Why Does My Confidence Disappear When The Stakes Are High?

Many of the professionals we work with are confident, capable, and successful in most areas of their lives. Yet, in certain situations — presenting to a group, speaking to someone senior, pitching to a potential client, or being in a moment where they feel they are being evaluated, something changes. The confidence that normally feels natural suddenly disappears.

If that happens to you, there is nothing wrong with you. And there are very understandable reasons why it happens.

It’s completely normal to find high-stakes situations stressful, for some very good scientific reasons. Our brains are wired to seek social approval and fear rejection, especially in scenarios where we feel exposed or judged. This isn’t a flaw; it’s a feature of being human.

Understanding this can be liberating. It shifts the narrative from “I’m not confident” to “I’m experiencing a natural response to a challenging situation.” And from this place of understanding, with the help of appropriate techniques, real, lasting confidence can begin to grow.

At Presence Training, our work is grounded in The Presence Method™ — a structured approach to developing embodied self-awareness, steady attention and real connection under pressure. In practice, that means we help you work with your nervous system and psychology rather than fighting them, so confidence becomes more stable and reliable.

If this mainly shows up for you in front of groups, you may find these helpful next steps:
Presentation Skills Training and
Public Speaking Courses.

If it’s more about meetings, authority, feedback, conflict or speaking up day-to-day, explore
Communication Skills training.

You’re Not Alone: Confidence Often Changes In High-Pressure Situations

It’s actually really normal for confidence to be “situational”. We may have it in certain situations, but find it evaporating in others. We’ll examine why this is the case below, but first let’s look at some very common scenarios that can trigger this effect.

When All Eyes Are On You

You were sitting down and then you stand up in front of an audience. Or you are sitting round the board-room table and a colleague throws the conversation over to you, asking for your point of view, opinion or expertise. Suddenly, you have become the centre of attention. Everyone is looking at you and expecting you to “perform”. This is accentuated when you were weren’t prepared for this to happen, and it occurs spontaneously, but it can happen almost as powerfully even when you are expecting it.

When You’re Speaking To Someone Senior

You’re fine explaining your point of view to someone who reports to you or even one of your peers, but now you need to justify where you stand to someone who is slightly or significantly senior.

When You’re Being Evaluated Or Judged

A colleague has just spoken about a topic, and now it’s your turn. Perhaps you are pitching a product to a “Dragons Den” or seeking the approval of your colleagues for a new project or course of action. It’s natural to compare the performance of one person to another – we all do it, yet it can be really challenging to find ourselves in this scenario. Even worse if you are following a colleague or competitor who has done a really impressive job of speaking for themselves.

When The Outcome Really Matters

When the stakes are low, and you don’t really care what happens it’s easy to speak with freedom. But when you really want to get the approval, the funding, the buy-in, things change. You find yourself thinking about what might happen if you don’t get the outcome you want and things become 300% harder. You start feeling really anxious, getting in your own head and getting in your own way.

In any of these situations you may find your heart rate increasing, your mouth becoming dry and your mind going blank, or racing with catastrophic thoughts predicting the worst-case outcomes. You don’t give the best account of yourself, and feel really disappointed with the performance you give, and end up beating your self up about it later. It really affects your self-esteem and confidence at work, and you become fearful about the next time this might happen.

Why Confidence Can Disappear In Moments That Matter

There are a couple of pieces of science and psychology which explain why our confidence can often disappear at times like this, in moments that matter. Once you understand them, you’ll know this isn’t something wrong with you. This is something that is wired into how we all operate as human beings.

The Social Brain And Fear Of Negative Evaluation

Our brains have evolved to care a lot about what other people think.

Why Humans Are Wired To Seek Social Safety

There is scientific research quoted by Matthew Liberman in his book Social, Why Our Brains are Wired to Connect which shows that in social situations human beings are programmed to seek eye contact to assess whether the person they are with is friendly and supportive.

Liberman suggests there was an evolutionary survival advantage to moving from smaller to larger tribes. Larger tribes required hierarchy — leaders and followers. Leaders needed to look into followers’ eyes and ask “are they with me?”. Followers needed to look into leaders’ eyes and ask “are we safe together?”. In other words, we evolved to monitor relationships constantly and draw conclusions from subtle social signals.

