It’s the stuff that girls like in buckets, it’s the surreptitious appeal in that new jacket you just bought, it’s what talent show contestants never seem to leave home without (save for any actual talent of course). Confidence’s never really gone out of fashion, maintaining a steady position somewhere between intelligence and beauty in nature’s global marketplace. No one seems to know much about it either - how it works, or even why it eludes some of us yet can’t keep it’s hands off those lucky few. Beyond the one-way determinist arguments of genetics and environment, I’ll try and address the former (and conveniently far easier) question of ‘how’. For the purpose of this article I’m going to take confidence as a quality of behaviour and divvy it up into two separate camps. One I’m going to call ‘faith-based confidence’ and the other I’m going to call ‘experience-based confidence’. For brevity’s sake, I’m going to refer to people who have faith-based confidence as ‘fbs’ and those that have experience-based confidence ‘ebs’. Of Bluff and Bluster Confidence is the full-beam projection of self, not necessarily the ‘truest’ reflection of self or even the most deceitful. But the self in full-engagement with, and in command of its audience. When self-doubt is extracted from the mind, confidence can be romantically thought of as the hide-tide scum left around the edges of the human psyche. Where the confident tend to diverge (hence my binary categorisation) is in the way in which they acquire and distribute their sense of self. The fbs (as their name suggests) are those beings that walk among us who seem to radiate natural confidence, confidence itself is an article of faith for the fbs. Their ever-present conviction projects an unshifting belief in their ability to preform, remain calm, and cope regardless of the situation or circumstance - they have ‘faith based confidence’. The ebs on the other hand base their self-assurity on experience. Their confidence isn’t so much a natural ‘state of mind’ as with the fbs. Rather it’s an intellectual position held about their own abilities and successes which their personality then submits in to others as a carefully regulated mixture of doubt & conviction – they have ‘experience based confidence’... Article continued here http://culturespam.wordpress.com/2007/09/27/confidence-explained-bravado-in-binary/
Interesting stuff helio. May i ask if you wrote this yourself? its of a pretty high standard, very lucid. I believe youre entirely on the right track with this article for the most part. I just wonder if the two states of confidence youve outlined couldnt be expanded upon and sub-catagorized even further.
Thanks Dan, like the beard btw. Yes i suppose you could quite easily catagorise things down either further. However the article was really conceived simply to explain why confidence seems to 'come easy' for some and not so for others. I assumed that there must be a key difference in the way people 'manage' their projected self, and what ive writen tries to uncover those key divergent process(s) of self-management as faithfuly as possible.
