Globe, you're confusing two different kinds of confidence. Your talking about confidence in one's mechanical skills, I'm talking about social confidence, the belief that others will accept and respond well to you. And THIS is what 99.9% of people mean when they talk about "being confident". I thought I was making that obvious, but you missed it. (deliberately?)globetrotter wrote:"So here's the truth about confidence: You can only have confidence when other people give it to you. "
You do not get confidence via someone else giving it to you. That is totally wrong.
Confidence is the belief in yourself that you can do something that you have never done before, and that you can do it well.
Windsurf, rock climb, f**k that hot chick, run a 10k, be a DJ with no training, whatever.
It's a mixture of emotion and spirit and you need to find within yourself what you believe you can do without practice first. That is likely the problem. You don't have any FAITH or BELIEF in yourself, in your ability to just go out and begin doing something with little or no practice, and that you can do said thing well. You think that you need TO LEARN and read and study something first.
No. Wrong.
This state of affairs is common among the very intelligent who live in their heads and write lengthy, well-written posts.
Stop thinking.
Stop writing.
Stop analyzing.
Do or Do Not.
There is no 'Try'.
When I was 22 I knew that I was the best Alternative DJ in my city. I knew that I had the talent and the knowledge and that I was at the right place at the right time.
And I was.
People still remember my music sets and clubs, 25 years later.
How did 'I know'? 'I just knew'. This is a knowing that is far far beyond rational thinking. You cannot get there with analysis and prose and writing about it. It either 'is' or it 'is not'.
Go out and do something, and keep chaging that something until you find what it is that you are very good at. You seem to have no awareness of this within yourself, thus the best solution is trial and error.
Try everything, and YES I do mean EVERYTHING.
That's something you can do until age 35 or so. Work at every job you can think of. Try every single hobby out there.
"Suddenly, all the women on the dating shows and in the advice columns are telling us how much they’re attracted to this mysterious new quality called confidence. And conversely, how the lack of confidence is a big turn-off. "
You are incorrect in your assessment. Women have always been attracted to confidence. It is not mysterious and it's not new. Not in 2005 and not in 2010.
Confidence is just the air about you that speaks silently 'I know what I am doing in XXX situation'. You can most definitely have it without success, and that is NOT false confidence. It is confidence before the success reveals itself. I was like this when I was a DJ. Some called me arrogant and there was some truth to that. However, if you knew that you had the skills to get everyone to dance AT WILL, that you could pick a couple out of the crowd and make them hookup and go home together with your music AT WILL, that you could play through the alphabet backwards and forwards AT WILL and still pack the floor; if you knew you could clear them out to get them to all rush the bar and spend money and then 6 minutes later pack them all in again, and you knew this when it was the first week and you had 8 customers and not 800, THAT'S confidence...and you WOULD be arrogant.
Other forms of confidence are irrelevant to this issue. For example, if you've mastered the Klingon language or are an expert in stamp collecting, you may be very confident in your ability. But that confidence CAN NOT translate into social confidence unless others respect, admire, and reward you for your abilities. The average Klingon expert is more likely to be shunned, particularly by the opposite sex, rather than admired.
But even in your example, you are wrong. So you had confidence in your DJ abilities and you turned out to be right. The fallacy in your logic is that your confidence had anything to do with it. It didn't. Haven't you ever met someone who thought they were a good DJ and yet they sucked? Lots of people have had confidence in their abilities and turned out to be wrong. I'm one of them. When I was young I used to believe I was a really good songwriter. So I spent thousands of dollars recording demos and even self-released an EP. I sent it to local papers to get reviewed. And they savaged it. They mercilessly pointed out all the flaws and weaknesses in my writing, singing, and playing. I was shocked. I expected high praise and I got slammed instead. I had confidence. But my confidence was proven to be delusional.
How could I have known? After all, my friends and family told me my songs were good. In retrospect, it's obvious they only told me what they thought I wanted to hear instead of being honest with me, which would have been much more useful. And there are millions who are just as falsely confident as I was. Haven't you ever watched the American Idol audition shows? It's as funny as it is heartbreaking. Here are all these supremely confident "singers" who have believed all their lives that they have a great vocal talent only to end up making complete asses of themselves. How'd all that confidence work out for them, Globetrotter??? Huh? Tell me. How useful was their confidence???
>'Do or Do Not.
There is no 'Try'.
That nonsense is only true in the fantasy world of Star Wars. Here in reality, we don't have "the force" to fall back on.
>Women have always been attracted to confidence. It is not mysterious and it's not new.
Maybe so. But only in recent years has the "just be confident" mantra been so popular. And only in recent years have women mentioned confidence as an attractive feature. Weren't you there 15 or 20 years ago? Do you remember anyone talking about confidence then? I don't.
And again: It's not really confidence that they're attracted to. They are attracted to the qualities (looks, money, social skills, fashion sense, etc) that produce confidence. When women say they are attracted to confidence, they are either lying to themselves or they are just trying to appear less shallow than they really are. After all, if they were honest and said they were attracted to looks and money, people would think (know) they were just shallow and/or goldiggers. So saying they like "confidence" is a convenient way to hide their shallowness.