This is why we naturally smile and nod in one-to-one interaction.
I tick that box for you. You tick that box for me.
And the anxious part of our brain relaxes — safe enough, for now.

Why Audiences And High-Stakes Contexts Feel Different

Audiences and certain professional contexts don’t always follow these social “rules”.
People don’t necessarily feel responsible for regulating our emotional state. They may listen with neutral or blank expressions — even when interested — or they may actively challenge or test us.

When we don’t receive reassuring social signals, the threat-detection parts of our brain can stay highly alert, or become more activated.

This often happens in contexts like public speaking, interviews, pitches, and sometimes when speaking to someone more senior.

Why Your Brain Assumes The Worst (Negativity Bias)

Our brains are also wired to assume the worst when information is incomplete — what psychologists call a negativity bias.

From an evolutionary perspective, this made sense. If a distant ancestor heard a sound that might be a tiger, the ones who assumed it probably was a tiger and ran survived. The ones who assumed it was nothing often didn’t.

Today, we may look out at an audience or a neutral expression and our brain jumps to: “they hate me”.

Great wiring for surviving the jungle. Not so helpful in a modern workplace.

Why Social Judgement Can Feel So High Stakes

There is one more layer — the ancient consequences of social rejection. Research on social risk and threat suggests that historically, being rejected by the tribe could be life-threatening.

As a result, part of the brain still treats social rejection as existential threat. So when we feel judged, an ancient system may react as if survival is at stake — even when intellectually we know it isn’t.

Put together, there are several powerful evolutionary factors that can make modern professional situations feel much higher risk than they really are — and make anxiety feel far more intense than a rational assessment would suggest.

The good news is that once we understand what’s happening, there are practical ways to work with these systems.

Adrenaline, Attention And The Body’s Stress Response

Whenever we are in a high-pressure situation — especially when the outcome matters — adrenaline will be a factor.

Adrenaline is the “fight or flight” hormone. It prepared our ancestors to run away from danger or to stand and be ready to confront it. The release of adrenaline is controlled by the amygdala, a part of the brain concerned with threat perception and mobilisation.

Why Adrenaline Shows Up In Work And Communication Situations

In a public speaking or leadership context, adrenaline is often triggered by a perception of reputational threat, either real or imagined.

It might be a thought like:

• “It will be my turn to speak next”
• “I hope I get this right”
• Hearing a critical comment
• Reading an angry email from a colleague or superior

A single spike of adrenaline often settles within ~20–30 minutes, though the felt effects can linger longer depending on context and mindset.

When Adrenaline Helps — And When It Gets In The Way

Adrenaline increases heart rate, blood pressure, breathing rate and blood sugar levels. It sharpens the senses and diverts blood to muscles, enabling fast physical responses.

Moderate amounts of adrenaline can actually enhance performance — including the performance of the pre-frontal cortex.

But excessive adrenaline can trigger an amygdala hijack, taking the pre-frontal cortex partially offline and impairing clear thinking and decision-making.

In other words:

• A small to medium amount of adrenaline is helpful.
• Too much adrenaline makes it much harder to think clearly and respond well.

How The Adrenaline Spiral Happens

Adrenaline usually only becomes a problem when we enter a negative spiral.

This often happens when we start panicking about the physical sensations themselves — especially if combined with memories of past difficult experiences.

For example:

“My heart is racing. My mouth is dry. My mind has gone blank.
Last time this happened it was a disaster.
What if it happens again?”

This is what we sometimes call the “OMG path” — and it tends to trigger more adrenaline release.

On a bad day this can feel overwhelming. On a very bad day it can tip into panic.

This is not a sign that there is anything wrong with you – it’s a sign that your nervous system and your mind are trying to protect you.

The good news is that this is completely normal — and there are simple but powerful ways to break this cycle and keep adrenaline at a manageable, helpful level.

