

Confidence really lifts our mood, and it has this impact of quieting our anxiety. Because what confidence is doing, essentially, is projecting a successful outcome into an uncertain future. That's pretty useful, because when you think about it, anxiety and depression do the exact opposite. They project negative consequences into the future, and so they drain our confidence.

Here's my definition of confidence: Confidence is belief with boots on. It gets to work. Confidence is the bridge between believing and becoming. If you like equations, I think it's best expressed as belief times action times purpose. 

If you believe "I can" but you don't take any action and you're not clear on purpose, then it's just wishful thinking. And if you're taking action without belief - I don't really believe in myself, or I don't believe that this action will result in the outcome I want - and you don't have any purpose, so the action isn't in a direction, then you're just involved in busy work. And if you have purpose, so you're clear in that vision and what's important and what matters to you, but you don't believe in yourself, and you don't believe that you can or that if you take this action, it can result in a result that's in line with your purpose - you don't take action, and you're just dreaming.

Let's get into it and begin to learn what builds confidence, because it's pretty darn useful, and it feels pretty good too. I'm going to share a quote from one of my favorites again - if you listened to last week's episode, I was quoting Marcus Aurelius and his book Meditations. And here I am again. So go buy that book - love it. Marcus Aurelius said this: "Our life is what our thoughts make it." And Ralph Waldo Emerson echoed this. He said, "A man is what he thinks about all day long." Let's change that a little - a woman is what she thinks about all day long.

Looking at our thoughts is such an important part when we're building our confidence. A question that I find really important to ask ourselves is: "Is my present way of thinking consistent with the level of success I'd like to experience in my life?"

Typically, no, let's be honest, because there are these two themes of voices going on in our head, and I call them the ally voice and the saboteur voice. Every time we're facing a challenge, we're at a fork in the road, and we have a choice about which voice we're going to amplify. All day long we're talking to ourselves. Our minds are like a meaning-making machine, and it's very noisy. If you've ever tried to meditate and you sit down in a quiet space, and then you tune in to what's going on between your ears, it's extraordinary how noisy it is.

When we want to build our confidence, we really want to choose the ally voice. When you do, you sort of enter into this success spiral. Each small step forward begins to build momentum, and your confidence will grow because you're building up that ally voice, you're amplifying that which is positive, encouraging, motivating, and basically saying kind and nice things about you: I can, I am, I am capable, I am a competent speaker, I am a great presenter. Whatever challenges you're up against, amplifying that voice really helps, and it builds upon itself and compounds.

We have to become intentional about that, because if you let the saboteur voice dominate, you sort of slip into what is almost like a sewer spiral. Every hesitation just reinforces doubt, delays just deepen disappointment. It all becomes pretty murky. You've got to ask yourself, what do I most need to remember when I'm being attacked by this saboteur voice, the one that keeps bringing up the doubts and telling me I'm not good enough and eroding my confidence? What do I need to have ready to counter that voice? And you need to write those things down, because that's how you feed the ally voice.

There's something really important that I like to remember: we are cluttered with thoughts in our minds, and our minds run on these almost like daisy chains of association. If you are thinking about success, thoughts of failure will inevitably follow. There's nothing wrong with you in that. If I were to say "black" to you right now, your mind would probably serve up immediately the opposite "white." That association of opposites is locked into the constructs of our language, and we're thinking in language.

We're not trying to repress the saboteur voice. We just need to understand that it's going to be there. But we don't need to amplify it. We get to choose which voice we amplify, and we want to focus on and amplify our ally. That's really important. It's the norm for the human mind operating system to serve up doubt. Do not waste your time trying to suppress it, conquer it, or any of that. It's just there. It's just part of the operating system, and we get to choose what we do with it.

Next thing: the importance of the mind-body connection. There's this myth that confident people don't feel nervous, which is nonsense. Feeling nervous and feeling fear is natural and normal. It's an important part of the survival mechanism of the species. When you look at this, I want you to get in tune with your body. We often try and think ourselves into feeling more confident.

Amplify the ally voice, and then notice what's happening in your body when the saboteur comes along, if you're about to do a big presentation or something, if you're going on stage to deliver a speech, if you're going to press the button to go live on Instagram. Whatever challenge activates your nervous system, you really just want to tune into your body, and the sensations of that nervousness are pretty much the same as what it feels like when you're excited.

The body is doing the same thing. It's getting ready to perform. And we just want to down-regulate the system a little bit if we're going to perform. So you just want to notice and normalize what's happening in the body. "Okay, I'm doing something out of my comfort zone" and "Okay, feeling my heart beat a little bit faster, tightness in my shoulders." Really tuning in - we're looking to befriend the whole experience of being human and just breathing into it.

Top tip: it's really simple box breathing if you want to calm your nervous system. It can often go into almost like fight or flight, with the excitement, with the nervousness, and you just want to bring it down a little bit. It needs to be up if you're going to perform and do something new, but you don't want it to be too high that it interferes with your performance.

