Ask an Overthinker: Should You Fake Confidence?
The Beautiful Voyager advice column isn’t like most others. In this column, I ask a question, then share advice, insight, and tips from all of you: family, friends, and fellow readers. Since there’s no right or wrong answer, this column is simply meant to encourage the sharing of ideas. Let’s hear what works (or doesn’t work) for you, and build together a robust collection of diverse tips for us all to try. On to this week’s question…
We live in a society that values confidence in school and at work, but anxiety can attack that very confidence. How does this affect your self-esteem in daily life, and how you think others perceive you?
Due to the complexity of the question, I’m sharing the answers I got in two parts. (Be on the lookout for Part 2 on combating anxiety when it begins to impact your confidence.)
In composing this article, I compiled feedback and anecdotes from those who identified with anxiety having impacted their self-confidence. From there, I was able to group their experiences into distinct reasons as noted below.
1. Past experiences leave trauma. Fear of failure and success:
“Fight and flight sets in when there is a negative reaction being triggered because of emotions based on a past experience. One that was deemed impossible or even based on the fear of success itself.” — Denise Granito (Chicago, IL)
“Sometimes my anxiety gets too heavy that I sometimes “freeze”, and then get frustrated when I need to step away or isolate myself. Others may perceive me as dramatic, strange, over-sensitive, or even unrelatable. Since middle school, I naturally dealt with my anxiety by picking at my fingers, sometimes to the point of open wounds or blood. Because of this bad habit I’ve become self-conscious of my thumbs and how scarred they are.” — Anonymous
“Bullying impacted my self-esteem and induced anxiety. The feeling of anxiousness and thought patterns left by childhood are still prominent in many of my social interactions. Whether it be reluctance to let others in, or be uncomfortable with how they are perceiving me.” — Mohammedi Khan
2. Lack of mental health understanding in the workplace:
“My current employer isn’t very well trained on mental health, so when I’m told I’m disengaged I make clear every time that my mental illness means I may not perform the same as my coworkers in certain respects.” — Anonymous (Miami, Florida)
3. Your preconditions {race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc.} can lead to hyper-awareness of your salient identities:
When being in an environment that makes you hyper-aware of the difference in yourself in comparison to the racial or gender composition of the room, it can get scary. In my experience when I suddenly realize I might be the only woman or South-Asian in a room, it sometimes can abruptly make me feel uncomfortable. My confidence can quickly go from a reality, to a facade taking root. Not because I’m not used to working with people from diverse backgrounds, but more so because I feel as though I am becoming representative for identities I identify with, without my consent..which is a truth of a societal-happening that occurs whether you intend for it or not.
Or in certain situations I begin feeling as though combinations of stereotypes are being placed onto me, and I’m left to either confront and disprove them, or meld into them. This sort of pressure can leave you feeling uncomfortable to a point that it drastically affects your presentation of body language and decorum.
“As a Women of Color (WOC) who studied and worked at Loyola University, I felt I had to continuously prove myself before anyone could doubt my capabilities, when in reality, I became my biggest critic.” — Melissa Vazquez (Chicago, IL)
“My anxiety is impacted by the demographics within a room, and how they may exacerbate my anxiousness or allow it to subside. When I’m in a diverse familiar space in a classroom or workplace I am able to flourish. When I’m in an all-White space I am more shaken and my confidence is a lot more broken. I start to carry that experience of speaking up or “failing” out of that space and into my daily life. There’s pressure that comes along with me feeling as if I have to speak for every black woman in many spaces when my identity/experiences/trauma is so different from my black sisters in many ways.” — Cidney Robinson (Chicago, IL)
4. Society’s overbearing expectations:
Society’s expectations leads us to feel an ongoing pressure. Pressure to live up to what is expected from us, and how we conform our notions to fit that of society’s. It creates both a fear of owning your success, to understanding your failures. Social anxiety can give lead to confidence battles arising from external appearances, to feeling judged for not fitting the spectrum of what classifies beauty. Some industries(i.e. makeup and modeling) are helping accept more, and at the same time fueling more negative self-images. Women experience it more from: body shaming, cat-calling, dressing, to mannerisms, etc.
Those who have felt the onset of anxiety can testify that there are sometimes warning signs giving you a heads-up, to sometimes BOOM it’s just there! The physical impact of anxiety is important to be aware of because it explains how the “fake it till you make it” approach can sometimes not apply to those experiencing GAD. It gives you sweaty palms, racing heart, tunnel vision, light-headedness, and to amplify the previous, just the worst-possible scenarios all start seeming plausible.
