Overconfidence and Underconfidence Both Create Blind Spots
Key Takeaways
Confidence isn’t a personality trait you’re born with or without. It’s a behavior that manifests under pressure and it can be built through repetition.
Underconfidence shows up as hesitation, avoidance, and over-compensating. Overconfidence shows up as bias toward action, control, and dismissiveness.
Both create blind spots across all three gaps — self-awareness, regulation, and relational.
Confidence can, in part, be decided. What you tell yourself in the moment shapes how you show up. That is a trainable mental capacity.
We talk about confidence as though it were a fixed quantity. We often see it as something you either have or you don’t, handed out at birth like eye color. Some people are the confident ones. The rest are working on it, repeating affirmations in the mirror.
I want to offer a different frame, because in my experience it is both truer and far more useful: confidence is not a personality trait. It is a behavior that surfaces under pressure, and like any behavior, it can be built through practice and repetition. The question is not how much confidence you were born with. It is how you train it and how you catch it when it gets distorted.
Why confidence isn’t a quantity you have more or less of
We often assume that more confidence equals a better leader.
But this misses something important. Confidence is not a single dial running from low to high. It is a behavior under pressure and both ends of the range create their own blind spots. Too little confidence distorts your leadership in one direction. Too much distorts it in another. Neither is ideal. What most of us need is an understanding of when which version of our confidence shows up and how to regulate it better.
There is a particular trap that comes with seniority. Research on what some call “CEO’s Disease” finds that the more power a leader holds, the more likely they are to overestimate their own abilities. In one study of more than 3,600 leaders, the higher-ranking ones overvalued their skills across nineteen of twenty competencies. The reason is structural: the more senior you become, the less candid feedback you receive, precisely when your blind spots carry the most weight.
What underconfidence looks like to your team
Underconfidence often shows up as hesitation, avoidance, or over-preparing for a decision you are equipped to make. What does this look like? In my Leadership Pattern Reflection Workbook, I discuss three gaps and map confidence to each of these. In the self-awareness gap, it surfaces as chronic uncertainty. In the regulation gap, it looks like freezing under pressure. In the relational gap, it becomes deferring, minimizing, and quietly avoiding the hard conversation.
The trap is that underconfidence often reads, from the outside, as humility, which is a quality we admire in leaders. So it goes unchallenged. But the cost is real: a team led by an underconfident leader loses clarity. They are left guessing at a direction the leader was hesitant to set.
What overconfidence looks like to your team
Overconfidence, as you can imagine, shows up as diametrically opposed behaviors to underconfidence. It manifests as a bias toward action, control, and moving prematurely. In the self-awareness gap, it becomes hubris. In the regulation gap, it looks like charging ahead without considering other perspectives. In the relational gap, it becomes vetoing other people’s ideas and dismissing their feedback.
And its trap is the mirror image: overconfidence reads as decisiveness, which we also admire. So it, too, goes unchallenged. But the cost is a team that loses its voice. They stop offering input to a leader who appears to have already decided.
Why both produce the same outcome
Here is what strikes me most about the two extremes. They produce opposite behaviors and the exact same result: people stop telling you things.
Underconfidence closes the door by deferring. The leader never quite plants a flag, so the team never quite engages. Overconfidence closes it by vetoing. The leader shuts down input, so the team stops offering it.
The foundational research on this, Kruger and Dunning’s original 1999 study, is usually remembered for only half of what it found. Yes, the least competent people overestimate themselves. But the study also found the opposite at the top end: high performers consistently underestimated themselves, because they assumed that what came easily to them came easily to everyone. Both distortions were present and both were costly to those experiencing them.
I have written about what avoided conversations are really costing you and when people stop speaking up, whether because you defer or because you dominate, that is exactly the price you are paying.
How to find your default under pressure
So the useful question is not “am I confident or not?” It is situational: when does which show up?
Most of us swing. The work is to notice your own swing: to learn which settings reliably push you toward overconfidence and which ones push you toward under.
For many seasoned leaders, the pull toward control shows up most sharply around letting go, which is something I have explored in why letting go feels harder for experienced leaders.
Confidence can be decided and trained
This brings me to the part I most want leaders to hear, because it is the part that changes what is possible.
Confidence is partly a decision. It is the read you give yourself about whether you can handle what is in front of you and that internal script is more adjustable than it feels. It is almost a mental trick: deciding you are equal to the moment and proceeding with that in mind.
And because it is a behavior, it strengthens with repetition. Every time you choose the steadier response under pressure, like speaking up when you would normally defer, or holding back when you would normally dominate, the next time gets a little easier. This is the same practice-and-reinforcement loop that shifts any pattern. Confidence is not fixed. It is trained.
This is also where coaching comes in. Not by handing you confidence on a silver platter, but by building the repetitions that make the decided response your default. It’s the same reinforcement I write about across all of this pattern work.
FAQs
Can a leader be both overconfident and underconfident?
Almost always, yes. Most leaders swing between the two depending on the room, the stakes, and who else is present — decisive to the point of dismissiveness in one setting, hesitant and over-preparing in another. The useful question isn’t which one you are; it’s when you’re which.
Isn’t overconfidence just confidence?
No, and treating them as the same is what makes overconfidence so hard to catch. Confidence is a well-calibrated read of what you actually know and can do; overconfidence is a read that outruns the evidence. The tell is what happens when you’re wrong: confidence updates, overconfidence doubles down.
If confidence can be trained, does that mean I can just decide to be confident?
In part, yes. In the moment, confidence is partly a choice about whether you’re equal to what’s in front of you. But deciding once isn’t the same as changing your default. The decision has to be repeated, under real pressure, enough times that the steadier response becomes automatic. It’s a decision and a practice, not one or the other.
What’s the difference between confidence and certainty in leadership?
Confidence is a willingness to act and to be accountable for the outcome. Certainty is a claim that you already know how things will turn out. The best leaders I work with are highly confident and comfortably uncertain at the same time. They commit to a decision while staying genuinely open to being wrong about it.
Closing Reflection
Think of the last time you were under real pressure in an important situation. Did you move too fast, or not at all? That answer points to your default, and your default is the thing you can train.
Explore More
→ Why Letting Go Feels Harder for Experienced Leaders
→ What Leaders Miss When They Assume Alignment
→ Trust Is Built in Small Moments, Not Big Announcements
Download
My Leadership Patterns: A Reflection Workbook includes a section on the role of confidence — mapping where your own default sits between over- and under-confidence, and how it shows up across each of the three gaps. It’s free to download.