Confidence is critical in leadership. As a young Ranger, I learned an important phrase - “When in charge, be in charge.” It didn’t mean you would be certain about your decisions, it meant you had to be confident to lead. It means that as leaders, we have to own it. We must be confident while accepting that we can never predict the outcomes. Confidence is hard to come by and must be earned over time. You can’t get it from books or podcasts or fake it until you make it. You have to get some reps. And you have to build confidence through the stages of base and learned confidence to gain earned confidence. Earned confidence is experience plus preparation, honed in the arena, for the arena. The Army has a great way of developing this by applying the crawl-walk-run approach to all training. When you see a video of some barrel-chested freedom fighters blowing doors off their hinges and clearing buildings, you can rest assured that it took a lot of reps in the arena to get there.
“Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence. ”
Close Quarters Battle (CQB; fighting in urban terrain) is a great illustration of progressing through the stages of confidence. It is the most exciting, most chaotic, and by far the most addictive aspect of Rangering. When it’s done to precision, it’s a terrifying and effective dance of chaos and order. Those who have experienced it can attest - there is nothing quite like it. But CQB doesn’t just happen overnight. In fact, the first time through the shoot house is always ugly, but well before that, there’s a long road to earning the shoot house. You don’t get through the door of the shoot house until you’re ready. You don’t get to shoot live round 2 feet off your buddy’s barrel unless you’re confident.
You must first learn how to use your weapon effectively and safely. You must qualify with your weapon, get through the flat range, learn how to load, fire, and clear jams, put rounds where you want them, put rounds where you want them while moving, and then tighten up your shot group. When you’ve learned how to do all of that without pointing the barrel of your weapon at your teammate, then you can progress.
And that’s just individual training. Then you have to learn CQB's tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). The formations, expectations, signals, commands, etc. You do that during tape drills with empty weapons. Then you do flow drills in buildings before you work up to the shoot house. All of these steps establish a base level of understanding, leading to something we call base confidence. That base is then ready to be tested in the shoot house.
Entering the shoot house for the first time is a lot like a first kiss. You generally understand what to expect and approach eagerly, but you never know the feeling until go-time. In CQB, all the base knowledge comes together when you feel the heat of the door charge on your face, the taste of dust and carbon in your mouth, or the crunch of bullet casings under your boots. It’s scary and exhilarating all at once. The fast pace is disorienting at first. You can enter the same shoot house a thousand times and feel like you’re walking into a thousand different rooms.
In and out of stack you go - assault, clear, secure, extract, review, and repeat. Execute, reflect, learn, refine, execute. Over and over. Day after day until the lights go out, and you do it again night after night - until you know. You know the feeling of your heart in your ears and the blast of the charge on your pallet. You know the pinch in your forearm from operating your weapon one-handed while working with your free hand. You know the feeling of a man crumbling under the strike of your elbow or of live bullets splashing through a target 2 feet in front of your face.
Time under tension in the shoot house changes you until you have the learned confidence to step into the real arena - war. Championships aren’t won on the practice field. We play the game because we don’t know the score based on the rosters. The price of admission into the arena is learned confidence. The thing about learned confidence is that it’s close to earned confidence. But they are not the same. Mastery of the elements only lies within the arena they were meant for. Earned confidence is refined in the arena, for the arena.
Go time.
Kicking down doors in a foreign land is different from blowing through the shoot house. Familiar, but different. The surprises of action in real-time emerge in the arena. Like an operator from another special mission unit (SMU) clearing rooms toward your progressing assault without knowing your signals. Or exploding into a dusty, dark room to discover a mother and her children frozen in terror and tears. Real-life decisions, with real-life consequences, occur in real-time in the arena. And though you reflect and refine in the ready room after the mission, you cannot take anything back. Once you pull the trigger, you cannot take back the round. The score is locked on the ledger, and an earned confidence hangs on you long after you hang your gear in the locker.
Earned confidence cannot be faked. It accrues through the losses and the wins in the arena. Each loss is equally as valuable (if not more) than each win. The losses force you to learn and to make decisions about your relationship with the arena of your choice. Decisions to get back in the arena or to climb into the stands. Decisions to grow, allowing yourself to be changed, or decisions to sit down and never get back up. That’s the journey, and it takes place every day around us and inside of us. And when you consistently make the decision to grow and re-enter, that earned confidence can never be taken from you. It remains with you even as you enter new arenas of competition - like leaving service and starting a career in the civilian sector. For that matter, leaving one industry to start in another or wiping the slate clean after a great year to your sights on a new year's goals.
We aren’t called to be perfect as leaders. We aren’t expected to be soothsayers and fortune tellers. We are expected to be in charge and to be confident when in charge. And whether you are currently leading with a base, learned, or earned confidence, we hope you take the time to own where you are and to lead authentically. We hope you accept that your people want to be led by you. We hope you remember - when in charge, be in charge!