websites devoted to the subject.
A common misconception is that confidence arises from ability and that if you want confidence, you have to get better at what you do.
This is false.
A person can be utterly incompetent and yet dazzlingly confident. What’s more, this same person can know how incompetent they are and still be just as confident. Confidence has nothing to do with ability.
Most of the methods for increasing confidence involve reminding yourself of your past achievements, bringing notes with you onstage if you need confidence speaking in front of others, and repeating positive affirmations to yourself.
All of which seems like kind of mushy advice. But then maybe confidence is a little mushy because, what is it?
How can you really feel like you don’t have enough of it unless you really know exactly what it is?
All right, let’s start with what it’s not.
Confidence is not a substance.
It’s not like high-density lipoproteins. You can’t go to your primary care physician and ask her to run some blood work and check your confidence level because you think it might be low.
Most people would probably say that confidence is a human quality, like compassion or generosity. If this is true, we should be able to describe the feeling, the sensation of confidence. There are many ways to describe how compassion feels; it can be an ache of kinship, as one example. Generosity feels something like gratitude and plea sure blended together.
Many people would probably describe confidence, then, like this: “It’s just not worrying about whether or not I’ll do a good job because I know I will, because I know what I’m talking about.”
Or, “It’s not being insecure about my abilities. It’s knowing what I’m really good at.”
But these descriptions actually describe something else.
They describe competence .
It is through competence that we feel “not insecure about my abilities.” Competence is knowing what you’re doing and doing it well.
Confidence isn’t competence.
You can know exactly what you’re doing and do it exceedingly well, but other people watching you might conclude, for any number of reasons, that you don’t look like you know what you’re doing at all.
I’ve known people who were extremely accomplished at something yet nearly paralyzed by a preoccupation with what other people might be thinking of them and how they were being judged. When you’re worrying about what people might be thinking, you’re distracted. Other people could look at you and see a worried, distracted person, not a confident person.
If confidence isn’t competence or a personality feature like compassion, and it’s not a substance we can raise or lower by eating more blood oranges, what the hell is it? And whatever it is, how can you get more of it immediately because now that it’s mysterious you need it even more than you did before you thought about it?
The truth about confidence is one of life’s wonders because even a lazy person can succeed in this single area: if you want to be more confident, you do not need to add anything more to your personality or your skill level.
In fact, you already have too much of something .
Because confidence is not the presence of anything at all. Confidence is a reduction of your own interest in whether others are thinking about you and if so, what they’re thinking.
Put another way, to be more confident you need to give a whole lot less of a shit about what other people think of you.
Confidence is not something you feel or possess; it’s something others use to describe what they see when they look at you.
The experience others call confidence you experience as being at ease, fully yourself, and not self-conscious but rather task conscious.
When you are making a presentation in front of a large assembly of your coworkers or trying to come across well in a job interview, you would naturally want to feel confident in these situations. But trying to feel
A common misconception is that confidence arises from ability and that if you want confidence, you have to get better at what you do.
This is false.
A person can be utterly incompetent and yet dazzlingly confident. What’s more, this same person can know how incompetent they are and still be just as confident. Confidence has nothing to do with ability.
Most of the methods for increasing confidence involve reminding yourself of your past achievements, bringing notes with you onstage if you need confidence speaking in front of others, and repeating positive affirmations to yourself.
All of which seems like kind of mushy advice. But then maybe confidence is a little mushy because, what is it?
How can you really feel like you don’t have enough of it unless you really know exactly what it is?
All right, let’s start with what it’s not.
Confidence is not a substance.
It’s not like high-density lipoproteins. You can’t go to your primary care physician and ask her to run some blood work and check your confidence level because you think it might be low.
Most people would probably say that confidence is a human quality, like compassion or generosity. If this is true, we should be able to describe the feeling, the sensation of confidence. There are many ways to describe how compassion feels; it can be an ache of kinship, as one example. Generosity feels something like gratitude and plea sure blended together.
Many people would probably describe confidence, then, like this: “It’s just not worrying about whether or not I’ll do a good job because I know I will, because I know what I’m talking about.”
Or, “It’s not being insecure about my abilities. It’s knowing what I’m really good at.”
But these descriptions actually describe something else.
They describe competence .
It is through competence that we feel “not insecure about my abilities.” Competence is knowing what you’re doing and doing it well.
Confidence isn’t competence.
You can know exactly what you’re doing and do it exceedingly well, but other people watching you might conclude, for any number of reasons, that you don’t look like you know what you’re doing at all.
I’ve known people who were extremely accomplished at something yet nearly paralyzed by a preoccupation with what other people might be thinking of them and how they were being judged. When you’re worrying about what people might be thinking, you’re distracted. Other people could look at you and see a worried, distracted person, not a confident person.
If confidence isn’t competence or a personality feature like compassion, and it’s not a substance we can raise or lower by eating more blood oranges, what the hell is it? And whatever it is, how can you get more of it immediately because now that it’s mysterious you need it even more than you did before you thought about it?
The truth about confidence is one of life’s wonders because even a lazy person can succeed in this single area: if you want to be more confident, you do not need to add anything more to your personality or your skill level.
In fact, you already have too much of something .
Because confidence is not the presence of anything at all. Confidence is a reduction of your own interest in whether others are thinking about you and if so, what they’re thinking.
Put another way, to be more confident you need to give a whole lot less of a shit about what other people think of you.
Confidence is not something you feel or possess; it’s something others use to describe what they see when they look at you.
The experience others call confidence you experience as being at ease, fully yourself, and not self-conscious but rather task conscious.
When you are making a presentation in front of a large assembly of your coworkers or trying to come across well in a job interview, you would naturally want to feel confident in these situations. But trying to feel
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