These Responses Happen Even To Very Capable People

As we can see by looking at the evolutionary biology and basic psychology these responses are not evidence of a character flaw. Quite the opposite, they are part of being human. And they will often be triggered by challenging aspects of our working environment. These things occurring have nothing to do with our level of intelligence, competence, or capability.

What does make things more difficult is that we often think that these things “shouldn’t be happening to us”. In other words, our “inner critic” tells us that these things occurring is a sign of weakness or character defect. This is adding insult to injury.

Once we understand how normal these things are, we can let go of such unhelpful and untrue self judgements, and concentrate on learning effective techniques for managing these features of being human. Once we have the “instruction manual”, we can acquire the appropriate techniques for managing our internal systems.

This Isn’t A Personality Flaw — It’s Context-Dependent Confidence

A common experience in our workshops is looking around the room and realising: it isn’t just me.
Many highly capable, outwardly confident people experience anxiety, self-doubt or blankness in specific high-pressure contexts.

We often compare other people’s outside presentation with our inside experience — and assume something is wrong with us.
In reality, the “confidence drop” is usually a normal nervous-system response to social risk, attention and evaluation — sometimes amplified by past experiences.

Why You Can Feel Confident In Most Of Life — And Not Here

Not all of us have our threat triggers and exactly the same place. But most of us have situations where our brains will project a “life or death” scenario onto what is happening, even when it simply isn’t true.

This will partly also be informed by our past experiences and things that have gone badly for us in the past. It will also be informed by “baggage” or “trauma”– unprocessed difficult events from earlier in our lives, quite often from our childhood, that emotionally resonate with what is happening right now. So we aren’t simply needing to deal with the challenging present moment situation, and our evolutionary wiring – everything is then getting amplified through the lens of these painful experiences from our past.

When we drop the idea that this shouldn’t be happening, and acknowledge with compassion that this is normal and human, we can get on with learning how to take ourselves in hand and simply manage these challenges. To be clear, most of these challenges are internal, emotional, psychological, and vastly more common than we would imagine.

Why “Just Be More Confident” Advice Doesn’t Work

Confidence isn’t a state of mind, and it isn’t something that you can simply decide to have, or try harder with. Confidence is a feeling and a state of being, and it arises as a result of feeling deeply at peace and at ease with yourself. This requires us to understand the (mainly internal) forces that get in way of this and to deal with these issues in a foundational way – addressing the root causes in a way that is honest and authentic.

Why Preparation Alone Usually Isn’t Enough

It’s important to have done your homework. To know and understand the material you are delivering, or the concepts you are trying to convey. To plan and structure your arguments properly. In other words, whether this is speaking or leadership, to really know what you are talking about. If you don’t you are going to get found out and usually quite quickly. But none of these aspects are going to help us deal with the emotional and psychological hurdles that we have been speaking about above. For that, we need a foundation of feeling comfortable in our own skin, managing our emotions and being able to put our troubled minds to rest. This foundational state of authentic confidence.

The good news is that genuine confidence isn’t something that we are either born with or not. This is something that we can learn how to inhabit. It is a natural state. Animals have it. Many children have it. And adults can have it too, though it often takes a little more work to recapture it. It arises when we are present, at home in ourselves and connected on the inside and on the outside to those we are with. These are all teachable and learnable skills. Perhaps, not surprisingly, they are the skills that we teach.

What Actually Helps Confidence Become Stable And Reliable

Getting embodied

This is about getting “out of our heads” and into our bodies. Dropping from the activity of thinking being our primary focus and making our felt sense of ourselves primary. If you ever “audit” your thinking, you may notice that only a small percentage of it is genuinely useful in the moment — much of it is worrying or rehearsing imagined problems. When we learn how “switch channels” to this embodied sense of ourselves, our minds come to rest and all the unproductive and counter-productive thinking drops out. The people we are speaking to are no longer experienced as threatening and we become more able to connect with them.

Letting the connection be more important than the content

Dr Stephen Porges, known for his work on Polyvagal Theory, highlights how safety and confidence increase when we experience connection. We feel more at ease when we sense that we are seen, received and not under threat — and non-threatening eye contact plays a powerful role in activating that safety system.

