To be confident or not to be confident

[Ink]

Which should you be?

 

[Da Blob]

Depends on the situation. Confidence is a quality that is measured in degrees. Only complete fools are completely confident and those who lack confidence to a great degree lack knowledge.

 

[Hawkeye]

Having a lack of confidence can lead one to being used. It can also prevent you from expressing yourself in many ways.

During my years at Music College, I lacked confidence and felt it was affecting my performance on stage. I developed a method for boosting my confidence which to begin with, I found quite challenging.

On my avatar, you can see I am wearing a wizard hat (and starry sunglasses and an awesome guitar ^^). I wore this hat to college every day for an entire year. This included wearing it on the bus, to any event I went to, and even when I went to town for food with friends.

As the hat is so large, it meant that I was noticed wherever I went. This led to practically everyone staring at me all the time. I felt incredibly uncomfortable with it to begin with. As the days went on however, I began to get used to the feeling and my confidence began to grow.

Some did not take kindly to the hat though. In fact a massive argument started because this one guy thought I thought I was above everyone. This escalated to the point where he was unfortunately expelled.

My level of confidence is much higher now because of that experiment and I am happier for it.


I would say it would be better to have confidence in expressing yourself than not.

Although, confidence is sometimes confused with arrogance.

 

[intpz]

Whichever one you want/are. That's a stupid question. If you wanted opinions, you should've said so, which is what other users are doing here.

 

[kora]

sure it's not good to be over-confident/arrogant, but explain to me the postive aspects of not being confident...

 

[Hadoblado]

99.9% of the world's problems are caused by confident people.

 

[kantor1003]

those who lack confidence to a great degree lack knowledge.

I disagree. I remember growing increasingly unconfident the more I practiced and improved on my instrument. For me the opposite was true, the more knowledgable I became, the more my confidence dropped until I completely lost any incentive to play.

If one start out somewhat unconfident, I think confidence can, if one is not careful, drop at the same rate as your progression (or increase in knowledge).

 

[EyeSeeCold]

Which should you be?

I didn't know it was a choice.

Confidence comes directly from positive attitude, an understanding of the situation, and ability. If you have none of those you can't be confident.

 

[Cogwulf]

Which should you be?

At the risk of a Wildeian phrase not quite coming across as I meant it to:

You "should" be confident, but you shouldn't "be" confident.

Lots of people decide to become more confident, but conscious attempts at confidence always result in either lying to themselves and behaving just as normal, or acting which can work for a while but will leave you completely drained of energy and motivation in the long run. This is actually something I have only realised recently, as in the past few months. I've been trying to be more confident for years, and I feel that I am still in the midst of a revelation on this matter and it may not pan out. The answer is counter-intuitive, lacking confidence is universally bad but so is faking it, instead you must be happy with who you are. If you can achieve that, and truly accept all the things about yourself you don't like and stop trying to change them, the confidence will come by itself and those things will start to change of their own accord.

Or not, as I said I've only just reached this idea, and although it may be supported by ideas courtesy of TED talks, I may just be barking up the wrong tree.

 

[hablahdoo]

I am understanding confidence as a feeling of well being in context of some thought. Here is how I expect it works out.

You should be confident in a thought if it's one you want to do or keep.
You should be unconfident in a thought if you want it thrown out.

You should increase confidence in your thoughts if you want answers.
You should decrease confidence in your thoughts if you want to search for better answers.

You should be totally confident in your thoughts if you want to be full of shit.
You should be totally unconfident in your thoughts if you want to know nothing at all.

 

[kora]

99.9% of the world's problems are caused by confident people.

Ha, I bet 99.9%of the resolutions and advancements are caused by confident people as well though...

That must mean the world is ruled by confident people!

Seriously, though it does make sense, because being underconfident induces passivness.

 

[NinjaSurfer]

Lol I cannot see any cons to being artificially confident all day long
Confident people get the good things in life
As long as you can stay humble and avoid the fine line of arrogance, you can retain the charisma that won't alienate your same sex friends

 

[intpz]

Well... The line of arrogance is pretending to not understand and know anything. I used to do this when I've just started interacting with people, 5th grade or so. A couple years ago I've started to focus on me and therefore, dropping the mask of stupidity. Got quite a kickback from the people I used to interact with, nobody likes people who know everything and understand everything.

 

[Hadoblado]

Ha, I bet 99.9%of the resolutions and advancements are caused by confident people as well though...

That must mean the world is ruled by confident people!

Seriously, though it does make sense, because being underconfident induces passivness.

The type of advancements being made are not the ones that IMO should be being made most of the time. A passive world of ideas to me is preferable to an actual world of fucked up motive and execution.