It’s an interesting fact of life, that most of us are very bad at picking who’s confident and who’s not.
It’s almost a good rule of thumb to acknowledge that most people are actually not confident. Most people could do with increasing their confidence.
The thing that confuses us, is that many people who appear confident are actually not. It’s because we tend to forget that true confidence arises when you are broadly confident over a wide range of domains. So someone who is confident at work, in social situations, even in unfamiliar environments is truly confident.
On the other hand, someone who is only confident in one area of life, but not confident in any other areas is actually not confident.
An example would be someone who is an incredibly confident doctor. They are very good at diagnosing and treating patients. People come from all around to see this particular doctor. She knows she’s a very good doctor and she knows that she has incredible skills. She is very confident that she knows what she is doing in a professional sense.
But when you put her in a room full of people at a party, she is a completely different person. In this environment all her confidence saps away. She is nervous and uncomfortable. She can’t look anyone in the eye. She can’t bear talking to people.
If you had only seen this doctor in a work setting, you would have imagined that she is one of the most confident people you have met. If you had only seen her in a social setting, however, you would have realised that she is not very confident at all.
Her confidence in her work setting simply comes from hard work, study, practice and experience. It is not the form of confidence that can be applied in other situations.
If you want to be truly confident, you need to be able to have firm self-belief in yourself that crosses over from familiar well practiced situations to unknown, unfamiliar situations. This is not common, but it is definitely learnable.