In our training, we work with this directly through relational exercises — including approaches influenced by Relational Presence® — all taught within the wider framework of The Presence Method™.

By learning to meet people as individuals, allow yourself to be seen appropriately, and let connection matter as much as content, adrenaline begins to settle. Confidence becomes less about performance and more about relationship.

Befriending reality, our sensations, emotions and psychology

The author and teacher Byron Katie famously said “When you argue with reality you lose, but only 100% of the time”. One of the cornerstones of confidence is embracing rather than fighting our reality. And that includes our sensations, emotions and psychology.

By learning how to embrace the uncomfortable sensations that accompany adrenaline, we can break the negative adrenaline cycle and prevent an Amygdala hijack.

By meeting and understanding our emotions as messengers from our body (and mind) telling us things that we may have been seeking to avoid, we not only create more internal harmony, but we deepen our self-knowledge and wisdom.

And by learning how to befriend the the worried part of our psychology the way we would look after an anxious child, we can effectively self soothe and bring these aspects of our mind to rest, whilst simultaneously gathering information about actions that we might need to take in the world to address the root causes of these concerns. This is a form of “self parenting”, and is an essential foundational element in true confidence.

Putting it all together

When you’ve done your homework, you are more in your body than your thoughts, you have befriended your sensations, emotions and psychology and you can let your connection with your audience be more important than any words you may say, you will have rock solid, authentic confidence. Not a show of confidence. Not a performance or an act. Real confidence.

How This Shows Up In The Real World Of Work

The first thing to say about work is that a lot of the conversations that we have there matter to us. There are often lots of outcomes we are wanting to achieve every day. We are seeking to persuade people to do things or believe things, whether they are colleagues we know well, or audiences we have never met. Much of the time when we are speaking in a work context, we are being judged and our reputation is (to some degree) on the line.

As colleagues and audience members, we know that we are judging the people who are speaking to us – are they competent, do we like them, do we agree with them, do we trust them, how confident do we experience them to be? And because we know that we regularly judge them, we can be pretty sure that they are judging us.

All of this raises the stakes, and gives us a sense that we are taking a risk whenever we open our mouths in our working lives. How big we perceive that risk to be will depend on the context, how we are wired and our history.

Presentations And Public Speaking

The first thing to say about the public speaking or presentations context is that by definition all eyes are on you. You are making yourself visible. You are often at a different level to your audience, either on a stage, or standing up whilst they are sitting. You know that they want to be informed, and ideally entertained, and they absolutely will be evaluating what you say and how you say it.

There are echoes from our distant past where we look out and see a sea of eyes looking at us. Imagine our ancestors encountering members of a neighbouring tribe on a journey, or even being forced to stand up in front of their own tribe and speak or justify themselves.

The audience will be tending to listening with blank expressions, even when they are interested which our threat based brains will usually interpret as hostile. This will often send the vulnerable parts of our psychology into a bit of a panic.

You will almost certainly be experiencing some adrenaline, and this may well interfere with your ability to think clearly. Your mind may even go blank. If you go a bit red or start shaking a little or your voice is tight, all of which would be understandable, there is a tendency to imagine that the audience can see this and is judging you negatively for it.

And if you’ve had difficult experiences with any of these things in the past, those memories can come back to haunt you, with parts of your brain forecasting that things will go horribly wrong. Which on a bad day can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Leadership And Difficult Conversations

Am I a leader? Will people follow me? Can I be persuasive or inspiring? How can I deal with judgemental or challenging colleagues? How can I deliver information to co-workers that I know needs to be delivered, but which they won’t want to hear?

Unlike an audience in a public speaking scenario, we often know these people quite well and have some idea of their agendas, prejudices and attitudes. Certain things we might want or need to say might cause them to respond in a way that is less than favourable to us. And we are potentially having to navigate office politics as well.

It’s easy to end up getting in our own heads and second-guessing ourselves. Censoring what is true for fear of their reaction, and then worrying about the fact that we have pulled our punches. We may have witnessed other people in the organisation going in “all guns blazing” and getting judged or punished for this.

