There’s a line in an old poem I recited as a child that I only understood decades later. It was never about the crowd cheering you on. It was about what you do when the cheering stops.
The poem is Veer Tum Badhe Chalo1, a rousing thing, really. Keep moving forward, brave one, it says. Keep going, steady one. Hold your head up, don’t stop for the mountain in front of you or the lion’s roar beside you, just keep walking. As a child you chant it and it fills you up, because someone, somewhere, is telling you to go on.
But the line I mean comes later, and I walked past it for years. It goes, whether anyone walks beside you, whether it is day or night, in company or completely alone, keep moving forward. That quietly changes everything. Because the courage it is asking for was never about the crowd. It was about what you do when the chanting stops, and there is no one left to cheer you.
That, to me, is the real question sitting underneath so much of leadership and so much of life.
What happens to your confidence when the applause goes quiet?
There are two very different kinds of confidence, and they look almost identical until pressure arrives. One runs on approval. The nod in the meeting, the praise after the presentation, the title on the door, the numbers ticking up. It feels wonderful, and it works beautifully, right up until the applause stops.
The other kind runs on something quieter and steadier within you. It is the difference between seeking the world’s approval to tell you who you are, and giving yourself permission to go ahead anyway. That is what leading from within means.
And this isn’t a new idea at all. Some of the people who understood it best were walking around five hundred years ago.
Kabir2 spent his whole life questioning the things everyone around him simply accepted. He wouldn’t take a belief as true just because it had been handed to him by his religion, his community, or his time. And that leaves us with a quietly uncomfortable question.
Which of the beliefs I carry are actually mine, and which did I just inherit and never stop to examine?
Because some of the standards we spend our lives trying to measure up to were never even ours to begin with.
Quick read – How I Quieted My Inner Critic (and Finally Started to Paint)
Ravidas was born into a community his society had decided was lowly, and he refused to accept that his worth had anything to do with that ranking. He imagined a place he called Begumpura, a city with no high and no low, where no one’s value was decided by their status.
Which is very relevant in today’s times, but with a different lens.
Do I believe I have worth without the title, the salary, the organisation behind me or the follower count? If all that fell away tomorrow, would I still know that I mattered?
And Meera4 walked away from everything expected of a woman of her standing to follow her own path, with every louder voice around her insisting she shouldn’t.
To me, in the modern world, she is what it looks like to hear your own voice over the crowd and go with it anyway, to trust the quiet thing you know even when the whole room is certain you are wrong. Most of us meet that test in smaller ways all the time, the moment your gut says one thing and the confident majority says another, and folding quietly feels so much easier than holding your ground.
None of this is about not caring what people think. That version of confidence, the I-don’t-care-what-anyone-says kind, is usually just armour, and it is heavy to carry.
True confidence is softer and stronger than that. It is being able to listen to people without handing them the authority to define you. You accept and acknowledge the feedback, but simply don’t hand over the pen.
I know this pull well, because for a long time I lived inside it. When I was moving into coaching and searching for my next role, I quietly measured my whole worth by how much money I earned. The belief ran so deep that I didn’t even recognise it as a belief. It just felt like the plain truth. It was only later, when a serious illness stopped me in my tracks, that something shifted. I saw that I don’t work for the money. I work to keep a rhythm and a discipline, and above all to be around people. The purpose was never the number, it was always the people, and I had spent years letting a figure tell me what I was worth.
Suggested Read – What Shaped Me: Coaching, and the Season the House Went Quiet
Now, I see a gentler version of this in the leaders I coach, people who can steady a whole room and still let a title or a salary quietly decide how they feel about themselves. The real inner work is slowly moving the source of your worth from worldly titles out there to something steadier within you.
So here is something small to try this week. The next time you catch yourself waiting for someone to tell you that you did well, pause and ask, whose approval or nod am I waiting for? And would their nod really change what I already know to be true? Often, it wouldn’t. You already knew. You were just waiting for validation.
In the real world, inner work was never about becoming strong enough to fight the world and win its approval. It is about becoming so clear about who you are that you no longer need to fight it, or win it, to prove anything at all. You stop waiting to be told. And you just keep walking (Veer Tum Badhe Chalo).
So I will leave you with the question these poets left with me. If no one was going to clap, if no one was going to notice or approve, what would you still do, simply because you know it is yours to do?
My answer is, I choose to work with people through coaching. What is yours?
Notes
- Veer Tum Badhe Chalo: A much-loved Hindi motivational poem by Dwarika Prasad Maheshwari (born 1916), long taught to schoolchildren in India. Its refrain urges you to keep moving forward with courage, whether or not anyone walks alongside you.
- Kabir (15th century): One of India’s most revered mystic poet-saints, honoured across Hindu, Muslim and Sikh traditions. His short, plain-spoken verses challenged religious ritual, blind dogma and social division, and are still widely quoted today.
- Ravidas (15th to 16th century): A mystic poet-saint of the Bhakti movement, born into a community his society treated as “untouchable”. He rejected caste hierarchy and imagined Begumpura, a place with no high and no low. Several of his hymns sit within the Sikh scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib.
- Meera, also known as Mirabai (16th century): A Rajput princess who left palace life to devote herself to the god Krishna, defying everything expected of a woman of her rank. Her devotional songs are still sung across India today.
Usha Nagrani, an HR Leader turned ICF Executive Coach, empowers senior management professionals and business leaders to achieve breakthroughs as expats, build cross-cultural teams, and navigate the exciting journey of career acceleration.
