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!
Right. I’ve made the same observation. Very annoying.
Double-checking everything you do is the opposite of confidence. You may gain confidence from the checks, but you’re not confident in your initial choices.
but you’re not confident in your initial choices.
absolutely, and I understand why people expect others to be
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.
Confidence is making a decision and standing by it even if others disagree or try to convince you otherwise.
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
