The Mask We Wear

Three words can make capable people do strange things: “I don’t know”. I’ve seen someone brilliant sit on a solvable problem for weeks, not because they lacked skill, but because admitting uncertainty felt worse than the problem itself. That moment captures the theme here: what looks like confidence can be a mask, and what looks like arrogance can be fear. 

I walk through why our threat system treats not knowing as a risk to belonging, and why that same nervousness sends one person quiet while it makes another person dominate the room. We also talk about the modern forces that keep the mask in place: social media certainty, the myth that leadership means always having the answers, and workplaces where everything feels recorded and remembered. If you care about confidence, imposter syndrome, workplace communication, and psychological safety, this will land. 

Then we get practical. I share four small ways to build real confidence: practise “I don’t know” when the stakes are low, use the word “yet” to keep a gap from becoming a verdict, ask for help while the problem is still small, and if you lead, go first so others feel safe to tell the truth. Real confidence is not knowing everything. It’s being able to admit what you do not know and collaborate anyway. If this resonates, subscribe, share it with someone who carries too much alone, and leave a review with the moment you realised you could drop the mask.

Let’s Talk About Confidence is an educational podcast exploring confidence, behaviour, leadership, communication, and personal performance. The views shared are intended for general information and development purposes only and should not be considered medical, psychological, legal, or financial advice.

While practical tools and techniques are discussed, listeners are encouraged to seek appropriately qualified professional support where needed.

Opinions expressed by guests are their own. All content © Breakthrough Change Management Ltd.

Transcript

The Three Words We Avoid

SPEAKER_00 0:00

There are three words most of us will do almost anything to avoid saying out loud I don't know. I've watched people talk for a full minute to get round them. I've done it myself, nodding along in a meeting or a word I didn't recognise, making a quiet note to look it up later, rather than just asking what it meant. It's a strange little reflex we've got. Someone asks you something, you haven't got the answer and instead of simply saying no, I don't know, you reach for a mask. You busy yourself looking capable. Most of the time it's harmless enough, but every so often I see it do some real damage. I once watched a very capable senior leader sitting on a problem for weeks because admitting it existed felt worse to him than the problem itself. The time it finally came out, it'd grown into something far bigger than it ever needed to be, and the whole time the help he needed had been sitting in the room with him. And this is it. What struck me watching that? From outside it looked like ego, it looked like pride, but it wasn't so underneath. Behind the mask was something much more ordinary and much more human. He was nervous, same as anyone. He just wore it the other way around.

Nervousness That Wears A Mask

SPEAKER_00 1:36

Welcome to Let's Talk About Confidence. I'm John M. Walsh. This is season three, Nervous Not Broken. All season we've been looking at people who feel nervous and decide there must be something wrong with them. The person who shrinks in the meeting, who talks themselves out of the room, who reads a perfectly ordinary flutter as proof that they're not up to it. And today I want to turn the picture round, because nervousness doesn't always make people shrink. Sometimes it makes them grow in the wrong direction. Sometimes the most nervous person in the room is the one who looks the most certain, the one with all the answers, the one who never seems to struggle with anything. That's what I want to talk about today, the mask. Why so many capable people find it almost impossible to say those three small words I don't know? And what it quietly costs them when they can't. Let me start close to home because this isn't a leadership problem, it's a human one. The leaders just have further to fall. Think about the last time someone asked you if you were alright. On a day where you weren't, what did you say? Most of us say yeah, I'm fine. We say it in reflex before we've even checked whether it's true. That's a mask. A small, everyday, socially useful one, but a mask all the same. Think about the last time you were given directions you didn't quite follow, or instructions at work you didn't fully understand. Did you ask them to go through it again? Or did you nod, say yeah, I got it, and work it out later in a small private panic? Most of us just nod. Think about the meeting where a word or an idea goes round the table that you don't know, and everyone else seems to in the window to ask sorry, what does that mean? Opens for about two seconds and then closes for good, and you spend the rest of the meeting hoping nobody turns to you and asks you about the bit you didn't follow. Or think about your first weeks in any new job, where everyone speaks in acronyms you don't have yet, and there's a small choice every hour between asking what they mean and looking like you should already know them. Most of us choose looking like we know, and drown in initials for a fortnight or even longer. We've all done it I've done it, all of it. And none of it makes you a fraud or a phony. It makes you a person who, like the rest of us, would quite like to be seen as capable and is frightened of being caught out. The mask is just a face we put on when we're worried that the real one isn't enough. And for most people, most of the time it's harmless, but the higher the stakes and the more people are dependent on you, the more that little reflex starts to cost. Because a leader who can't say I don't know doesn't just lose a small moment. They lose the chance to get the help that everybody, including them, needs.

