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!
Confidence is making a decision and standing by it even if others disagree or try to convince you otherwise. You believe in yourself and you don’t feel the need to become defensive or angered if someone questions it. This can totally be a decision to gather more information in order to become more informed and take the right course on a matter.
Yeah part of the problem is that people use the word “confidence” to mean different things, some of which are a bit contradictory.
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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Confidence doesn’t mean that you stand by a decision if others disagree. That’s being stubborn. If people have valid points you hadn’t considered when they try to convince you, you shouldn’t just stick to your decision. If the counterargument is just “really? are you sure?” you shouldn’t just give in. But if the counterargument is “really? did you account for X?” (and you hadn’t, and X is important), then you might suddenly want to rethink the situation.
Confidence is more like an approximation for: on a scale of 1-100, how sure are you? If your answer is 75 or higher… just say 100. If your answer is 50-75… just say 75, and highlight key things you are still very not confident about. If it’s lower than that, just say 0. “This will help you understand confidence” vs “This is generally how confidence works, the numbers might be a bit off, or the exact details aren’t right, but it gets you most of the way there.” vs “I have no idea what confidence is”.
The key is not about how confident you actually are, but how others perceive your confidence. And in that regard, different situations call for different levels of confidence. A doctor doing brain surgeon shouldn’t just go cutting through things at a 78 confidence level. But when deciding on what to have for lunch, “I dunno, tacos?” is fine even if you’re only 23 confidence that you actually want tacos.
There are jobs out there that basically exist in the 50-75 confidence range. But you have to be able to articulate your lack of confidence and propose remedies. “Are we ready for the product launch Monday?” “No, I’m still concerned that we haven’t addressed X”. Some companies are very risk averse, and if your lack of confidence in success is because of confidence in the existence of risks (which you have to be able to convey to be helpful).
You have to figure out what level of confidence youre supposed to have in a situation (accounting for negative consequences of being wrong), and then give your answer. But to further complicate things, sometimes “give your answer” means answering “are you sure?” and sometimes it means presenting yourself in a way that implies that you are sure. Social interactions are weird.