During my college days and early years of my entrepreneurial journey, whenever I met people who were articulate, intelligent and confident, I was often awed by their personality.
I assumed confidence was simply a part of who they were.
Perhaps they were born fearless. Perhaps they had inherited it from their family. Perhaps their education, upbringing or social background had given them something that I did not possess.
Coming from a small town, I sometimes wondered why some people could walk into a room without hesitation, speak their minds without fear and make decisions with apparent ease, while others struggled with self-doubt.
It took me many years, and the opportunity to work with people from very different backgrounds and personalities, to understand something important:
Confidence is not inherited. It is built.
Family background, education, wealth and social position may create opportunities, but they cannot give us inner conviction. True confidence develops slowly — through preparation, experience, responsibility, failure and, most importantly, the courage to act even when we are afraid.
Looking back at my own journey, I cannot say that I always knew what to do or had complete faith in every decision I made.
There were meetings where I had to speak before people who knew much more than I did. There were responsibilities that appeared far greater than my capabilities. There were situations where I had no previous experience to guide me and crises for which no textbook had a ready answer.
Yet life rarely waits for us to become completely prepared.
A decision has to be made. A problem has to be faced. A responsibility has to be accepted.
And that is when I discovered an important truth: Confidence often does not come before action; it comes because we act.
I remember entering a conference room for the first time as a students’ representative when I was barely 19 or 20 years old. Sitting across the table were ministers and senior government officials. I had never been in such a situation before.
I did not know exactly how to greet everyone or how to present our concerns before such senior people.
But when questions were put to me, I answered them one by one — in Odia and whatever English I knew.
When the meeting ended and I walked out of that room, I felt happy — and, more importantly, I felt more confident.
I had done something I had been afraid of doing.
That experience taught me something I would understand many more times in the years ahead: once you do something difficult for the first time, the second time becomes a little easier.
When I entered the construction business, the challenges were very different, but the principle remained the same. I had to deal with government officers of different ranks, politicians, contractors, employees, local issues and, at times, people who tried to intimidate or obstruct us.
Many times, I wondered whether I truly belonged in that world.
There were negotiations where I was uncertain and decisions where I was afraid of making the wrong choice. But every time I faced a challenge and came through it, I gained something — a small deposit of courage.
Then another.
And another.
Over the years, those small deposits accumulated.
One day, people began describing me as a confident person.
What they could not see were all the moments of hesitation, nervousness and self-doubt through which that confidence had been created.
In 2003, when I joined DN Homes as a Director, the organisation gradually grew into what is today the DN Group. This journey gave me the opportunity to meet and work with thousands of people — employees, entrepreneurs, consultants, investors, customers, government officials and many other stakeholders.
Watching people closely taught me another important lesson:
Confidence and loudness are not the same thing.
Some people speak loudly but become uncertain when a real crisis arrives. Others speak very little, yet remain calm and dependable when circumstances become difficult.
Loudness seeks attention.
Confidence inspires trust.
Arrogance says, “I know everything.”
Confidence says, “I may not know everything, but I can learn, decide and take responsibility.”
A truly confident person does not need to dominate every conversation. Genuine confidence is often quiet. It listens, asks questions without embarrassment and is willing to admit a mistake. It is comfortable with the fact that someone else may know more.
My own journey taught me another important ingredient in building confidence: trust.
Our Chairman, Mr Jagadish Prasad Naik, always encouraged me to work with full authority and take ownership of my responsibilities. He gave me the freedom to take decisions, even when there was a possibility that I might get them wrong.
His approach was simple but powerful: take the decision, take responsibility for it, and if it turns out to be wrong, learn from it.
There was no culture of fear around making mistakes.
Instead, mistakes were treated as opportunities to learn.
What mattered was not whether every decision was perfect, but whether I had thought it through, had the courage to take responsibility and, after the outcome, had the honesty to examine what went wrong.
More importantly, I was encouraged not merely to learn from mistakes but to convert those learnings into action.
This had a profound impact on me.
When you are repeatedly given the freedom to decide, you gradually stop looking over your shoulder for approval. You begin to think independently. You learn to accept consequences. You become comfortable with uncertainty.
And slowly, you develop the conviction that even if your decision goes wrong, you will have the ability to deal with the consequences and learn from the experience.
Confidence grows when someone trusts you with responsibility. But it becomes your own when you learn to trust yourself.
I believe this is one of the greatest gifts a leader can give another person — not merely advice, but the freedom to think, decide, make mistakes and grow.
Perhaps this is also why failure plays such an important role in building confidence.
Success tells us that something worked.
Failure tells us what we are made of.
Every setback we survive teaches us something about ourselves. We discover that criticism did not destroy us. Rejection did not end our journey. A wrong decision did not make us incapable of making another one.
Gradually, confidence stops depending entirely on favourable outcomes. It begins to rest on something deeper — the knowledge that we can face whatever outcome comes our way.
Of course, confidence cannot be built on empty optimism. Preparation remains one of its strongest foundations.
When we study a subject, understand the facts, practise our skills and prepare ourselves thoroughly, our minds become calmer.
Competence gives confidence its substance.
But preparation has a limit.
There comes a moment when we must stop preparing and start acting.
Many capable people hold themselves back because they are waiting to feel completely confident before taking the first step.
They want to start a business when they feel fully ready. They want to accept a leadership position when they believe they have all the answers. They want to speak when they are certain they will not make a mistake.
But complete readiness is often an illusion.
We become ready by beginning.
This is particularly important for young people.
They often compare their uncertain beginnings with someone else’s polished personality. They see the confident speaker but not the years of nervous practice. They see the successful entrepreneur but not the failures, rejections and sleepless nights that shaped that person.
We are often comparing our beginning with someone else’s middle or end.
It is an unfair comparison.
Confidence is built when we choose preparation over excuses.
It is built when we accept responsibility instead of waiting for permission.
It is built when we speak despite a trembling voice.
It is built when we learn from criticism without allowing it to define us.
And above all, it is built when we rise after failure without losing faith in ourselves.
So perhaps we should stop waiting to feel confident before beginning something meaningful.
Begin with whatever courage you have.
Take the first step.
Then take another.
Action creates experience.
Experience develops competence.
Competence creates confidence.
Looking back, I realise that the confident people I once admired from a distance were not necessarily born different from me.
Perhaps they had simply taken more steps.
And perhaps that is the most encouraging lesson of all:
No one is born with all the courage required for an entire lifetime.
Life gives it to us gradually — challenge by challenge, responsibility by responsibility, failure by failure and victory by victory.
Confidence is not a gift passed down to us.
It is the strength we earn, one courageous step at a time.