Why “I Don’t Know” Feels Risky

SPEAKER_00 4:38

So let's do what we always do and ask why. Why should three of the most useful words in the language the most useful words feel so genuinely dangerous to say? Earlier in the season we talked about the part of the brain that scans all day long for threat, and we talked about how for almost the whole of human history your survival depended on you standing in the group. The tribe kept you alive, and your place in it depended in large part on being useful, on being good for something, on being a contributor rather than a passenger. Now think about what I don't know sounds like. To that ancient part of the brain it sounds like an admission that you're not as useful as the others thought, that you can't be relied on, that your place in the group might not be as secure as you'd hoped. To a modern rational mind saying I don't know is just honest. To the old threat system, it can feel like stepping towards the edge of the circle, towards being found out and found wanting. So the system does what it does, it sounds the alarm, and this is the part that matters for today. It doesn't always make you go quiet, and some people the alarm comes out as the opposite, as certainty, as taking charge. As having the answer before anyone else has finished the question. Because if I can look just capable enough, fast enough, then nobody will ever get close to find out what I don't know. That's the mask. I want to be really clear about what it is, because it's the heart of this whole episode. The mask is not arrogance. It looks like arrogance from the outside, but underneath it's fear. It's the same nervousness we've been talking about all season. The same worry that you're not quite enough. It has simply learned to defend itself by attacking rather than by hiding. The person who shrinks in the meeting, the person who dominates it can be running the exact same fear. One of them retreats from it, the other one armors up against it. But underneath the armour and underneath the retreat, it's the same human being worried about the same thing, nervous, not broken. They're just wearing it differently. And why does the same fear send one person quiet and another loud? Usually it comes down to what worked before. Somewhere back along the way one of them learned that going small and careful kept them safe, and the other learned that getting in first and looking strong did the job. Neither chose on purpose, they just kept doing the thing that once got them through long enough after the danger had passed. Which is worth holding on to the next time someone's certainty is grating on you, you may well be watching an old survival strategy, not a personality. And once you see that you stop reading the confidence certain never wrong people as a different species, you start to recognise that the most offended person in the room is often the most frightened.

Modern Life Rewards Fake Certainty

SPEAKER_00 7:44

Now the mask is ancient, but I think we've been handed more reasons than ever to wear it. The conditions have shifted, the way they keep shifting all through this season. The first thing is that we now live surrounded by performances of certainty. Open any feeds on any of the socials, and it's wall to wall expertise. Everybody has the answer, the framework, the five things you're getting wrong, the confident take delivered straight to camera. Nobody posts a version of themselves saying I'm not really sure about this. And so without ever deciding to, we absorb a quiet lesson that everyone else knows, and we are the only ones still working it out. It's the comparison trap again, dressed up in a suit. We measure our private uncertainty against everyone else's public certainty, and naturally we come up short. Same thing is this myth of the leader who always knows. A lot of us carry an old unhelpful picture of what authority is meant to look like. The person at the front who has the answers, who's decisive, who doesn't dither, doesn't wobble, doesn't need help. And so the moment people are handed responsibility, they reach for that picture and try to become it. They think the job is to have the answers when very often the real job is to ask the right questions and get the best of people around them. Trying to be the leader who always knows is exhausting and it's a performance you can never quite keep up. The third thing is that we've fewer and fewer safe places to be a beginner, to not know out loud, without it being noticed and remembered. So much of modern work and modern life is visible, recorded, on the record, and when not knowing feels permanent, like it'll be screenshotted and held against you, the temptation to cover up gets stronger. We've made honesty about our own limits feel riskier than it is, and the mask thrives on that. You see it in small ways everywhere, the new starter who won't ask the obvious question in week one, because asking it in week one is fine and asking it in week six is mortifying, so the window shuts and the question never gets asked at all. The parent who feels they're supposed to know what they're doing, and so never says to another parent out loud that they haven't got the faintest idea either. When that one honest sentence would be a relief to everybody in earshot. We are all in our own way, waiting for someone else to go first.

