Only recently did I realize this, but over the last few years, I've been renegotiating my relationship with confidence. It’s been weird. I've played with it in different areas of my life: my personality, my career choices, and my relationships. I don’t know how many books are written on the subject of confidence, and I don’t know any great theses on it. If they exist, I haven’t read them. For me, I’ve only been noticing my confidence and forming it. I don’t know when I started this, but I think these may be some concrete properties of a very fickle thing.
1. It’s a choice
Confidence is a choice. To be clear: there aren’t many other choices in life like the choice of confidence, but it is a choice nonetheless. It’s easy to agree on this, but what makes the choice to be confident unique is worth remembering. The choice to be confident has a compound effect on your life at a root level. When you make this choice, the number of other parts of your life that change, as a result, is very high. There is no objective metric for the degree to which a choice affects your life, but I believe that this choice, the choice towards or away from confidence, lives in an elite tier of decisions in your life. This is the primary implication of conceding that confidence is a choice: that results touch everything in consciousness. Another implication is that it is willful. You must actively make the choice. It is a habit, but it is also an education, and it grows on itself. If we’re trying to define confidence and its properties, I’ll mention that I think knowledge is another concept in this same category as confidence. When you turn your attention toward it, it affects your life on a level that changes everything else.
2. It’s not magnetic.
Confidence is not magnetic. In the landscape of confidences, opposites do not always attract. Yes, people of full confidence do sometimes attract people of less confidence (and vice versa), but this is still not a rule. The firm “opposites attract” quality of magnets does not apply to confidence. Rather, what attracts or pushes people away from one another rarely can be attributed to a single person’s confidence alone. This is important because it tells us the degree to which a person’s confidence affects their overall attractiveness and ability to be heard. Since it’s not a hard and fast rule, you can’t assume that confidence will be the determining factor in an attraction or aversion. The truth is that confidence is specific, and applying confidence in different ways has much to do with how it affects others. The idea that high confidence attracts people of low confidence is bogus. The magnet metaphor just doesn’t apply here. It’s too complicated.
3. Not always a good idea
Confidence is not always a good idea. In every situation, choosing where you apply confidence weighs as heavily as the choice towards confidence itself. There are entire worlds where the overt display of confidence is completely counterproductive. It may be accepted, you may still be respected, but to outwardly display confidence can work very hard against your goals. This is especially true in allowing space for people’s emotions, and exhibition of empathy. Even so, there are other areas of life where showing moderate to high confidence is always acceptable, like self-love and creativity. To be clear: always be confident. The key here is how you display it. Embody it. Don’t project it.
6.15.2020
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