Is it possible to be overconfident?
5 March 2007[Words: 1320, Reading Time: 5-6mins]Â
If you view confidene as a baramter of mental health, then no it’s not possible to be over confident. After all, how can you be too healthy? That just doesn’t make sense.
Your confidence is a measure of internal strength, mental strength. Just with physical strength, you’ve an ability to build it from the base level you have, no matter how weak it is when you begin. Everyone has muscles, everyone has thoughts. With that you can start building confidence.
Similar to physical fitness, you can develop mental health regardless of how weak you are to begin with. If you do four or five push ups a day, even if that’s all you can do, that’s something and you’re beginning to build strength. In a smiliar manner, if you work on improving your self talk or self image for just one minute each day, you can build you internal confidence and inner fortitude.
An interestering thing is that with physical fitness can be divided into exercise and eating habits, your mental is primarily built by your thoughts. There is only so far we can stretch this analogy, so please don’t take it as a perfect one-to-one relationship!
The external determinants of confidence
My focus is to help you build confidence from the inside out, independent of any external factors. But there is a role external factors can play in your internal confidence.
Building Self Esteem Today has an article on the external factors that can damage your self esteem and therefore should be avoided. While I don’t entirely agree with the premise it is nonetheless a useful article.
In NLP they believe that between that between an action and a reaction there’s a choice. I call this your filter. You’re mental barriers and how you decide to interpret things will determine the impact on your self esteem and confidence far more potently than just the event itself.
Say, for example, someone is rude to you, or a lot of people are rude to you. You could interpret this as:
- People are really mean (no reflection on you, just the world is mean)
- I must be a terrible person
- I’m weak, that’s why people bully me
- People are jealous of me, I don’t need them
- Wow! They’re really shy and insecure; I wish they didn’t have to feel the need to try to put people down.
How you react will depend on how you view yourself and how you decide to interpret events. And this will reinforce your inner beliefs. This to me is the true reflection of how external events affect your internal confidence.
It’s important to note that just like your outer strength, your inner fortitude has limits. To carry this analogy further, if you are strong enough to easily bench press 50Kg, there’s going to come a time when you can’t lift it anymore, no matter how much you’d like to.
Another analogy I like to use is a bank account. Every day you can deposit into this account with positive thoughts, actions, and self images. If a tragedy hits, or something less severe but nevertheless demanding on your fortitude, you need to make a withdrawal. You need to spend mental energy on combatting the stress. However, after a time you’re account will be depleted.
Then you need rest to rebuild yourself. This can come in removing yourself from the stressful/demanding situation, coupled with investing more in your account – i.e. doing more self improvement work.
So what do people mean by over confidence? Over confidence is commonly meant as believing you are more proficient at a particular task/skill than you are (if measured objectively).
Concerning confidence related to skill: Why you’re nervous when you start a new task is the image you have does not reconcile with the outward performance. You feel nervous when first starting a new task because you have an image of how well you should perform and obviously if the task is highly skill dependent, you can’t perform.
Part of the problem is that if your ignorant of the level of commitment and dedication required, or the skill involved you can’t form an accurate image of how well you should do. The second component would be your ego not wanting you to look foolish while you stumble over the first few tries.
Acceptance plays an important part in overcoming this confidence challenge. If you accept yourself fully you’re okay with how you perform because, well, you’re a beginner, you’ll reduce/eliminate the anxiety when performing the task for the first time. Furthermore, accepting the skill level you’re at makes it easier for you to learn as you can actively seek out the skills you need to ahcieve and progress. So acceptance will aid your development.
It’s looking at things through this light which allow you to figure out your confidence in those areas of life in which you’re weak or underdeveloped. You can accept that you’re at this particular level, and despite having a “shortcoming†in this area, still feel proud of who you are. Again I want to emphasise that something is only a shortcoming of yours if you chose to view it that way. The only true measure of your value is you.
To go back to our exercise analogy, if you aren’t that strong to begin with and your goal is a 100Kg squat it will take you longer to get there than if you’re “naturally†strong or have been exercising for a long time. Similarly, if you’re used to beating yoruself up, or haven’t invested in developing your self confidence, it will take you longer to develop proper mental fortitude. Longer is the wrong word, it will take more effort and resources initially. But the great thing is that it multiplies and has a cumulative effect. Brian Tracy talks frequently about building momentum, stating that while it might take a lot of effort to get yourself moving, it takes less effort to keep yourself going once you are.
Building your internal strength or confidence requires workouts. You can do ‘external’ workouts by taking moments of courage. Also, setting aside five, ten or fifteen minutes to meditate, affirm, visualise is what I’d consider to be performing mental workouts.
You need to take breaks in personal development, or confidence building. Why is this? Primarily because it’s always a good thing not to get overly committed (or worse, overly attached) to anything, as it will unbalance your life.
A second reason is that you also need time to ‘recover’ after mental workout just like a physical workout. Undercurrents of a lack of confidence can emmerge from building up your confidence. While you may be focusing on becoming more confidence you mightn’t notice all those thoughts of feeling inferior or low self esteem arising. It’s possible you might be asking yourself why you aren’t feeling confident and answering ‘I don’t feel confident because…’ It’s all those repetitions of ‘I don’t feel confident’ that can sabotage your efforts to build unshakable internal confidence. Consider them like minor injuries everyone picks up during the course of regular exercise.
It’s important that you don’t sabotage your efforts during the rest period. If you were trying to get a six pack all the cardio in the world wouldn’t help if you were eating McDonald’s and curries every day. Similarly, make sure you’re refraining from mental junk food by keeping your thoughts and actions in line with your intentions.
A curious thing I’ve noted that a lot of times I’ve set an intention or done some inner game work and then forgotten about it for a bit. After a while it’s manifested and I remember that I was thinking about it intensely a while ago. I guess if you’re always working you can never reap the rewards. So although work is important you need to take a break to gain the benefit of your efforts.
One Response to “Is it possible to be overconfident?”
March 10th, 2007 at 2:39 pm
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