With all of this going on, it can be tricky sometimes to find the courage to hold our ground, and be ourselves in a way that feels kind, connected and yet powerful.

Client Pitches And High-Value Meetings

It’s not difficult to see why the stakes are high here. There is a very specific outcome that you want and it has high net value in terms of reputation, relationship or the bottom line.

The people you were speaking to will often be very experienced or senior decision makers who will be rich on opinions and short on time. You might not know them that well, and will be doing your best to read their responses to you as you are speaking with them. They may or may not be willing to give anything away about what their position is.

You are absolutely certain that both what you say and how you say it will be judged. To some degree, it will often be the very purpose of that meeting. There can easily be a belief that the smallest slip up will cause serious reputational damage to yourself, the organisation or the deal. There’s definitely going to be a significant amount of adrenaline in the picture. And you’re going to have to manage your own psychology alongside the psychology of those you were speaking to. If you’ve had any difficult interactions in the past in similar situations, or indeed with these individuals that will make things even more challenging in terms of presenting in a way that is clear, confident and connected.

Career Progression And Visibility Moments

If we are working in an organisational context, we are often wanting to be promoted to a more senior role where we will get more challenge, more variety of work and potentially better pay and conditions. And of course, we will be in competition with others in the organisation for such promotions, which can often be hardly contested and in short supply. Our likelihood of success won’t just be about competence, it will also be about perceived confidence, trust, and of course office politics.

There will be lots of times in our working lives where our colleagues will be evaluating us when we are speaking. Are we speaking up in meetings? Are we asking questions and are those questions intelligent? Are we positioning ourselves as a team player? When we are speaking internally, how are we coming across? When we speak externally, how are we representing the organisation? Even in one-to-one interactions with colleagues, they will be judging our attitude and mastery of our subject as well as how trustworthy and confident we appear to be.

Knowing when to speak out and when to remain silent, and how to communicate when we choose to do so in a way that gives the best account of ourselves is no mean feat. The best asset we can have in times like this is a very solid base of self-confidence and the ability to calm and manage our psychology when we are navigating the trickiest situations. We can’t guarantee getting it right every time, but if we are feeling comfortable in our own skins and our minds are clear we give ourselves the best possible chance of letting those around us see our best selves.

How We Help Professionals Build Real, Stable Confidence

When you step back and look at all of this together, something important becomes clear.

Confidence isn’t just about mindset, positive thinking, or “pushing through fear”.
It’s about understanding how your brain, body and psychology respond when the stakes feel high — and learning how to work with those systems rather than against them.

Most people try to solve confidence challenges at the level of technique or willpower.
But real, stable confidence usually develops when we change our relationship with our attention, connection, and our internal responses under pressure.

And the good news is this is absolutely learnable. Here’s how we can help.

We support professionals to build this kind of confidence in two main ways — through immersive group training, and through highly tailored one-to-one coaching.

Foundation Training (Group Learning + Deep Skill Building)

Our London-based Foundation Training is a 4-day training delivered in two parts (each part is two days). Working in a group with a maximum size of 10, this is gentle yet intensive learning.

The group provides an extremely safe learning environment, a ready-made audience to practise with, and a group of wonderful people to learn from and be inspired by.  And because this work is grounded in The Presence Method™, it supports not only presentations but also leadership communication, influence and high-stakes conversations at work.

Foundation 1 focuses on the fundamentals of confidence and audience connection. Not only will you better understand what has been undercutting your confidence, you will learn practical tools for turning this around — and immediately practise them.

You will get comfortable with eye contact, improvisation, being the centre of attention (regardless of how many eyes are on you), and working with the negative messages that can appear in our minds. People are often astonished by how much progress they can make in just the first two days.

Foundation 2 focuses on applying these skills to your real working environment — maintaining confidence with prepared material, speaking to specific audiences or individuals, and managing more challenging interactions and contexts.

You will also learn how to design presentations so they meet your needs, your audience’s needs, and your stakeholders’ needs — while integrating and deepening the skills you began developing in Part One.

The Presence Club

Of course, learning these skills once is not enough. For confidence and connection to truly become natural, they need to be practised and integrated over time. These are very much “use it or lose it” skills — and it’s important to be practising the right things.

