Confidence Without Arrogance

Confidence is one of the most overused and least defined concepts in leadership.

In this episode of Restless Excellence, Tonya Richards explores what it actually means to lead with confidence without tipping into ego or shrinking into self-doubt. Moving beyond performative confidence and external validation, she reframes confidence as something grounded in alignment, presence, and a clear understanding of what you bring.

Drawing from her own leadership journey and years of advising executives, Tonya unpacks the subtle but critical distinction between confidence and ego and why the difference matters more than most people realize.

In this episode, she explores:

• Why confidence is often misunderstood in leadership spaces 
• The difference between confidence, ego, and self-doubt 
• How imposter syndrome evolves as you grow
• The hidden ways professionals shrink or overcompensate in high-stakes environments 
• Why consistency builds credibility more than self-promotion 
• How to own your voice without dominating the room 

This episode is for:

Leaders, high performers, and professionals navigating visibility, growth, and the pressure to “prove” themselves, especially in rooms where the stakes are high and the expectations are unspoken.

© 2025 Tonya Richards. All rights reserved.

Restless Excellence™ is a trademark pending.

All original content produced are the intellectual property of Tonya Richards and may not be reproduced or presented as original work without prior written permission.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This is Restless Excellence, a podcast for people who care deeply, work hard, and are quietly asking themselves, is this sustainable? I'm Tanya Richards. I created this space because I've lived the tension between achievement and exhaustion. The tension between being capable and being depleted. The tension between success on paper and something feeling off in my body. Restlex excellence isn't about doing more. It's actually about telling the truth. The truth about work, the truth about leadership, the truth about ambition, and ultimately the cost of carrying too much for too long. These conversations that we'll explore in this podcast, they aren't going to be polished. They'll be reflective and they'll be honest. And they're for people who don't want to lose themselves while building something that matters. Let's get into it. Confidence is one of those words that gets thrown around constantly and almost never fully gets defined, at least not in the right way. We often tell people to be more confident by saying things like, own the room, speak up, take up space, and then we give them absolutely no guidance on how to do that without either tipping into ego or swinging the other direction and shrinking themselves down so they don't come off as being too much. I've actually seen both happen throughout my personal and professional life. And to be honest, I too have lived both. I've watched genuinely brilliant people dim themselves by holding back ideas. They sometimes qualify everything they say. They even stay quiet in rooms where their voice was exactly what was needed at that time. And they do so all because they were terrified, terrified of being perceived as arrogant. On the other hand, I have also watched people mistake someone's volume for confidence. The loudest person in the room, they seem to have all this confidence. They watch them perform certainty that they actually don't have. And what happens is that it slowly erodes the trust of everyone around them in the process because at some point they get found out. Neither of those instances I just described is what I'm talking about today, actually. What I want to explore during this episode in this conversation, based on where we are in the journey, is a different kind of confidence. Not the loud or performative kind that we all may be used to, nor the confidence that is dependent on applauses or titles or even other people's validation. I want to delve more into the kind of confidence that is grounded in who you we actually are, what you or we actually know, and what you or we genuinely bring to a particular space. This kind of confidence does not need the room to confirm that it actually exists. Now, let me share a distinction here. A distinction between confidence and ego. And it actually took me a while to really understand this. Ego actually needs to be seen, and true, true, true confidence, it doesn't. Ego is constantly scanning the room and asking, am I being taken seriously? Am I getting credit? Do they know how much I know? While on the other hand, confidence doesn't need those loops of questions running in and out of our head. Because it comes from internal alignment and not some external validation. Earlier in my career, I actually thought confidence meant having certain answers and actually having them fast. So I used to try and speak quickly. Imagine that. What this actually looked like was me just over-explaining profusely and actually trying to fill silence with that certainty. It was a hot mess. Even when what was underneath the certainty was really anxiety. I just thought if I could maybe sound like I knew what I was saying, that I'd be seen as competent. What I eventually realized is that real confidence is comfortability. Comfortability with not knowing and realizing that you don't know everything. You can say things like, I don't know, let me think about that. And doing so without panicking. It can listen without immediately formulating a response. It can leave spaces in a conversation instead of rushing to fill those particular spaces while you're having a conversation. Now, that shift for me didn't happen overnight. It finally happened when I started paying attention to the leaders that I actually trusted and respected, looking at how they did things and noticing that almost none of them were performing. They were just present and appeared to be grounded and genuinely engaged. And for me, that quality was more compelling and even for the audience than anything I'd been trying to project myself at that point in my career. Now, one of my listeners actually asked me to discuss imposture syndrome. And I thought that it would be fitting for this particular conversation. It is actually something that should be more normalized and discussed in more leadership spaces, but it really doesn't. Now, believe it or not, imposture syndrome doesn't go away when you get accomplished. As a matter of fact, at least for me, I find that it just finds new rooms to show up in. Speak more carefully, especially because you know, sometimes I have an accent, be it a Brooklyn accent or a Caribbean accent, also to take up less space, just in case. Now, here's what I've learned from those particular moments. Confidence doesn't mean that voice disappears. Confidence means you don't let it take control. There is a question shift we should all sort of employ. Instead of asking, do I deserve to be here? When you're confident, you ask, What do I actually bring to this space? That first question is more defensive, and the other is contributive. You cannot show up fully when you're spending energy defending your right to be present in a particular space. I mean, that's just a fact. The evidence that you belong is almost always there if you're willing to look at it honestly rather than discount it. It's important to own your voice, and owning your voice is not the same as dominating a conversation by no means. I think that gets confused a lot by many people, especially for us women, and for people who come from backgrounds where taking up space really came with a cause. Owning your voice means trusting that your perspective is worth contributing. Your read on a particular situation matters, and therefore you don't need to hedge