Read the full transcript of Kris Kelso’s talk titled “3 Steps To Finding Confidence” at TEDxOldHickory 2025 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Starting a Business Without Experience
KRIS KELSO: In 2007, at age 31, I started my first real business with no business training or education whatsoever. I didn’t even go to college. And I knew there was a lot I didn’t know, so one evening I went to a large bookstore. Remember those? We used to buy books. I bought a stack of books covering everything I thought I needed to know to run a small business: marketing, finance, sales, contracts. I read a book on writing contracts.
I read them all, and I just started a business and I got to work. In those first few years especially, I heard a lot of advice. And there was one piece of advice that just kept coming up. I heard it from multiple people, and that advice is, “fake it till you make it.”
The Problem with “Fake It Till You Make It”
I’m going to be honest, I do not like this advice. In fact, I think it’s terrible advice. And it’s not just because I’m automatically skeptical of advice that rhymes. Like “a stitch in time saves nine,” really? Does it really save nine or does it just save four, but nine sounds better? I digress.
There are several reasons why I think “fake it till you make it” is terrible advice:
There’s just an inherent deception in that that doesn’t sit well with me. It’s dishonest. And I would never advise someone to try to get ahead through deception.
If you have any doubt about what you’re trying to start, if you have any worries or fears about being ill-equipped or inadequate, and especially if you wrestle with some form of imposter syndrome where you worry that your success may not be real or legitimate or that you’ve just gotten by on luck or chance, well then telling yourself to fake it is not going to help you. Calling yourself a fake is not going to boost your confidence. It’s going to erode your confidence.
When you’re faking it, you’re acting like you don’t need any help. And if you act like you don’t need help, you may miss out on opportunities to get help. You could set yourself back or at the very least move forward much slower than you should because you decide to fake it.
The Dangers of Proud Insecurity
Now I’ve experienced this myself. I’ve started multiple businesses and I’ve changed industries several times through my career from music to technology to leadership development. In fact, I love trying new things. I love the learning that comes with it. But that often means that I’m a little bit in over my head. I’m figuring it out as I go. And in those moments when I’m learning, I’m tempted to fake it.
But here’s what I noticed when I give in to the temptation to fake it till I make it. There’s this pride, even an arrogance that develops as I’m trying to appear as competent and self-assured as I can. That outward pride is really just a mask for the inner insecurity, for the fear that someone is going to figure out that I’m faking it.
So I call this state of being “proud insecurity,” where there’s a big difference, there’s a big gap between how you’re acting on the outside and how you feel on the inside. And that gap, that distance between how you feel and how you’re acting, it creates a lot of tension, a lot of stress, a lot of anxiety. It can be exhausting. It shows up in a lot of wasted effort and energy. It’s wasted on things like managing your image and focusing too much on how you come across. It’s wasted on really over-analyzing situations and replaying conversations in your head again and again, trying to figure out what others might be thinking. It’s wasted on trying to cover your flaws, your mistakes, anything you’ve done wrong, and trying to appear that you have it all together and you’re getting it all right.
And this waste, this wasted energy, it doesn’t just affect you as an individual. There’s a cumulative effect. Imagine for a minute an entire organization of people who are faking it until they make it. Very little would actually get done. Progress would be so slow and expectations would almost never be met. Take that a step further and imagine an entire community that is faking it. It could descend into chaos.
So it truly is a situation where what you think is helping you is not only not helping you, it’s potentially hurting you and the world around you.
The Power of Humble Confidence
So I asked myself one day, if proud insecurity is so dangerous and potentially destructive, then what’s the opposite of that? The opposite of proud insecurity is humble confidence. Now, at first blush, it may seem like humility and confidence are at odds with each other. But they’re not opposites. In fact, they make really great partners.
To understand this, we have to make sure we have the right perspective on humility. My favorite quote about humility comes from author Rick Warren who said, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.”
Humility doesn’t mean that you have a low opinion of yourself. It just means that you quit worrying about what everyone thinks of you. You quit managing your image. And so in order to help you understand what humble confidence is, I’m going to describe three humble confidence behaviors. And the great thing about these behaviors is that they’re choices you can make. They’re habits you can form that will help you avoid the trap of proud insecurity and walk in humble confidence.
Three Habits of Humble Confidence
1. Say “I Don’t Know” More Often
The first behavior involves a very simple phrase, although simple is not the same as easy.