The Mask Blocks Help And Trust

SPEAKER_00 10:23

Here's the cruel irony at the centre of all of this. The mask is meant to protect you, and it does the precise opposite. Let me go back to that senior leader from the start, because his story is the whole lesson. He was good, genuinely good, with a long track record to prove it, and that was part of the trouble. The behaviours that had made him successful, having the answers, carrying things himself, being the strongest person in the room had worked for years. They'd been rewarded. So when he had a problem that was truly beyond them, a complex one, the kind no single person could ever solve alone, he reached for the only playbook he had. He doubled down and looked incapable, kept it to himself, decided if he'd bring it to the others once he'd fixed it. But he couldn't fix it alone. That was the entire nature of the problem, and so the mask, the thing meant to protect his standing, kept him from the one thing that could have saved it. The help in the room. The people who between them could have cracked it in an afternoon, if only he'd been able to say four words. I need your help. This is where it connects to something I've believed my whole working life. Confidence leads to collaboration, and collaboration leads to performance. That's the order. That's how good things get built. But the mask breaks the chain right in the middle. You cannot collaborate from behind a mask. Because collaboration starts with admitting that you don't have all of it, that you need what other people have. And if you can't do that, the performance never comes, however hard you work, because you're trying to carry alone a thing that was only ever liftable together. And before we even get to the people around them, and look at what it costs the person wearing it. A mask is heavy. Holding a performance of certainty in place hour after hour, meeting after meeting is tiring, and a way that's hard to admit because admitting it in itself against the rules of the mask, it's lonely too. You can be surrounded by people well thought of, apparently thriving, and still feel completely alone with the truth of how unsure you are because you've never let anyone close enough to see it. That's a particular kind of tiredness, and a lot of very capable people are carrying it without a word. And here's the trap at its sharpest. The mask is most dangerous at exactly the moment your old way of working stops being enough. When the problem in front of you is a new kind of problem, bigger, more tangled, the sort that no amount of being the cleverest person in the room will crack. This is precisely when you need other people most. And it's precisely when the habit of looking capable, a habit that served you so well for so long, turns round and works against you. The very strength becomes the weakness. Knowing when your own playbook has run out and being able to say so out loud is not a failure of confidence. It's one of its highest forms, and it costs the people around you too. When the person in charge never admits a doubt, never asks a question, never says I don't know, it doesn't make everyone else feel safe. It makes them feel they can't admit anything either. The mask is contagious. One person performing certainty teaches the whole room to perform it back. And then you've a group of people all struggling, all pretending they're fine, all wearing the same mask, and nobody saying the true thing that would let the air out of it. That's the real cost. Not just a problem left too long, it's a whole team taught that honesty is too risky to attempt.

Four Small Ways To Practise

SPEAKER_00 14:08

So what do we do about it? Because knowing the mask is fear doesn't on its own make it any easier to take off as ever. We need something to practice. There are four things and they're all small. The first one is simply to say the words on purpose when it doesn't matter much, so that they're available to you when it does. I don't know, I'm not sure. Can you show me that again? Use them in low stakes moments, the ones where nothing is really on the line, and you'll be building a muscle. Because the reason those words feel impossible in the big moment is that we've never once practised them in the small moments. Say them when it's easy, and they'll come when it's hard. Ask the way to what a dish actually is. Tell a colleague you've forgotten how to do something on the system. Ask them to walk you through it. Admit you haven't read the book everyone's talking about. Tiny, harmless rapes, each one teaches the alarm, the same lesson, that the words can be said and nothing bad follows. Second's a single word and it changes everything. The word is yet. There's a world of difference between I don't know and I don't know yet. The first one can sound to the frightened part of you like a verdict, a statement about what kind of person you are. The second is just a status update. It says this is a gap in what I currently know, not a flaw in who I am. We did a version of this with nerves earlier in the season, separating the passing feeling from the permanent story. This is the same move. I don't know yet. Keeps the not knowing where it belongs. It's a temporary fact about a task. Rather than letting it become a permanent fact about you. Third, this is the hardest and the most powerful. Ask for help while the problem's still small. While it's still a thing that someone could help you with in five minutes, rather than the enormous thing it becomes once you've sat in it for a month. The instinct is always to wait until you fix it, to bring people only the solved version of things. Resist that. Bring people the unsolved version early while it's small and the stakes are low. You'll be astonished how willing people are and how much smaller the problem looks the moment it's no longer yours alone. But it's hard. And the fourth is for anyone other people look to, a manager, a parent, anyone at the front of anything. Go first, be the one who says I don't know what you think. Be the one who admits the doubt out loud because when the person in charge takes their mask off, they don't lose authority. They give everyone else permission. The whole room exhails, people start telling you the truth because you've shown them it's safe and that not the performance of certainty is what builds trust. The leaders people genuinely trust are not the ones who are never wrong. They're the ones who can say when they are.

