Confidence Is Overrated.

Picture this. Amsterdam. A vast concert hall with acoustics so fine that musicians rank it alongside Boston’s Symphony Hall and Vienna’s Musikverein. People fly across the world to play one night in it.

This is the Concertgebouw.

Today, no concert – instead, the final round of an orchestral audition for principal flute. One job. A room full of the best flautists alive.

One of them walks out and plays the hardest round of her life. And none of her low D’s come out. Not one. It’s never happened to her before. The pressure goes somewhere specific – her jaw – and the airstream can’t get where it needs to go.

That flautist is Lorna McGhee – now principal flute of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. But the real story isn’t the failed audition. It’s what she does now, before she walks on stage. And it has nothing to do with feeling confident.

She still walks on stage. Not because the feeling arrives – it never does. Because she makes a choice.

A choice.

I’m Jon Hunter, and I work with actors. This show is Emotions for Humans – the craft of being human, the stuff nobody sits us down and teaches. So whether your room is an audition, a big pitch, or the first day of a new job… stay with me. Because today I want to take confidence down off its pedestal – and show you what the people who make it look easy actually do instead.

Here’s the assumption we all make. We see someone on stage – or at the front of the room – looking calm, loose, certain. And we assume that what we’re seeing is what they’re feeling. That the outside is a window.

Lorna McGhee has spent her working life on those stages, and here’s her answer, word for word: “confidence is really overrated.”

In the studio, I watch the wait happen every week. The actor who won’t commit to the rehearsal until they feel ready. The half-voice take. The cautious run-through, saving the real thing for whenever the feeling turns up. And I’ve started saying what McGhee says: nobody feels as confident as they look. Not even them.

Now – last week’s episode established something important: confidence is built from evidence. Reps. The memory of having done the thing and survived. That’s all true. But notice what it doesn’t promise: that on the day, the feeling will show up on time. The most rehearsed performer in the world can still walk into the room without it. The evidence is banked – and the feeling may not pre-arrive.

So the real question is this. If confidence isn’t the feeling… what is actually carrying these people through? That’s today’s episode.

Back to Amsterdam. What actually happened in that audition?

For a low D note on a flute to sound, the airstream needs to arrive at a certain angle. And the pressure had gone straight to her jaw – she was holding tension there, and her jaw was in the way of the airstream. Not a mystery. Not a character flaw. Physics, with an address.

And this is the part I want you to hear exactly as she says it: “the shoulders don’t get tight on their own. The fingers don’t grasp the keys for dear life unless there’s an element of fear there as well. It’s psychophysical.”

Psychophysical. The mental and the physical are one system. Pressure doesn’t float around your body looking for somewhere to land – it books a specific seat. Hers was the jaw.

For an actor, it might be the knees locking at the top of the scene, or the throat that closes mid-sentence, or the neck that stiffens right before the word ‘action’. And if your stage is somewhere else: the party where you know no one and your voice goes thin. The phone call where your shoulders climb. The hospital corridor where your hands disappear.

Every body has an address. And there’s a second story from McGhee that proves the same thing from the other direction – the Rampal Competition in Paris. Her first round went beautifully. On the day of the second round, she couldn’t find a bank that would exchange her traveller’s cheques, so she arrived late – 15 minutes before she was due to play, with no warm-up, in a panic – and she crashed and burned. The anxiety lived in her body, and the sound went with it.

Why does any of this matter? Because an address is something you can work with. A fog isn’t.

So if the feeling can’t be summoned – what do you do with the moment before the room?

There’s a line I want to hand you, and I’ll tell you exactly where I got it. McGhee quotes a performance psychologist named Dana Sinclair, from her book Dialed In: “It doesn’t matter how you feel, it’s what you do.”

And here’s what McGhee herself does with that. Before a solo performance with the Boston Symphony – every single time, right before walking on stage – she says the same words to herself. Choose courage. Choose courage. Choose courage.

Hear what that is and isn’t. It isn’t a pep talk. She isn’t telling herself she feels great. She isn’t trying to manufacture a feeling. She’s making a choice – about what she’s going to do in the room. In her words: “It is like the choice you make rather than just how you feel. You’re not at the mercy of events. You’re not buffeted around by them.”

Not at the mercy of events. The nervous system is going to do what it does – the jaw, the shallow breath, all of it. The feeling of confidence may or may not come. And none of it decides what you do. The feeling was never the admission ticket. The choice is.

Before I show you what the choice looks like in practice, there’s one more piece – and it’s the one that quietly frees people the most.

Here’s what it looks like in my studio. An actor finishes a scene in front of the camera, the class watching on the monitor. I call cut. And they step away from the camera already listing the damage – I forgot that line, I didn’t do that action. Meanwhile the rest of us are wondering if we just watched the same take, because we saw none of it. Not one item on the list. They’re beating themselves up for things that the camera never saw.