In 2016, we recognised the need for a supported practice environment where people could deepen and stabilise these skills. That’s why we created the Presence Club.

The Club has gone from strength to strength, and for many people it becomes one of the highlights of their month.

The Club offers not just a functional practice environment, but also a delightful place to meet like-minded people and socialise. It’s also where many people start to notice that confidence, communication, leadership and self-understanding deepen and stabilise naturally — not because they are trying harder, but because the underlying foundations are changing.

The Club meets once a month for 3 hours, usually on the first Thursday of each month. Once you have completed both parts of the Foundation course, you are eligible to join if you wish.

Membership is purchased annually and can be renewed for as long as you are finding the Club helpful and enjoyable. Many people make as much progress in their first year or two at the Club as they do during the four days of the Foundation training itself.

One-to-One Coaching (Targeted, Personalised Change)

Some people prefer to start working with us one-to-one rather than beginning with the Foundation training.

This is sometimes because they are based a long way from London, or because taking two full days out of a busy working schedule feels difficult. In other cases, people have an urgent need for support and there isn’t capacity on a Foundation course at a time that works for them. And sometimes there are specific challenges they want to work on that sit outside the scope of the group training.

If any of the above apply to you, we would be delighted to work with you one-to-one — most often online via Zoom, MS Teams or Google Meet.

Our experience has shown that remote coaching of this kind can be incredibly powerful and effective, with little (if any) disadvantage compared to working in person. And if you are London-based, in-person sessions are sometimes possible.

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In one-to-one coaching we can cover everything taught on the Foundation Training — and often much more besides. The main advantages are focused attention, flexible scheduling, and the ability to work directly on what matters most to you.

The main disadvantages are that you don’t have a ready-made audience to practise with (other than your hopefully fabulous coach), and that it is more expensive than group training, as you are paying for all of the coach’s time rather than a small percentage of it.

One of the major strengths of coaching is that we usually work directly with your real situations — your real meetings, presentations, leadership challenges and conversations. Because of this, many people find that changes in confidence, clarity and ease transfer into their working lives very quickly.

Leadership Communication Coaching (Beyond Public Speaking)

Quite a number of our coaching clients choose to continue working with us even after they feel confident as leaders and speakers.

This is often because the work naturally expands beyond communication technique into how people experience pressure, responsibility, relationships and themselves as leaders.

We are able to help with a vast array of organisational and leadership challenges. Whether it’s becoming good at having difficult conversations, managing office politics, or overseeing organisational change, we would be delighted to help.

If you would like to explore how we might be able to help you in a one-to-one coaching context, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. We’d love to have a chat with you.

For many people, this work eventually becomes less about “fixing confidence” and more about discovering a much more stable, grounded and authentic way of operating in the world.

Coaching Or Courses — Which Is Right For You?

Our Foundation Training is often best if you:

• Want deep, foundational confidence skills
• Value learning in a supportive group environment
• Want structured, immersive learning
• Want the best value way to build long-term confidence

One-to-One Coaching is often best if you:

• Have a specific challenge or high-stakes situation
• Prefer fully personalised support
• Need flexible scheduling
• Are based outside London or internationally

Many people complete the Foundation Training first, and later use coaching for specific leadership or communication challenges.

How Quickly Can Confidence Start To Change?

The short answer is much much more quickly than you might expect. We have been running these workshops since 2012, and to be honest we are still surprised and delighted by how quickly people are able to make progress.

We ask people to self score for confidence in public speaking at the start of our workshops, and between 70 and 75% of people scored themselves below 3 out of 5 for confidence. (Where 3 is “somewhat confident”, 5 is “very confident” and 1 is “unconfident”). In a typical workshop the modal score (the number that more people pick than any other) is 1 or 2.

After two days, we ask them how their confidence is now compared to where it was at the start. In a recent survey of 100 participants, the average increase in confidence scores was 94% in this two day period. It often surprises people — but it’s consistently what we see. This tends to happen because we are not just teaching techniques — we are helping people change how they experience pressure, attention and connection in real time.

