Three Days Ago I Discovered I Had Confidence

Self-assurance has eluded me my entire life. I don’t voice my opinions out of fear of being challenged or fired upon for them. I don’t speak up in meetings for fear of having nothing important to say. I hang back, I watch, I evaluate, I assess.

But that’s an outdated story. I won’t tell myself that story anymore.

There is a woman in my office named Sandra. Until three days ago I had never met her. Oh, but I hear her. We all hear Sandra. Her opinions cling to the stale office air, flowing over the tops of the cubicle dividers like a yellow fog. They’re toxic.

My first week at work she loudly announced (to everyone? an unfortunate passer-by?) “All the company’s contractors are stupid.”

All of them are stupid. Hmm. I’m a contractor. I’m not stupid. The other contractors I know aren’t stupid.

I listen day after day, my face pinched, to her loud reports (who is she speaking to? her monitor?) of other people’s many mistakes. After ensuring the entire third floor knows about the mistake, she calls the mistake-maker stupid, or if she’s changing it up, an idiot. She doesn’t discriminate between a technical error in a document or a misprint in the cafeteria menu. At this point in her long career, she has labeled us all stupid.

She’s become a thorn in my side. Her view of the world is quite grim, considering the multitude of idiots in it. That’s simply not my world.

I see people trying to do a good job, sometimes falling down, sometimes achieving the impossible. I see people struggling to focus on work amidst family tragedy, financial strain, sleepless nights.

Sandra sees stupid people.

Three days ago I needed her help with my new project. Her depth of knowledge on the subject literally made her the only person who could quickly give me the answer I needed, in the timeframe I needed it.

She came to my desk and stood next to me. She looked at my screen, without once making eye contact, and shot out a stream of questions. I usually begin with “Hi, I’m Rachael.” That’s probably stupid.

I answered her questions. She asked me more questions. We seemed to be getting off track, until she tripped me up. I understood and smiled. She needed to find the thing I didn’t know to feel in charge of the situation. If I had realized that I would have said “Magna Carta” to her next question. I couldn’t have her away from my desk fast enough.

Satisfied that she knew who was she was dealing with (a stupid idiot) she said, still no eye contact, “Well, this project is doomed to fail. Why did they give this to you? I said to my boss, I said, ‘Gee she must be smarter than me if they gave her this project.’ But you’re not.”

In that moment, I was more pleased with myself than I have ever been. Pleased to be able to see through her, to see her fear, her limitations, her narrow world of Sandra-against-the-stupid-people. I saw the exchange bewtween us for what it was — her projection onto the world.

It had nothing at all to do with me.

A younger me, even a five-years-ago younger me, would have been hurt and embarrassed. My reaction would have been to question my abilities, to admit I was in over my head. I would have believed her words. My face would have gone red. I would have prepared myself to fail.

I smiled at her and said, “Yeah, I am pretty quick. I think we’ll be ok. Thanks for your help.”

She stared at me for a moment, then rolled her eyes and said, “You’re going to fail.” She drew out the word fail in a sing-song voice all the way back to her desk.

Confidence surge through my veins. I had just leveled-up, shifted.

I finally had such a deep knowledge of myself that she couldn’t touch me. I felt wrapped in an invisible barrier, and the fear she spat out at me couldn’t penetrate it.

All my life I’ve watched people who possess this confidence with amazement, people who can smile in the face of an attack. I wondered how they got there, how they achieved it. I wanted that for myself.

Lessons show up in the strangest places. Thank you Sandra.