A Manager Who Goes First

SPEAKER_00 17:17

So look at the smallest version of this because it doesn't have to be big. A manager I worked with had gotten to exactly the bind we've been describing, who's bright hard working and quietly drowning because she believed that asking for help would mark her out as not up to the job. So she carried everything and she carried it alone and it was starting to show. What changed wasn't some grand confession, it was one sentence and one meeting. A problem came up that she didn't have the answer to. And instead of doing what she always did taking it away to wrestle with on her own, she said out loud to the team, I'll be honest, I don't know the best way through this. Who do you all think? And the room changed. Not because she'd shown weakness, but because she'd shown them a door. One person offered an idea, then another belt on it. Someone admitted they'd been stuck in something similar and hadn't liked to say. Within twenty minutes they had a better answer than she'd have reached in a week on her own. And something else happened that lasted longer than the meeting. Our team started bringing her their own unsolved problems earlier, while they were still small. Because she'd gone first, she'd taken the mask off, and the whole team breathed out. She told me afterwards that the thing she'd been most afraid of, looking like she didn't have all the answers, turned out to be the very thing that made people trust her more. The mask had been protecting her from the very thing she most wanted.

Redefining Confidence Without The Act

SPEAKER_00 18:49

So here's the shift I'd like you to make from this one. We tend to think confidence means having the answers, looking certain, never being caught out, and so we build a mask to perform all of that and we wear ourselves out, keeping up. But real confidence isn't the absence of I don't know. It's the ability to say it without feeling that it ends you. The most secure people I've worked with are not the ones who know everything. They're the ones who are completely relaxed about the enormous amount they don't know. Because a sense of being enough doesn't depend and have an answer for everything. They can say I'm not sure in a steady voice and ask a room and mean it. That's not weakness. That's about the most confident thing a person can do. Taking a mask off feels like exposure. It's actually the opposite. It's the thing that lets people in. Let's help arrive, lets the work get shared, and lets you stop performing a version of yourself that was exhausting and was never really you anyway. The mask was only ever fear in costume. And you don't need it nearly as much as it had led you to believe.

One Experiment To Try Today

SPEAKER_00 20:01

So here's an experiment, just one thing to try. Catch one moment, just one. Where you'd normally reach for the mask, where you'd normally nod along and something you didn't follow or say fine when you weren't, or take the problem away to fix on your own rather than admit you were stuck. And instead see the true thing. Actually, I'm not sure of follow, can you go through that again? Or I don't know yet. I could do a hand with this. Then notice two things. First, the sky doesn't fall in, nobody recoils, the world carries on and very often the person in front of you visibly relaxes, because you've just made it safe for them to be honest too. And second, notice how it feels to set it down, to stop carrying it loan. And if you keep that evidence log we started back at the beginning of the season, write that one down too the moment you took the mask off and you were fine, because that's the evidence that in time makes the mask feel less and less necessary. The people who say I don't know aren't arrogant. They're mostly just frightened. They've decided somewhere along the way that they're only as welcome as they are useful, and that not known as a kind of feeling that they can't afford to be seen doing. So they build a mask and they pay for it in the help they never ask for and the problems they carry alone. But you're not only as good as your last right answer. The people working with worth following, worth loving. Worked out a long time ago. They know that I don't know. It's not the end of confidence. Quite often it's the beginning of it. Can you put the mask down? Not all at once and not everywhere. Just one honest sense at a time. Because a mask was always fear, wearing a confident face, and you were never as alone behind it as it told you that you were.

Final Thought And Farewell

SPEAKER_00 22:01

Thanks for joining me in this episode. I'm John M. Walsh, and I'll see you next time.