“Anxiety for me has stemmed from my own fear of failure and living up to society’s expectations.”— Treasure Pascal (Chicago, IL)
“My confidence is often shaken by anxiety. It is a fear stemmed from the possibility of being publicly wrong or just simply not good enough. Places like school and work value confidence, but they also value correctness and the ability to excel. The two are intertwined by circumstance but not necessarily in everyday life causing dissonance — this is where anxiety creeps in. How can I be confident and wrong? How can I be confident without mastering?”— Janay Moore (Chicago, IL)
“Social anxiety can affect confidence directly. What I’ve learned from my own experience is one can be an effective communicator; yet be plagued with worry that physically impacts them.” — Mohammedi Khan (Chicago, IL)
“ In the years where my self-confidence should have been ingrained and strengthened I encountered a lot of bullying from my peers. I started to constantly compare myself to others, never feeling good enough. I became consumed by how others perceived me that I developed a self-doubt that I still experience today.” — Melissa Vazquez (Chicago, IL)
5. Confidence can be a defense mechanism, or become a means for over-compensation:
Confidence, or over-confidence can be a defense mechanism for some, or a tactic to deceive. For me anxiety is excessively worrying, and the smallest of things being blown out of proportion internally. It can lead to a feeling of, or a need for perfectionism. If any of this goes awry, negative self-talk ensues to “do better” on what is already fine. As simplistic as this might sound to some, *it is important to note that this is a reality for many who do not need validation of whether this reality exists or not. It IS their reality.
“Anxiety stems from the idea of being perfect, among my peers. Mainly because I perceive them to be more intelligent than me, and that my ideas may not be as valued compared to theirs. My anxiety drives perfection in my work. I can’t just turn in an assignment or do a presentation until I feel like it has been deconstructed and analyzed over and over again.. my overanalyzing makes me spend hours on an assignment that would take another student 30 minutes to complete. Because of my anxiety people may perceive me in a negative manner and associate traits of laziness and irresponsiblity. Not knowing that I probably put five times more effort in my work to produce the same product as them.” — Anonymous
6. Uncertainty. Rushing to get to the known:
It is hard to grapple with the truth that there are some things in life we cannot anticipate or know immediately. For some it is about accepting that, and for other worriers this is a set-up for triggers leading to a cascade of events. Uncertainty is an uncomfortable place that can take some navigating, whereas, certainty on the other hand is comfort and knowing.
“#1 cause of anxiety in college students would be the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Basically, people who know very little about a topic overestimate how much they know. Learning more exposes us to how much we don’t know, a vast unknown we tend to overestimate.” — igetcha
“My anxiety comes from overthinking and overanalyzing certain situations/scenarios which cause even more anxiety (it’s like an endless cycle). This effects my everyday life because it causes me to double guess myself, question my self worth or the quality of my work which results with procrastination (not because I am lazy) or even allowing myself to become depressed, without knowing till it is too late.” — Anonymous
7. Misery needs company:
“Yet, somehow, no matter how many YouTube videos you watch, you’re the only person in the room who doesn’t get it. When the self-proclaimed legends are out picking up fans, you can find miserable company with your fellow self-doubters. You’ll leave feeling validated, understood, less alone, but more hopeless. — igetcha
8. Questioning yourself and your decisions:
Job market search and school application processes take a toll of their own. They have you questioning everything — your intellect, your potential, and mostly your ability to make choices.
“Imposter syndrome makes navigating the ambiguous job market 100x harder. I would never work somewhere I wasn’t treated like a human being. No dream was worth giving up my self-respect. A friend told me that if I degrade myself, it’s indirectly degrading others in similar situations and humans in general. I keep in mind that I have the rest of my life to fail and try again and the only truly harmful thing I can do is give up…Game changers fail 100x more than everyone else because they experiment 1000x more. I feel I’ve learned the most from the times I’ve fallen the hardest, the times I beat myself up for months and then woke up to realize one day that I had worked way too hard for it all to be in vain.” — igetcha
9. Not knowing how or when to stand up for yourself:
Confidence comes from not having outlined your expectations, beliefs, and what you will accept or not. So when things become blurred, your perceptions can cloud your judgement of what you believe you are deserving of. These moments are there to teach you how to stand up for yourself.
“Meeting so many diverse, inspiring people in college taught me life isn’t a competition. Many times I’ve ran into people I felt deserved to succeed more than I did, which made me feel guilty for advocating for myself. When I gave up on gagging myself professionally, I found identity in the values I’d gained from my experiences.” — igetcha
