Notice the people in your life who carry genuine authority.
Not the authority of title, though they may have that. Not the authority of volume or insistence. The authority that comes from a quality of presence — a settled, undefended stillness that makes other people instinctively listen.
This quality is extremely rare. And it has nothing to do with confidence in the conventional sense.
Conventional confidence says: I know I am right. It is defensive. It monitors its own image. It needs agreement to feel stable. Under pressure, it becomes louder — because it is using loudness to manage the threat to its certainty.
What the contemplative traditions describe is different. The Shiva archetype in Kashmir Shaivism: power that does not require performance because it arises from the recognition of what one fundamentally is. Not confidence that I am better than others. Certainty about the ground beneath one's feet that has nothing to do with comparison.
The person who has nothing to prove is the most powerful person in the room. Not because they are aggressive. Because they are completely still while everyone else is moving.
The Tao Te Ching's paradox: The soft overcomes the hard. The gentle overcomes the rigid. Lao Tzu's ideal leader — the Sage King — rules by Wu Wei, non-action. Not passivity. The active principle of not forcing, not imposing, not needing the world to look a particular way in order to function. This quality of non-forcing is itself a form of extraordinary power.
The Stoic equivalent: Marcus Aurelius, sole ruler of the Roman Empire, spent his private time writing reminders to himself not to be affected by praise or blame, not to confuse his role with his self, not to mistake the purple robe for the man wearing it.
Real authority is internal. Ego-driven authority is rented. The difference is visible, in time, to everyone in the room.