Do You Feel Like A Monster Or A Mouse? Let’s Challenge The Highs And Lows Of Self-Confidence
Either you feel all too powerful, or you can’t help but feel all too powerless.
Self-confidence can make you a monster.
High doses are good for you but not great.
Overconfidence can make you come across as a total jerk.
Lower levels of confidence make you feel incompetent.
So what’s really good for you and what’s bad?
Let’s get to it.
High Self-Confidence
Those who are overconfident often come across as impressive.
Hubris allows the individual to break barriers and surge ahead. But research suggests that individuals with high self-confidence can’t handle themselves when they fall on their face.
Why is that you ask?
Because they believe they are too good to be fallible. And as failure is a part of life, individuals with overconfidence will never want to see their faults.
In Jay Shetty’s new podcast ‘On Purpose’, tennis legend Novak Djokovic says,
The quality that I want everyone to have is to keep an open mind.
Overconfident people are often close-minded.
They aren't open to improving and thus remain stuck with their blown up images in their heads.
Quoting James Baldwin,
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can change if it isn’t faced.
Now while I’m not telling you to have low confidence, anyone with low confidence knows it doesn't feel very good.
But no one’s really told you this.
It has a few upsides.
Low Self-Confidence
Being a little unsure is actually a good thing.
Dr. Tomas Chamorro Premuszic renowned author, psychologist, and entrepreneur says,
Low self-confidence may turn you into a pessimist but when pessimism teams up with ambition it often produces outstanding performance. To be the very best at anything you have to be your harshest critic and that is almost impossible when your starting point is high self-confidence.
Well if you’re in the low confidence bandwagon I’m sure you did not look at this, in this way before.
In his novel ‘Barking Up The Wrong Tree,’ Eric Barker sums it up perfectly-
Students who get A’s are elated and rarely seek ways to improve their performance. But those who get an F are looking at their faults and trying to look at where they can improve.
But I did say we were going to challenge the paradigm of confidence.
Let’s get to that in a bit.
The Problem With Faking Confidence
Quoting Richard Feynman,
In principle don’t fool yourself, as you are the easiest to fool
While ‘fake it till you make it’ seems like the mantra it’s quite short lived.
You feel a sudden boost of confidence after faking it, but it fades away and you’ve got to summon up the confidence to fake it all over again.
Think about the first time you spoke in front of a classroom.
You told yourself it’s easy and you probably did a damn good job.
But what happens when you’re called to speak again?
You have to reassure yourself all over again to do a better job.
Are you confused?
There’s a simpler answer to it all.
Just be compassionate.
Self-Compassion
Yes, practice self-compassion.
You’re human.
You're fallible.
You can improve with time.
Give yourself a breather. See your fallacies as fallacies and nothing else.
Acknowledge that yes, you too can be wrong and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Give yourself the freedom to express and the chance to grow.
Self-compassion has all the benefits of being confident without sounding very arrogant and it makes you feel good about yourself. (All the negatives we discussed of those having high confidence and low confidence).
Under an fMRI scanner, it activates the same areas of the brain when one shows empathy towards other people.
A lot of people mistake this as being passive. Self-compassion makes you a very likable person and gives you the energy to be involved in a community both of which we seek to do good work.
In Conclusion
Let’s keep in mind that overconfidence might feel good initially but doesn’t work for our benefit in the long term.
Low levels of confidence give us this queasy unpleasant feeling that we want to displace.
And since constantly feeling confident and motivated is inhuman let’s just practice compassion and let the compass for confidence readjust.
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