Anecdotally, we regularly hear people speak in our closing circles at the end of workshops about having undergone a mindset and attitude shift. Going from “I can’t do this and it’s always going to hold me back” to “I now believe I can do this and if I keep going, I’m going to get to where I want to go”. Not only have they witnessed their shifting themselves, but they have seen it in the others who have travelled alongside them at the workshops.

And that’s not just what we see inside the training room.

Independent Feedback

We also have extensive independent feedback that reflects this kind of shift. Presence Training has (at time of writing) over 360 Google reviews, with an average rating of 5.0 stars.

Many participants use phrases like “life changing”, “mind blowing“, “completely transformative”, or “probably the best training I’ve ever attended”.

If you’re interested in reading more and seeing more of our reviews just Google “Presence Training London” or click here.

Is two days enough?

Is 2 days (or even the 4 days of the Foundation training) enough to radically and permanently change your confidence for the better? Absolutely not. This is a gradual process of learning new ways to be an unlearning old “bad” habits. That simply takes time, skilful coaching and repetition. (That’s why we have the Presence Club and some people opt for longer-term individual coaching). But 2 days is enough to radically change the way you view yourself and to give you a roadmap as to what is not just possible but absolutely realistic.

And we’ve certainly had people go away from even a single session of one-to-one coaching with what they need to handle a particular upcoming challenge in their lives in a radically different way than the way they would’ve done it previously. (We know this because they have written to us afterwards and told us that this is what happened).

Powerful change can happen when you change where you’re operating from

This isn’t just about understanding your physiology, your psychology, or the evolutionary processes at work, although that is really important. And it’s not enough to simply experience the effects of doing something differently, and witnessing that in others, although that is incredibly helpful. Something more fundamental is required in order for the shift to be sufficiently radical, deep and effective.

That something else is a shift in perspective. Most of us habitually operate from the perspective of our egos. These are the parts of our psychology that are worried about our performance and how we will be perceived, and therefore try to control ourselves and others as a way of attempting to achieve a form of safety. This is why so many people fall back on techniques which are based on pretence and performance.

The Shift From Ego To Presence

The shift occurs when we recognise that these parts of our psychology are completely normal, and they live within us all, but they are not truly who we are. There is a wider, deeper, more intelligent and more authentically confident self that we can all access, when we understand how. This is a shift from an egoic perspective to Presence — and The Presence Method™ is the structured way we teach people to stabilise that shift under pressure.

We have all experienced this at times in our lives — whether in our work, in artistic pursuits or on the sporting field. That sense of being in a flow state, of being “in the zone”. Where we are not doubting ourselves and we instinctively know what we need to do. This is presence – and it underlies everything we teach.

What Changes When You Operate From Presence

When we learn how to move from operating primarily from fear, control and performance into operating from presence, something very fundamental changes. Confidence stops feeling like something we have to manufacture or maintain, and starts to feel like something much more natural and stable — essentially part of who we are.

From here, people often find they can think more clearly under pressure, stay connected to themselves and others, and respond to reality as it actually is — rather than through the lens of fear or self-doubt. This is where communication, leadership and performance start to feel much more effortless, and much more authentic.

What This Means In Practice

All of this might sound quite conceptual — neuroscience, psychology, attention, presence — but in practice, it shows up in very ordinary, very human moments at work and in life.

It shows up when you walk into a meeting and don’t feel that familiar tightening in your chest.

It shows up when you can hear a challenging question and stay present, rather than disappearing into your head trying to work out how to defend yourself.

It shows up when you can speak to someone senior, or to a room full of people, and still feel like yourself — rather than feeling like you have to become a “version” of yourself.

It shows up when you can feel adrenaline in your body, but it no longer feels like an emergency.

And perhaps most importantly, it shows up in how you experience yourself.
Less self-criticism.
Less second-guessing.
Less feeling like you’re one mistake away from being “found out”.

And more clarity.
More steadiness.
More sense that you can handle whatever is actually happening in front of you.

This isn’t about becoming a different person.
It’s about becoming much more able to be who you already are, your best self — even when the stakes are high.

