Short answer: you sound confident in English by changing how you deliver what you already know, not by waiting until your English improves. Confidence and fluency are two different skills. Fluency is about how much English you know. Confidence is about how you say it, your pace, whether you apologize before you start, and whether your sentences sound finished or unsure.
A listener judges your competence heavily from these delivery signals, often before they judge your grammar at all. That means a woman with a smaller vocabulary who paces herself and finishes her sentences can sound more confident than a more advanced speaker who rushes and hedges. You do not have to wait for fluency to fix this. There are specific, concrete things you can change today: drop the apology before you speak, slow your pace on purpose, and end sentences like statements instead of questions. All three are trainable starting with your next sentence.
Most women assume that once their English improves, the confidence will follow on its own. It is a reasonable guess, and it is usually wrong. Fluency measures what you know. Confidence measures how you deliver what you know, and those are two separate skills that happen to show up in the same sentence. You can be missing plenty of vocabulary and still sound sure of yourself, and you can know every word in a sentence and still sound like you are asking permission to say it.
When someone listens to you speak, they are not running a grammar check in real time. They are reading delivery cues, your pace, whether you hedge before you have said anything, whether you rush through a sentence to get it over with. Those signals arrive before the words do, and they shape how competent you sound regardless of your actual level. Open with "sorry, my English is not very good," and you have told the listener to doubt you before giving them anything to judge. Rush through a sentence to hide a gap, and it reads as more nervous, not less noticeable. None of this has anything to do with how much English you actually know.
Cut the apology preface. Never open with an apology for your English. It is the single most common thing that undercuts a sentence before it starts.
Slow your pace on purpose. Rushing does not hide a gap, it makes the gap louder and reads as anxious. A deliberate pace reads as controlled, even mid-sentence, even with a mistake in it.
End sentences like statements, not questions. This one is easy to miss. Ending on an uncertain upward lilt, the tone you would use to check your own answer, is a habit, not a fact about your English. Say the sentence, then stop, on a falling tone. It is the difference between sounding like you are asking permission and sounding like you mean what you said.
I walk through all three of these live, with a real demonstration, in the video that goes with this post: How to Sound Confident in English (Even When You're Not Fluent Yet).
Telling yourself to feel confident does not change any of the three things above, because confidence here is not a mood, it is a set of specific, physical delivery habits. You cannot think your way into a slower pace or a dropped apology. You have to practice the actual behavior, the same way you would practice any other skill, until it becomes the default instead of something you have to remember mid-sentence.
If your problem is more that the words will not come out at all, not that they come out unsure, that is a related but different problem, and I wrote about the specific fix for that one separately: why do I freeze when I have to speak English. This post assumes the words are already there and coming out. It is about how they land once they do.
Mistakes are the fastest teachers. You will still make them while you practice this. The goal is not zero mistakes, it is sounding like you meant the sentence you just said, mistakes included.
Yes. Confidence comes from delivery, pace, framing, sentence-ending tone, not from vocabulary size. You can start today regardless of your current level.
No. A deliberate, controlled pace reads as more competent, not less. Rushing to sound fluent usually backfires and reads as anxious instead.
It tells the listener to doubt you before you have said anything worth judging. The apology itself does more damage to how you are perceived than the mistake you were worried about.
Yes. These are delivery habits, not knowledge you are missing. They work at any level, and they often make the biggest visible difference for women who already have solid vocabulary but still feel unsure out loud.
If you want a place to practice out loud without anyone judging the mistakes, the community is free and open today.