I’ve spent some time reflecting yesterday and I realized that. When people want you to be confident they don’t want you to be actually confident, they want you to pretend you are. It is idiotic and makes no sense, but it explains a lot of situations in which I behaved the wrong way.
confidence to me means the opposite of that. it means questioning your asssumptions, approaching things from a different angle, reflect, recalculate, asking for a second opinion. Because I’ll end up with greater confidence that my assertions are more truthful. But apparently doing all that makes people think I’m insecure. Shit!
About confidence The national guard taught me a thing about confidence in cleaning weapon
When you clean your rifle, you need to clean it, and get the armorer (are at least a superior) to check if it is well cleaned. In basic you're taught that you only ask for your weapon to be reviewed if you are confident it's clean. Of course its basic and the main lesson you take out of it is that life is shit and your job is to deal with it. But it doesn't last. Now after basic I begin actual service and for the past 4 years I'd had to clean fuck tons of guns. Mine, others, entire armories. And each time I'd have to ask for the review I needed to be certain. And many time, especially at the beginning I'd have to continue cleaning because it wasn't fully cleaned despite being confident it was cleaned.
And the thing is… it wasn't a problem if I was wrong, had forgotten a small parts, etc. What they wanted me to do was the work correctly and genuinely believe in my work. They wanted me to have genuine and honest reason to believe my work was done, and therefore, if there was work remaining to do, that mean I genuinely didn't see it. And after years of service, thanks to the experience acquired, now I almost pass review first try.
Though there are fucking idiots who want to be lied to. Especially superior who actually don't know, understand nor are intelligent enough to understand what your job actually is who just want you to say "yeah everything fine" so they can repeat it to their own boss.