everything you say into near meanlessness before you're willing to put it out there. Just go for it. There's no need to trim. The automatic softening of questions, prefacing with this might be a silly idea, but or I could be wrong, or I haven't thought this through fully, but now these were qualifiers. Qualifiers that I had stacked in front of perfectly sound observations because I'd learned somewhere along the way growing up and as a young professional that this was the safer way for me to speak. What I noticed though was that the people who took me most seriously were the ones I spoke to directly. I didn't need to do so loudly or aggressively, just clearly and without that preamble of an apology. Now, to further clarify this, speaking plainly is not the same as speaking harshly. You can be warm and clear and do so at the same time. You can also be thoughtful and direct at the same time. The only thing you give up, and it's actually to your benefit, is the self-protective habit of prediscounting your own ideas before anyone else gets a chance to do so. Ultimately, your voice doesn't need permission, it just needs practice. I'll give you an example that I've actually lived. I recall once in my career when I was a senior leader at a particular organization sitting at a table with executives who had been in the field longer, who had been louder, and quite frankly were more visibly confident than I felt at that time. Now, on paper, I absolutely belonged there. I had the experience, the results, the track record. For some reason, though, internally, there was still that quiet voice asking, are you really supposed to be here? So what did I do? I overcompensated. I came into meetings overly prepared, tons of notes, pages of notes, multiple talking points, ready to jump in quickly so I wouldn't miss the moment to prove myself. I felt this pressure to make sure that people knew what I knew, ensuring that I was seen as credible and seen as credible in real time. One day though, after a particularly fast-moving meeting, a leader that I respected pulled me to the side, tapped me on the shoulder, and what they said to me was really critical in that moment. It actually served as a clarifying point for me and in my career. They said, You don't have to work this hard to prove your value, it's already in your work. Now that really landed for me in that moment. Ultimately, when I stepped back and really looked at it, the outcomes were already there. The strategies I had led were working. The teams I supported were performing, overperforming. The relationships that I had built were strong, and the evidence of all of that existed. But for some reason, it just felt like I wasn't trusting it. I was still trying to perform credibility instead of just standing in that credibility and all the work that I had already put forth. So ultimately, I just made a change after that particular insight. I stopped trying to say everything in every meeting. I spoke when I had something meaningful to add, not just something to prove. I asked more questions, meaningful questions. I listened more closely, and let consistency in how I showed up over time do more of the talking than any single moment ever could at that point in my career. What ultimately changed wasn't just how others experienced me, it was also how I experienced myself. Now, this example that I shared brings me to another topic that I want to hone in on. And that's really about letting your work and what you do speak for itself. This was one of the most freeing things I shifted in how I operated some years ago. I stopped needing every contribution to come with a press release. Hey, look what Tanya did, or Tanya and her team did. Once upon a time, I felt this constant pressure to make sure people knew what I had done. Make sure that the credit was mine and that it was visible, ensure my involvement was legible, and to be honest, I think it came from a real place, and that place I would say is maybe a fair that if I didn't advocate for my own visibility, it would quietly get absorbed by someone else taking credit, or that it may just disappear. Now look, just to be clear, that fair I felt, it wasn't irrational. There are environments where you genuinely do need to advocate for your own contributions. I've been in those environments as well. So I'm not suggesting that you go silent and that you hope for the best, cross your fingers, cross your toes. No. There's a difference between legitimate self-advocacy and the anxious need to defend every win. I really had to learn how to tell those two apart. What I've found is that consistency builds credibility in a way that self-promotion just doesn't. When you show up the same way over time consistently, when your judgment is reliable consistently, when your words mean something, when people can count on how you'll handle something, that builds something much more durable than any single visible moment could. Confidence that's backed by a body of work is really, really strong. I also want to take a moment to distinguish humility from self-erasure because I think they sometimes get conflated in ways that are genuinely damaging. Humility is not minimizing yourself. It's not about pretending that you know less than you do. It's not stepping back from things you're qualified for so that someone else can feel more comfortable. Humility is self-awareness. It's about knowing what you know and what you don't know. It's about being genuinely open to feedback, not performing openness while internally defending every choice. It's also giving credit to people around you without feeling like that somehow would diminish yours. It's also being willing to say, I got that wrong, without turning it into a referendum on your entire competence. The most confident leaders that I know are also some of the most teachable people that I've ever been around. They don't treat learning as a threat to their particular credibility, they treat it as part of how they stay sharp. That's something that I continue to do. And there's something about that particular combination. Genuine confidence alongside genuine humility. That's really magnetic. Can't think of another word. And it's not magnetic because it's a strategy. It's because it's real. It signals that this is a person who doesn't need to protect their ego, which means that you can actually be honest with them. That is a rare and valuable thing, I have to say from per first hand experience, in a leader. It's rare to see that. Now, as we close out this episode, here's one of the key things that I want you to take away today. Know that confidence without arrogance isn't a balancing act that we should be doing. It's not splitting the difference between two extremes. It's something more integrated than that. It's really knowing who you are clearly enough that you don't need constant external confirmation. It's being grounded enough that you can hear hard feedback without it unraveling you as a person. It's also contributing fully without needing to control how your contributions are received. Confidence should stand quietly. It doesn't need the volume turned up so that you feel it in the room, nor it doesn't need to be rushed to prove itself. You as an individual, you don't need to prove your worth every time you walk into a space. Now here are a few questions that I'll leave you with to reflect on until next time. The first is where in your life or leadership are you still seeking external validation to feel confident? And what would it look like to move from needing recognition to trusting your own alignment? The next and final question to ponder on is if you showed up fully grounded in both your strengths and your growth areas, how would your voice, your presence, and even your decision shift in the room that matter most? This is Rest as Excellence.