The Competence-Confidence Equation
A framework for leadership grounded in power awareness.
In a recent session with members of The Co., a participant asked me:
“Is being aware of your own power the same as having a healthy feeling of confidence within yourself? What would you say is the difference between the two?”
It’s a thoughtful question, and one that sits at the heart of leadership, equity, and change.
My short answer was: no, power awareness is not the same as confidence.
But unpacking why reveals how deeply both are shaped by context and power dynamics.
The Three Ingredients of Change
When we talk about using power effectively (driving positive change) - in organizations, communities, or movements - three interdependent ingredients emerge:
Awareness
Willingness
Skill
Each of these relates to confidence in a different way.
Awareness is perception in motion, knowing how power is distributed and how it feels in the room. It’s being conscious of formal authority, unspoken influence, and the subtle hierarchies that shape who feels free to speak, interrupt, or decide.
It also includes awareness of your own position - how your role, identity, and lived experience intersect with others’.
Awareness means noticing both the space you occupy and the space you leave for others.
Willingness connects awareness to action. This is where confidence begins.
Willingness asks: Am I prepared to use my power in this moment?
It means assessing what’s at-risk and what’s at-stake.
Healthy confidence often grows when we focus on what’s at stake - the potential to create, repair, or move something meaningful forward - rather than the fear of what we might lose.
Skill (or competence) completes the triad.
Skill increases confidence because it expands what’s possible within our comfort zone.
But skill without awareness risks reinforcing harm, and awareness without skill can paralyze.
Confidence grounded in both is the most sustainable.
How Power Shapes Confidence
Many of us were implicitly trained to equate confidence with certainty, dominance, or visibility - to take up space, speak first, or project authority.
This conditioning privileges those historically granted social safety: men over women, people racialized as white over others, those with institutional power over those without.
That kind of confidence can appear strong but is often fragile, dependent on hierarchy for validation.
For people whose identities or histories place them outside dominant power, confidence is rarely assumed. It’s earned, most often through repeated demonstrations of competence, careful self-regulation, and resilience in the face of doubt.
As a result, what looks like “hesitation” or “lack of confidence” may actually be strategic awareness: the understanding that being overly confident in a down-power position has consequences.
Competence itself is frequently mismeasured through biased perceptions. The person who “seems confident” isn’t always the most capable; they may simply be more protected from penalty when they fail.
Awareness of this distinction is the first step toward a more just interpretation of both confidence and skill.
Rebalancing Confidence
Developing authentic confidence in unequal systems requires reframing its purpose:
From performance to practice. Confidence isn’t the absence of doubt; it’s the willingness to act while remaining teachable.
From self-trust to collective trust. Competence grows in relationship, in environments that share knowledge, power, and feedback.
From taking space to making space. Power-aware confidence means reading the room, not dominating it.
Confidence becomes generative when it serves connection and shared progress rather than control.
In Practice
The healthiest confidence I’ve witnessed doesn’t shout. It listens. It holds discomfort without retreating.
It’s not about being certain; it’s about being centred.
Awareness helps us see the system.
Willingness gives us the courage to step into it.
Skill enables us to navigate it responsibly.
Together, they turn power from something we possess into something we steward. That is the difference between confidence as performance… and confidence as presence.
-Jeff