CONFIDENCE VS COMPETENCE

‘Fake it to make it!’ and ‘Just go forward confidently!’ can destroy your progress.

I was feeling a little down one day and downloaded an audio book about confidence to try and get a boost and was slapped in the face with some awesome reality I was not expecting.

The book looks at the benefits of the

lack

of confidence. The relationship between

CONFIDENCE and COMPETENCE

and how we seem to have it all backwards toward gaining our own real inner worth.

It states how the need for confidence is really nothing more than a social pressure and has very little benefits at all. In fact, your low confidence can be your best friend in becoming a higher achiever.

People tend to overuse confidence to avoid feeling negatively toward something that has obvious evidence of harm.


“I’ll quit smoking whenever I want.”

“I won’t ever get caught.”

Having lower confidence with regards to your health can be a stronger driver to creating better health habits. We have all heard those stories of people hitting rock bottom before making drastic changes toward improvement.

At ‘rock bottom’ they have lost all confidence and have finally accepted that ahead of them is work and often hit the effort hard with the best results.

Example: If two students are heading to an important test and one student is confident and one is very cautious about passing, the cautious student will most likely be motivated to study. This would lead to a higher test score, leading to higher actual competence levels and in turn leading to true self-worth through actual competence.

As for the confident student,

when we encourage others to do well through being confident their activity levels toward their goals actually decrease

. When we tell somebody they can achieve anything they want, they get a higher sense of entitlement, a higher sense of false victory and their willpower diminishes.

Higher confidence = Lower competence.

Lower confidence = Higher competence.

Higher competence = Higher self-worth which is portrayed as high confidence.

Be aware that your biggest ‘weaknesses’ of insecurity can be one of your biggest strengths toward true competence and looking more confident.

Keep an eye out for the under confident. It often is a flag of high competence.

Brendan