Check Your Confidence

I’m not sure which is more dangerous – confidence or its lack. The dangers of lack of confidence are pretty obvious. Without confidence we underestimate and undervalue ourselves. We second guess our choices and this often results in self-sabotage. But too much confidence can be just as dangerous to ourselves and the people we interact with. A large number of ignorant, incorrect, or inconsiderate assertions and statements that I’ve heard seem to come directly from too much confidence. Too often, that same confidence translates to charisma, making these statements more acceptable to listeners.

Sometimes we can gain much by second-guessing ourselves. Sometimes a little undervaluation (the fact that “undervaluation” is a real word just boosted my confidence) is equivalent to a healthy amount of humility. Sometimes underestimating is a good thing, especially if overestimating is the alternative. How much is too much? As with many things in life, it seems that the challenge is not to gain confidence, the challenge is to find balance between confidence and humility. We must be confident enough so that we do not accept less than we deserve and constantly doubt our choices, but we must not be too confident to see our own flaws, empathize with our fellow men, and question our beliefs.

In my search for balance, I’ve found a few situations that should always set off alarm bells when it comes to confidence:

• If I find myself thinking of another person or group of people as being stupider, weaker or lesser than me in some other way, I question myself and take a second look. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not living in some fairy tale land where I think there are no stupid people. Sometimes after questioning myself, I find that I was right in the first place. However, sometimes, I find that the same stupidity, weakness, or whatever else that I am accusing someone of, is something I am guilty of. Other times I find that while I may not suffer from the particular fault I am seeing in the other person, I can easily understand why such a fault would arise in the situation.
• If a new of thinking about something or new idea comes to my attention and my immediate reaction is to discount it, I ask myself why I am discounting it. Is it because there is something wrong with the idea or is it because I am too confident in my beliefs to change them?
• If I find myself doubting my ability to accomplish a particular task or doubting the quality of my work, I do my best to take a second, more objective look. Perhaps my doubt is caused by lack of confidence rather than lack of ability.
• It’s not just our own confidence we need to watch out for. If someone makes an extra-confident assertion, I do my best to look past their confidence to the reasons and justification behind the assertion.
• If I ever find myself believing that I deserved something that happened to me, whether good or bad, I take a second look. If it’s something bad, there’s not much to consider. I don’t believe anyone deserves bad things ever. At times we might need bad things to result from our actions to teach us lessons, but punishment for its own sake serves no purpose. If you feel that you deserve punishment, that means that you are aware of mistakes you may have made. Once you are aware, wallowing in guilt is no substitute for doing what you can to right the wrong and learn from the experience. If I feel like I deserve something good that happened, I ask myself why. Was whatever I supposedly did to deserve the good thing that came really something above and beyond? Maybe I need to work to deserve that good thing after the fact – you know, pay off some of the debt on my karma card.

Balance never comes easy. I believe that achieving balance is the essential challenge of human life. These are just a few tips to help achieve balance, but this is far from comprehensive. Every situation where we should check our confidence is not easily generalized broken down into neat bullet points. Most aren’t. However, the way I see it, if we think about the simpler, easy to generalize cases ahead of time, that leaves us more time and energy to deal with the complicated cases as they occur.