And that is exactly the work we help professionals do every day.  Our Presence-based leadership programme is rooted in this.  But we can use it outside our working environment, every moment of every day.

When this starts to stabilise, many people discover something unexpected — that confidence stops feeling like something fragile that can disappear, and starts to feel like something much more natural, much more reliable, and much more like “home”.

If You Recognise Yourself In This — There Is A Way Forward

If you’ve recognised yourself in parts of this page, the next step doesn’t have to be dramatic.

For most people, it simply starts with a conversation.

Some people choose to begin with group training, where they can practise in a safe environment and very quickly see what is possible.

Others prefer to start one-to-one, working directly on the real situations they’re facing right now — upcoming presentations, leadership challenges, high-stakes conversations, or moments where confidence feels unreliable.

There isn’t a single “right” starting point.
What matters is beginning the process of learning how to work with your system — rather than fighting against it.

If this work resonates with you, you’d be very welcome to get in touch and explore what the right next step might look like.

Talk to us about your situation

If something in this page has resonated with you, you don’t have to work the rest of this out on your own.

Most people who get in touch with us are not looking for “training” in the abstract.
They are usually facing something real — an upcoming presentation, a leadership transition, difficult conversations, visibility pressure, or simply a growing sense that confidence in certain situations is holding them back from being who they know they are capable of being.

A short conversation is often the best place to start.

We can talk about:

• what is currently happening for you
• what you would like to change
• whether group training, one-to-one coaching, or simply pointing you in the right direction would be most helpful

There is no pressure, no obligation, and no expectation that you already know exactly what you need.

Sometimes people leave that first conversation with a clear next step.
Sometimes they simply leave feeling relieved that what they are experiencing is understandable — and changeable.

Many of the people we work with say they wish they had started this work earlier.
But in truth, whenever you start is the right time.

If you’d like to explore what might be possible for you, please do get in touch.

Frequently Asked Questions About Confidence In High-Pressure Situations

1. Can confidence really change if I’ve felt this way for years?

Yes.

Many people we work with have felt this way for a long time. What most discover is that confidence is not a fixed personality trait — it is strongly influenced by context, pressure, and how your brain and body respond to attention and evaluation.

When those underlying patterns change, confidence often changes much faster than people expect.

2. I’m successful in most areas of my life. Why does confidence disappear in specific situations?

This is extremely common.

Confidence is often situational, not global.
You might feel confident in most of your work — but lose confidence when:

• all eyes are on you
• you are being evaluated
• you are speaking to someone senior
• the outcome really matters

This is usually about how the brain and body interpret social risk — not about ability or character.

3. Is this just public speaking training, or is it broader than that?

Public speaking is often the doorway — but the work is usually wider.

Many clients initially come because of presentations or speaking.
But the same patterns often affect leadership, client conversations, visibility moments, and high-stakes decision environments.

That’s why the work often supports leadership communication, influence, confidence under pressure, and how people experience themselves professionally.

4. How quickly do people usually notice changes?

Often faster than people expect — but stable confidence develops over time.

Many people notice meaningful shifts during:

• the first two days of Foundation training
• the first few coaching sessions
• sometimes even after a single targeted session for a specific event

Long-term stability comes through practice, integration and real-world application.

5. How do I know whether I should do a course or one-to-one coaching?

It depends on your situation.

Group training is often best if you want structured learning, a safe audience to practise with, and shared learning.

One-to-one coaching is often best if you want highly targeted support, flexible scheduling, or help with specific real-world challenges.

If you’re unsure, a short conversation usually makes this clear very quickly.

6. What makes your approach different from typical confidence or communication training?

Most traditional approaches focus mainly on technique and performance.

Our work focuses first on helping you feel genuinely at ease being seen and heard — and on building real connection with the people you are communicating with.

From there, clarity, structure and impact tend to follow much more naturally.

This is why many clients find the work affects not just presentations or speaking — but leadership, relationships at work, and overall confidence.

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If you’ve read this far and recognised yourself in this work, you’re very welcome to reach out.
We’re always happy to have an honest conversation about what might help.