A forty-something I spoke to had an interesting take on acting confident on the outside when you may not feel it on the inside. When you consider that everyone is “faking it”, you can be more open and less judgmental.
One of my professors in graduate school always told me that confidence is as much a rhetorical position as it is a real attitude that people carry with them. Just because someone is projecting confidence through what they say and the way they act has no relationship to whether they actually feel confident all the time. That’s liberating because you can project outside confidence even if you don’t feel you have it. But then it also gives you the understanding that we are all human. People have feelings. You have to respect that that’s a human being whether or not they seem like they have every answer. One of the wisest things that anyone has said to me was that the more you get to know people, the more you realize how everyone’s has their own little universe.”– 40-something, Los Angeles, CA
This post is an excerpt from an article that originally appeared in November 2010.