I’ve spent some time reflecting yesterday and I realized that. When people want you to be confident they don’t want you to be actually confident, they want you to pretend you are. It is idiotic and makes no sense, but it explains a lot of situations in which I behaved the wrong way.
confidence to me means the opposite of that. it means questioning your asssumptions, approaching things from a different angle, reflect, recalculate, asking for a second opinion. Because I’ll end up with greater confidence that my assertions are more truthful. But apparently doing all that makes people think I’m insecure. Shit!
then it makes no sense to me to consider confidence a virtue. Noone should pretend to be confident when they are not, and even worse expect others to be confident and take them less seriously when they admit that they are not.
It’s not pretending. That’s called false confidence. Real confidence is knowing that you are making the right decision.
but real confidence is unattainable without doing things that are socially understood as “insecurity” (challenging own beliefs, double checking, asking for more opinions etc…) that’s the contradiction
You’re totally right. Here’s how I’ve learned to navigate these situations. [EDIT] I started to write out specific advice, but as I was writing i realized there are more elements of nuisance to it than I could list in a short amount of time. So here’s my top points:
You can add qualifier words like “I believe X” rather than double checking.
Act falsely confident in an amount scaled to how important the topic is. If someone making small talk asks what i had for breakfast yesterday, it’s ok for me to confidently say “cereal” even if I’m a bit unsure, because it’s not an important topic. But if someone asks me how much gas they need in their car to drive to the next town then I’ll be very clear and tell them my level of uncertainty, like “I think it’ll take around 5 gallons, but I’m not sure about that.”
You can be confident that the right course of action is to seek further information. Double checking is a lack of confidence because you are not trusting your first check. If you seek other people’s opinions, it’s important that those people have experience and knowledge in the thing you are asking or it may seem like you will listen to anyone’s opinion but your own.
If double checking your beliefs will mean you are then confident in them, do that double check before you speak. Make it part of coming to your conclusion in the first place, and then trust yourself enough to stick to that. That’s true confidence. Worrying and asking for more opinions, or double checking after you have your conclusion just telegraphs uncertainty.
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