The confidence scam

Jyothsna Kolanupaka
Nov 2 · 3 min read

Be confident, you’re told. Believe in your own worth. Speak up. Project a positive self-image and everyone will pay attention. Sounds straightforward, right? Believe in yourself and the world’s doors will open up to you — what’s hard to understand about that?

For most people, however, this kind of advice is just another meaningless cliche. It’s not practical always, because a feeling of hesitation or doubt is natural whenever you’re doing something unfamiliar. It can even be actively harmful when people condition themselves to be confident of their actions ignoring any reasonable self-doubt. Taken too far, the practice of blind self-belief sows the seeds of narcissistic behavior.

There’s also the question of what confidence really means. We’ve always hero-worshipped confident, successful people. We’re often told that these people reached the pinnacle of success through unwavering self-assurance.

But what if that we had our correlation and causation mixed up all along? Does success gradually build up confidence, or does confidence precede success?

The answer depends upon how you define confidence. There are two possible ways of looking at confidence that we don’t clearly distinguish between: let’s call them Self-belief vs. Belief that you’ll succeed.

Self-belief is your own confidence in your inherent worth. It’s when you trust yourself to do the right thing by yourself. It’s when you know where you stand and feel secure in your own skin.

Belief that you’ll succeed is a different beast. Even if you know your own capabilities and think you deserve success, there’s the question of external opportunities or lack thereof. For the less privileged amongst us, there are various structural inequities, injustices and discrimination to deal with. That could be poverty, mental or physical health troubles, having had to deal with sexism, racism or any kind of discrimination based on your abilities, who you are and what you believe in. Contending with all of these means that you’ll believe a bit less in the possibility of your success. Building up and projecting an aura of confidence is going to be that much harder.

Often, the silent, seemingly diffident ones amongst us aren’t silent because they don’t know what to say or because they don’t believe in themselves. They’re silent because experience has shown them that their voices aren’t heard anyway. Their experiences are dismissed. Their real talents are overlooked or undermined.

Inwardly they may have the confidence of a mediocre rich white man, but they may remain on the sidelines until you call them out and ask for their contributions. If you know someone like this and want to bring out the best in them, give them lots of opportunities, demonstrate your trust, praise their achievements and forgive their mistakes in the same way as society does for said mediocre men.

We need to stop worshipping confidence so much and start celebrating bravery and authenticity instead. The first is a result of success and isn’t always a good thing, while the latter two are value systems worth emulating. The unabashedly confident are often just the lucky ones, while courage and honesty make the world a better place while still being modest.

    Jyothsna Kolanupaka
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