Lots of people who are presenters or performers will have rituals that they go through to basically just take the very top of that nervousness down a little bit so we're more in the ready-to-perform zone, rather than "oh my god, I'm having a heart attack." You will find your rituals, but here's a simple one. It's called Box breathing: 

- Inhale for a count of four

- Hold the breath as you're full for four

- Exhale for four

- Hold empty for four

And then repeat that cycle. Four to six cycles will calm down the nervous system.

People use these small rituals to prepare themselves. It's really important to just tune into the body. Your body isn't betraying you. You're not losing it. It's completely natural for the body to feel that surge of energy. And then what we do when we're building confidence is not tell ourselves a story about what that means. Not "oh my god, I can't do it" - that's the saboteur voice. It's like, "oh, feeling excitement, feeling tightness, down-regulated a little bit getting ready to perform. I can do this."

Amplify the ally voice, notice the saboteur voice without amplifying it, and take a little edge off the heightened nervous system sort of going into that fight or flight, just tapping it down. And I've been around some really high profile speakers, and I've never seen one who doesn't have a ritual that prepares them and manages their nervous system when they're taking on a new challenge. When you're feeling it, you're with the best of the best - they all feel it. It's just how you respond to that feeling. That's why you want to tune into that body connection and not let it run the show. You just have to come into your body, notice it, be okay with it - it's completely normal - and find your own practice and ritual for acknowledging it, preparing it, and getting a little bit of down regulation so it doesn't interrupt your performance. And that takes time and practice. Anyone who's selling you a quick fix here is snake oil.

Now I want to tell you a story about the importance of attention and focus. I don't play golf, but I love this story about an Irish golfer named Pádraig Harrington at the 2007 British Open. It really illustrates beautifully this relationship between attention, how we control our attention, and confidence.

He was on the cusp of winning the British Open golf tournament, one of golf's most prestigious prizes, and he had a one-shot lead on his rival, Sergio Garcia. There were just two holes to go, and he was completely in the zone, feeling really confident, until, as he described it, he just got this little twinge of doubt just at the top of the back swing. That tiny doubt was enough, and he sliced the ball straight into the water, and then at the final hole, again, disaster struck - another ball in the water.

He said afterwards that he'd never experienced this reaction in his life. "I've now lost the open, this is irrecoverable." He said he just wanted to throw his golf club away and give up, and he was humiliated and embarrassed. He choked in his mind and his confidence had completely dissolved. Here was a real professional who had held it together in so many tight moments before, and it just got away from him.

Then here's where it gets really interesting. His caddy, Ronan Flood, stayed right by his side, and all he did was repeat one simple message over and over to Harrington: "One shot at a time, you are the best chipper and putter in the world, one shot at a time." He did not try and convince Harrington that he could still win the tournament. He didn't give him some big motivational speech. He just really narrowed the attention and the focus on the immediate next step - chip, putt. That's it. Nothing else.

And then something remarkable happened. Harrington says that he stood there and got really excited about it. He said, "I don't think I've ever been more in the zone than in that chip shot." And he said this: "It's really easy to hit a good shot when you're feeling good, and it's really difficult to hit a great shot when you're feeling bad." And doesn't that resonate just in life? Generally, when we're feeling bad, we don't tend to do our best work.

Those two shots, just focusing on what was right in front of him, won him the tournament. He went on to win the playoff against Garcia, and then he won the whole open. And it was just that repetition: one shot at a time, you're the best chipper and putter in the world, one shot at a time.

Later that night, they're all celebrating. Harrington has done all the press conferences, all elation and everything. And he's sitting down in a quiet moment with his caddy, and he says, "You know, Ronan, I thought I'd blown the open and so did everybody else in the world except you - you believed in me." And Flood started laughing. When Harrington asked "Hey, what's so funny?" he said, "Well, I thought you had too - I didn't think you had a chance."

The power of the story isn't about positive thinking or just thinking happy thoughts. It's about attention, because what Flood did for Harrington was make him focus on the next step, just the next action. He amplified that ally voice - "you're the best chipper and putter in the world. Just take the next shot." He really narrowed down what he needed to focus on, and then he was able to do what he needed to do. He didn't try and build his confidence in winning - he built his confidence in the next step.

That's the really important thing. As an introvert, if you're shy, you're reserved and you're thinking, it's very easy for any nascent confidence that we're beginning to build to just collapse when we're trying to think about everything we want to achieve. Sometimes it prevents us from doing the next thing. We just need to recognize we can't control the outcome, but we can control how we show up. We can control the action we take - just the next right step. Just focus on that.

Real confidence, genuine confidence, especially for us quieter folks, comes from choosing which voice to amplify, working with our body, not against it. Don't ignore the sensations in our body. We come into the body, make it okay, and adopt our own rituals. We manage our attention and focus on the next best step. It's a skill. You build it. It takes time. Belief with boots on is what confidence is. You've got to build it. Belief, times actions, times purpose - together, they create confidence, and they all have to be fostered and practiced.