You can be a beginner and still be confident. Confidence isn’t only for what you’ve mastered.

Confidence gets defined as knowing you will do well, which would make it unavailable to anyone starting anything. There is a more usable version: trusting that you can be visibly bad at something and survive the experience. That kind needs no track record, just a willingness to look like a learner in front of people, which is the real barrier for most of us.

Start something new this week where somebody can see you. Say that you are new, out loud, in the first minute. It removes the thing you were bracing for and lets you get on with being a beginner, which is the fastest state to learn from.