You Can't Think Your Way to Confidence — Maya Jacobs on What Actually Works
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
Introduction: Stop Waiting for Confidence to Arrive
Confidence is not something you build by reading about it or listening to someone speak about it. You build it by doing the thing that scares you and realising you are still standing at the end. That is the entire premise of Maya Jacobs' session — and why within the first five minutes, she had 850 people standing up, eyes closed, imagining the most uncomfortable thing she could ask of them.
Maya is the founder of Stage Heroes — a name built on the belief that stepping in front of an audience takes genuine courage. Not because confident people are fearless, but because they act anyway.
Two Types of Confidence — and Why Most People Only Work on One
Most people think of confidence as a single thing. Maya splits it in two. Task confidence is the kind that grows through repetition — the more you present, the more comfortable presenting becomes. It is worth building, but it is not the whole picture.
Self-confidence is different. It is what you carry into every room, every pitch, every difficult conversation. It does not come from practice alone. It comes from how you see yourself — and that is what the rest of the session is about.
The Three Components of Self-Confidence
Maya's framework rests on three elements. They build on each other, and the most powerful one comes last.
Where You Put Your Focus
The Spotlight Effect convinces us that everyone in the room is watching, judging, and cataloguing our every flaw. They are not. Every person in any audience is primarily asking themselves one question: what does this mean for me? The moment you shift from "I wonder if they like me" to "I'm curious about who they are," the dynamic changes entirely. Curiosity is more powerful than self-consciousness — and it is a choice you can make before you walk into any room.
Being Present in Your Body
When nerves kick in, most people leave their body entirely — running on autopilot, disconnected from the room. Maya's fix is deceptively simple: feel your feet on the ground. That physical anchor keeps you connected to yourself and to your audience simultaneously. You cannot truly communicate with someone if you are not present, and you cannot be present if you have lost the thread back to yourself.
Radical Self-Acceptance
This is the hardest one, and Maya goes first. The thing she dreads most hearing after a talk: "That was a waste of my time." She traces it back to childhood, to bullying, to a belief she still carries — that she is only worthy of people's time if she delivers value. Most people in the room have their own version of that sentence. The worst thing someone could say that would land in their gut.
The point is not to get rid of it. It is to stop fighting it. As long as we are at war with parts of ourselves, we cannot be fully present in front of others. Radical self-acceptance means owning those parts completely — so they lose their power over us.
Final Thoughts: Confidence Is Not a Trait — It's a Practice
The people who seem most confident are not the ones without fear. They are the ones who stopped waiting for the fear to disappear before walking onto the stage. Focus outward. Stay grounded. Accept the whole of who you are. That is where real confidence lives — and nobody can take it away from you.
Join the Conversation
Which of the 3 components — focus, presence, or self-acceptance — do you find hardest to hold onto when you are in front of an audience? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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