I watched this video today after showing up on my Youtube feed and started thinking about how to exude confidence with every ounce of your being. To me, confidence has always felt like a foreign attribute and skill that I need to actively work on. I naturally caveat and hurry through and self-deprecate to serve an artificial to avoid imposing and be looked upon favorable as “what a humble guy.” It means I’ve had to learn to force myself to be confident, even aiming to be arrogant or selfish in order to actually stand up for myself and assert my ground.
Some people are naturally very convinced in their abilities, sometimes overly so. I think we always fall somewhere along a spectrum between undervaluing a skill or overvaluing it, and it requires a high level of self-awareness and cultural awareness to match perception to reality. I’ve grown to adopt quiet confidence as the term to refer to naturally being able to exude competence and conjure respect with grace. Those who overvalue themselves compared to reality rely on theatrics and have to bluster their way through, while those who undervalue themselves are too meek to take up the space they deserve.
Quiet confidence is when you’re able to naturally take your time, take up proper space, and be unapologetically yourself without putting down anyone else or manufacturing dependence. Quiet confidence is the stable foundation of self-belief that emanates around one who has a core of trust in themselves. It’s explicitly not a blustering god complex of someone who has unwavering faith that they can do nothing wrong. It means acknowledging mistakes and learning from them, but it also means refusing to compromise on what you want and how you feel. Quiet confidence is about embracing your full self and making sure people understand and connect with that image.
I aspire to acquire that level of trust and elegance in the way I carry and present myself. It’s the sort of thing that makes someone feel so much larger than their physical body—the kind of thing that imparts a magical, greater-than-life quality that you can feel when you see it. A lot of it comes through in the seemingly effortless ability to take time, make space for yourself, and communicate a vision effectively that seems like a supernatural mandate. Some people get what they want through shouting and fear and deceit, but I want to push for what I want through quiet attention, graceful empathy, and refreshing honesty. I believe in abundance and mutualism and authenticity, and that is the world I will never stop pushing for in both my words and my deeds.
This is the 98th installment in my experiment of publishing raw, lightly edited mini-essays every day towards achieving 100 public pieces. Check out the rationale and the full list here.