What if the skill requires confidence to be competent? For example, being a healthcare worker taaked with re-assuring a patient that they're in good hands prior to surgery. If you don't exude confidence, it's likely they won't believe it as effectively. Worse, they end up feeling worse.
Instead of confidence, we ought to focus on... intonation, tone, verbiage, therapeutic language - is that what you mean to say? But I feel that (1) this is merely substitution, with confidence being the overarching umbrella, and (2) surely, self belief can boost performance in some intangible way.
Thanks for writing this article. It's one of my favorites.
For sure. This post is a warning against that sort of thought process becoming a loop or a trap- if you're failing somewhere, you should probably never "just believe harder."
Believing harder is a bad substitute for effort and attention that predatory ideologies and our own minds sometimes offer.
But like you said, there's definitely a case to be made that focusing on more concrete advice about intonation and verbiage can be more valuable in general than telling someone to be confident.
I love this take on the common myths of “Law of Attraction” and whatnot.
Although, the Pygmalion effect suggests that we can “trick” ourselves into believing we’re better at something than we are.
After learning this, I remember walking into my graduate program pretending to be excited to be there (I didn’t feel excited lol).
I had a much better morning than I had anticipated, and felt my mood elevate as I interacted with others in a faux-excited manner.
Thanks for the great post and food for thought!
What if the skill requires confidence to be competent? For example, being a healthcare worker taaked with re-assuring a patient that they're in good hands prior to surgery. If you don't exude confidence, it's likely they won't believe it as effectively. Worse, they end up feeling worse.
Instead of confidence, we ought to focus on... intonation, tone, verbiage, therapeutic language - is that what you mean to say? But I feel that (1) this is merely substitution, with confidence being the overarching umbrella, and (2) surely, self belief can boost performance in some intangible way.
Thanks for writing this article. It's one of my favorites.
For sure. This post is a warning against that sort of thought process becoming a loop or a trap- if you're failing somewhere, you should probably never "just believe harder."
Believing harder is a bad substitute for effort and attention that predatory ideologies and our own minds sometimes offer.
But like you said, there's definitely a case to be made that focusing on more concrete advice about intonation and verbiage can be more valuable in general than telling someone to be confident.
Thanks for the compliment!
What if we’re really doing all the right things and not feeling confident still.