One of the characteristics that most of us find appealing is confidence. Confident people are seen as more charismatic, and are more likely to be chosen as leaders.
Yet there is a paradox to confidence, and that paradox was even hidden in that prior sentence.
We view confidence as a fundamental personality trait. But the idea that someone is a “confident person” is a terrible misperception. An individual can and should be more or less confident in specific areas, or about specific things.
LeBron James should be very confident in his basketball abilities. He should not have the same confidence in his abilities as a neurosurgeon.
A person who feels innate confidence in all things isn’t a confident person; he or she is simply delusional. In the movies, Tony Stark can be a genius who can build clean nuclear reactors, powered armor, and time machines. In real life, it’s practically impossible to devote enough time to such disparate subjects to be a world-leading expert in all of them.
That’s the confidence paradox. Confidence is great AS LONG AS IT IS JUSTIFIED. Confidence without justification is the characteristic of the “confidence man” or conman.
You should be confident about your abilities where you are truly great. And you should not be confident in areas where you have not yet proven your skills.
If you want to become more confident in more areas of your life without becoming a conman, get great at more things.
But given that there is a limit to how many things we can be great at, the other lesson is to seek out situations that justify your confidence.
If you want other people to be drawn to your confidence, display that confidence in the context of doing or having done great things.
Many people think of me as confident. That’s because they usually meet me in a context where I am truly an expert, such as the startup world, the topics of my books, or as a public speaker. Anyone who has seen me try to tackle manual labor or minor household repairs knows that I am definitely not confident in all aspects of my life.
There is one final paradox to confidence. There is one form of confidence that is nearly universally applicable, which is the confidence in your ability to learn and problem-solve. If you are truly great at these things, you can face nearly any situation with aplomb. And yet, there is a paradox within that paradox, which is that no matter how great you are at learning and problem-solving, there are mysteries and problems that you won’t be able to solve, which is why you must temper that confidence with humility.
Becky Kennedy, parenting guru of “Good inside”, depicts a different form of confidence relating to emotional function. She defines confidence as the ability to reliably identify what you are feeling. This is related to the idea to “know your self,” or even “know your Self” at a deeper level of being, where Self refers to religious understanding / sight of the nature of (one’s) consciousness / soul.
Perhaps this type of confidence is what women are naturally assessing – emotional confidence, and fooled by the narcissist (?).
Knowledge or being aware of your neuroses-dysphoria (fear based emotions: pride, depression, anger, shame, guilt..) one sees the inherent cognitive distortion or contradiction in them as non-acceptance of reality (needs, shoulds, musts) and engagement in the attachment to ego (the judgement of total unity of self as great or horrible) and reduces them by seeing-feeling them as informationally false.
Feel free to edit all of this more sensibly.
The cognitive contradiction of “the world must be this way or it is horrible and I can’t stand it,” is equivalent to the contradiction of “judgement of self as great or horrible” via the premise that “what one can’t stand / exist” by definition is equivalent to “I am a bad person qua person” – because “a bad person qua person” cannot exist, and “one not being able to exist” constitutes one as “a bad person qua person”. So this single condition connecting two perspectives defines completely what a neurosis-dysphoria is. But operatively speaking, the engagement to “ego” or engagement to “the attachment to judgement of total unity of self as great or horrible,” is the correct definition of neurosis. As ego defenses acting in boundaries as anger, ego defenses generally (including confirmation bias), lowering of ego defenses to allow in information including emotional awareness, as ego-positive dysphoria (pride) and ego-negative dysphoria (fear-based emotions), as the Stoics’ “Ego is the enemy,” and the meditative act of letting go of the ego, ego-positive hubris, etc, are operatively the primary (true, deeper) definition of neurosis.
It is my observation that psychedelics – on the emotional level of letting go – primarily act to lower ego defenses – to allow access to feelings – from the meta-meta level down of meta neuroses-dysphoria, thus creating safety first (reducing anxiety by reducing higher order dysphoria about lower order dysphoria) (fear of fear, shame of fear, depression of feeling fear), thus creating free will in manifesting one’s wants by lowering the energy necessary to feel difficult feelings by reducing the anxiety of higher order dysphoria that ordinarily blocks us from feeling difficult feelings, and thus manifesting root wants. Free will is associated with synapse formation or neuroplasticity.