I’ve spent some time reflecting yesterday and I realized that. When people want you to be confident they don’t want you to be actually confident, they want you to pretend you are. It is idiotic and makes no sense, but it explains a lot of situations in which I behaved the wrong way.
confidence to me means the opposite of that. it means questioning your asssumptions, approaching things from a different angle, reflect, recalculate, asking for a second opinion. Because I’ll end up with greater confidence that my assertions are more truthful. But apparently doing all that makes people think I’m insecure. Shit!
You’re totally right. Here’s how I’ve learned to navigate these situations. [EDIT] I started to write out specific advice, but as I was writing i realized there are more elements of nuisance to it than I could list in a short amount of time. So here’s my top points:
You can add qualifier words like “I believe X” rather than double checking.
Act falsely confident in an amount scaled to how important the topic is. If someone making small talk asks what i had for breakfast yesterday, it’s ok for me to confidently say “cereal” even if I’m a bit unsure, because it’s not an important topic. But if someone asks me how much gas they need in their car to drive to the next town then I’ll be very clear and tell them my level of uncertainty, like “I think it’ll take around 5 gallons, but I’m not sure about that.”