All right, as simple as this phrase is, it can be one of the hardest things to say. And that phrase is, “I don’t know.”
See, when you’re stuck in proud insecurity, it can be really hard to admit that you don’t know something. When someone asks you a question or they turn to you as if you’re the expert, the temptation is just to make something up, to try to sound smart. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve caught myself at times beginning to answer a question having no real idea where that answer is going to end up. It’s like I think I can talk my way there. And the problem with doing that is you really paint yourself into a corner. The moment you start sounding like an expert, you put a lot of pressure on yourself to come up with the right answer, even if you don’t have it.
But by starting with “I don’t know,” you free yourself from the burden of having to fake it. Now, the key to making this work is that “I don’t know” doesn’t have to be the end of the sentence. You can say things like:
“I don’t know, though I have some ideas.”
“I don’t know, but I know someone who has the expertise we need.”
“I don’t know, but I have a black belt in Google search.”
If you’re on a team, you can say, “I don’t know, but I bet we can figure it out.” And this is even more important for leaders, because as a leader, if you fake it, people will assume you have the answers, and they’ll defer to you keeping their ideas to themselves. But when you start with “I don’t know,” you invite other people to the conversation. You get more from your team when you start with “I don’t know.”
2. Reorient the Source of Your Confidence
The second habit is to reorient the source of your confidence. A number of years ago, I was making one of those career transitions that I mentioned earlier. I was moving from one kind of business to something very different. And I confided in my coach that I wasn’t sure if I could make the switch. And my coach, a psychologist named Dr. Roger Hall, he taught me the difference between self-esteem and self-efficacy.
Self-esteem, he said, is largely emotional. It’s how you feel about yourself and your value. But feelings are fickle. They change easily, and so they’re not very reliable. Self-efficacy, on the other hand, is an honest assessment of your capabilities, your track record, and your resources.
And he challenged me in that moment to look back at all the times in my career I had started something new and been able to figure it out and eventually be successful. And since then, I’ve learned to draw my confidence not from having the answers but from my ability to go find the answers. I’m a good learner. I have a knack for figuring it out.
And so when I start something new, I can be confident not because I’ve done this thing before but because I’ve done so many other things before. And as a result, I can have the humility to admit that I don’t have all the answers, and I’m probably going to make some mistakes along the way, but also have the confidence to know that I can and will ultimately be successful. I can be confident that I have what it takes to experiment and learn my way to success without having to pretend that it’s going to go perfectly.
Habit number three is to be more open about sharing your mistakes and failures but to reframe those as lessons learned. There’s a story that’s been passed down by employees of IBM for decades about Tom Watson, the founder of the company, when he was running the business a long time ago. And Tom Watson had called one of his salespeople into his office to talk about a failed bid that was worth a million dollars. That would be many times that amount in today’s dollars.
So think about that for just a minute. You’ve been called to the CEO’s office to discuss your multi-million dollar failure. He walked in with his resignation letter. And as the story goes, Tom Watson took the letter and he looked at the man and he shook his head and he said, “Why would we let you go? We just invested a million dollars in your education.”
See, Tom Watson understood the valuable wisdom that can come through failure. And he wasn’t about to see that wisdom walk out the door and go to a competitor.
I’ve failed many times as an entrepreneur. I’ve had some six-figure failures in business. And I’ve learned a lot in the process. And I have a lot to offer. But when I’m stuck in proud insecurity, there’s a strong desire to sweep those failures under the rug, to pretend they never happened and hope that no one ever finds out. But if I do that, if I give in, I rob myself and people around me from the valuable wisdom that comes with those failures.
So I’ve come to realize that failure is only truly failure if I learn nothing. And humble confidence means being much more focused on the value of the learning than the embarrassment of the failure.
So now when I start something new, I’ve determined there’s only two possible outcomes. I’m either going to succeed or I’m going to learn. And neither one is bad.
Conclusion
So you see, humble confidence works because humility doesn’t mean having a low opinion of yourself. It just means that you quit managing your image. You quit worrying about what everyone’s thinking. And confidence doesn’t mean that you have all the answers or that you’re going to get it perfect every time. It’s just believing that you have what it takes to learn your way through it, to find those answers. And ultimately to be successful.
When you walk in humble confidence, there’s no reason to fake it until you make it. You can just skip the faking it and focus on making it.