Psychologists have a name for that gap: the illusion of transparency. In the key studies, people gave speeches while convinced their nervousness was written all over them – and the observers watching couldn’t read it nearly as well as the speakers believed. Not because those observers were being polite. Because inner states leak far less than they feel like they leak. The nervousness felt blinding from the inside. From the outside, only a fraction of it showed.

A related finding, the spotlight effect: we massively overestimate how much attention anyone is paying to us at all.

Put those together and you get something strange and liberating. That defensive, careful version of you – the one playing not to be seen failing? You’re defending against an audience that mostly can’t see what you’re hiding. It’s hide and seek, and nobody’s looking.

Which clears the way for the last piece.

Here is McGhee again, on what separates the performers she looks up to – people like Yo-Yo Ma and Joyce DiDonato – from everyone else. Two ways to be in the room.

One: playing defensively, in order not to go wrong. Slightly hiding your light. Not because you don’t care – because you’re scared. And here’s her diagnosis of what that buys you: it isn’t really music-making, it’s just physical execution. There’s no communication. The best it can earn is admiration – well done, you navigated that well – and it doesn’t reach anybody. Connection is not on the menu.

Actors have their own version of this: the obsession with getting the lines right. As if anyone came to check the lines – as if anyone actually cared (unless it’s Shakespeare). It isn’t really acting, it’s a memory recall exercise.

So, one: playing defensively. Or, two: playing generously. Openhearted. Her own definition of courage, and I’ve never heard better: getting over yourself. Taking the focus off yourself – “less self-regard, less self-defence, and more commitment to the task at hand.”

And here’s the half McGhee never has to argue – the research carries it for her.

At UCLA, Tristen Inagaki and Naomi Eisenberger asked a simple question: what does giving do to the giver? People wrote a supportive letter to a friend, then faced a public-speaking challenge. Against a control group, their systolic blood pressure rose less under the challenge – and so did a marker of the body’s stress response. The fight-or-flight machinery – the same machinery that grabs a flautist’s jaw – settled. And here’s the detail I can’t get over: the letter-writers felt just as anxious and stressed as everyone else. The feeling didn’t move. The body did.

I’ll be straight with you about the leap. That study is about a letter to a friend. It isn’t about playing a flute in front of a hall. But it’s the same shape of move: under pressure, turn the attention outward instead of guarding yourself – and the body follows. McGhee’s two ways of being in the room are opposites in spirit – and in the body. Playing not to lose keeps the bracing switched on. Playing generous is the version where the bracing comes down.

Generosity isn’t the price you pay for courage. It’s part of the mechanism.

And notice where her courage lives: in the body, in specifics. She talks about refusing to brace – “I refuse to get tied in knots physically” – choosing to keep the body peaceful in exactly the moments the hands want to grab. Freeing the neck before the hard passage instead of tightening around it. Courage isn’t a mood here. It’s a chain of small physical decisions, made under pressure, in real time.

Behind all of it, one line she keeps returning to – she heard it on a podcast, a notice on the door of a dance studio: the only reason to practise technique is so the body doesn’t get in the way of the soul expressing itself. That’s what all the training is for. Getting the obstacles out of the way.

And one more thing she carries with her, from her Alexander Technique teacher, which she says she finds strangely comforting: allow all the possibilities to be on the table – including complete catastrophe – because only then are you free to move. Release the audience from having to like it. They don’t need to like it. She calls it the wisdom of no escape: the concert’s going ahead.

The concert’s going ahead. Your meeting is going ahead. The audition is going ahead. The only open question is whether you play or defend.

Let me put this in the rest of your week, because it transfers.

The meeting where you had something to say and didn’t say it. The dinner where you kept the peace. The difficult conversation you walked into with your argument already loaded. In every one of those rooms, there were two versions of you available. One playing not to lose. One playing to connect.

The room doesn’t need you defended. It needs you there.

So, here’s what you know now.

Confidence is really overrated – nobody on that stage feels what you think they’re feeling. Pressure has an address in your body – and it’s the same address every time, which means you can learn yours.

It doesn’t matter how you feel, it’s what you do.

Your nerves barely show.

And the enemy was never the nerves. The enemy is playing in order not to go wrong.

The room you’re dreading? You’ve been waiting for the confidence that was never coming – and paying for the wait in ways the room can’t even see.

Try it this week. Pick the next room you actually care about. Before you walk in, name what playing not to lose looks like for you in that room – the cautious version, the defended version, whatever it is. Then choose the generous version of your first move instead. That’s all. One room. One honest name. One different first move.

Okay, that’s all for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time – or maybe see you in class. Go be a human.