Confidence
So people used to tell me to be more confident. I often get quite defensive about this. Because frankly I feel quite a lot of confidence. As I look back over myself I think I acted with loads of confidence. I went and did a Law degree with little to no evidence I would be able to do well in a subject that is not geared towards my strengths. I showed up a board games club I had never been to alone not knowing anyone there and made friends. I have done the same with kink events. Pretty confident thing to do if you ask some people. So what was encouraging people to suggest this? Well, my hang ups about my body were a significant part. I ended up wondering what people were referring to and listening to audiobooks and online Youtube videos about how to meet their expectations. I wondered if a person could write a pathway to confidence.
I have been confident in my career I think. I totally changed my career when I was in a dead end and felt held up by people. I up and left a job where they failed to honour my contract properly with nothing to go to, but I successfully got another job within 3 days. I have led sprint reviews and sprint planning sessions. Hell, I started a company and this was after Brexit and it was going to depend on tourism. Thinking about it that might have been a dumb action if it weren't for the minimal start up costs, but it worked out and it definitely took guts. I have thrown myself into a shitty costume with mild make up skills and performed in drag despite reservations about my skill. That took guts too!
So what exactly am I doing that makes people think I'm not confident? Should I even care? My inability to accept compliments about my body was a huge part. Interesting how it is something we think of as so vain and superficial, but it is the only part of myself I used to be not confident about and people focused on that. Are we that shallow as a society? Perhaps it was just me, but it is them as well. I think it is the one thing I have been pulled up about since before my age was double digits. Their focus on the physical and visible. I could work on my body and I am doing that, but I should I really be pandering to what other people think? Is that even confident at all?
I am a big guy and not very physically fit, but I took up a martial art which I kept at for quite a while! I climbed to the top of the tallest mountain in Wales with little evidence I would be able to do it and I was scared I was going to end up needing to be rescued somewhere, but I felt the fear and did it anyway. We didn't even do the easiest route to avoid the crowds. I am fat and despite continually failing to lose weight since I was a child, guess what I am doing? I'm trying despite all the evidence technically suggesting that I will fail like nearly every attempt before. I am ignoring my prior failures and going for it. Is that not pretty damn confident? But apparently I don't come across that way because superficially people focused on my difficulties with my body. One small and insignificant part of me, the head of the iceberg.
Despite being overweight I am posting provocative pictures in certain places where some of my peers can see them. Suddenly, people think I am confident. It feels so superficial, but it does help me, but I feel like it shouldn't.
I went through an audiobook and came to the end of it really wondering if "confidence" as far as some people see it, is something we truly need. James Smith the author of the audiobook "How to be confident" describes a time he had nearly sold out an entire room of people for a seminar he hadn't even written yet. Now I have left things to the deadline before, but I would never do this. I would be concerned that those people deserve better than a half-arse written seminar done at the last minute. I am confident in my ability to deliver high quality and I hold myself to that standard because I believe I can do a higher than average standard if I put my mind to it. If cobbling a talk together in an hour and charging for it is what the world defines as confident, I do not want any part of it.
My mind instantly goes to the number of difficult situations caused by sales guys who over sold a feature that wasn't finished yet and suddenly a development team needs to rush to put out a low quality product. Some people call this confidence. I call this lack of confidence in the product to be suitable for the customers needs as it is, followed by anxiety of losing the sale. That anxiety and lack of confidence caused the salesperson to lie. If this is what the world is calling confidence then I don't want any part of it. I am confident being supposedly "unconfident".
I recognise that I am not what other people want to call confident some of the time. Their honest views of me, not being confident no longer affects me. Their opinion before bothered me that I wasn't what other people expected for a time. But as I investigated, I discovered that sometimes they can't agree about what is needed to be confident, sometimes their idea of confidence is superficial, or acted rather than felt. Sometimes their idea of confidence is actually what I would call short changing people and something I don't want associated with my brand. Sometimes it is being so anxious, and de facto unconfident, that you have to lie about something with the confidence that other people will make up the gaps later thereby dropping other people in the mud. I have decided that I am good how I am and if that is what they think of as confident, it is not something I need. Shirking off other people's opinions rather than trying to live up to them, is me finally, truly behind confident.
I have one last effort to vamp up the supposed confidence impression I leave with people and that's the Teach Yourself Confidence Workbook and I might see if I can write a coaching course off the back of it that I can use with clients, but frankly it's at the back of the pile right now. I am confident I don't need it!
Graeme