Confidence vs Insecurities
Posted on 26th April 2021 at 02:25
I’ve been thinking a lot about these two things recently. I started thinking about this because of a leadership program I am going through at one of my jobs. Part of the program is to receive feedback from your manager, your peers, direct reports, and other people you work with. Some of the feedback that I received from my direct supervisor is what brought me to this train of thought. Honestly, I’ve been having issues with my management recently. When I read her feedback, it was a bit confusing to me and proved to me that she and I are on completely different pages.
My boss told me she wants me to be more confident but also tells me she wants me to be vulnerable about my insecurities. She then holds my insecurities against me, believing that if I have insecurities that I must not be confident. Now, I know there are quite a few issues with the sentence that I just typed, but we aren’t going to dive into them in this post.
I started thinking about how if I’m confident with her then she is unsatisfied because I’m not being vulnerable. But if I’m being vulnerable then she’s unsatisfied because I’m not confident. Again, there are lots of issues in the above that we are not diving into right now. The issue that we are discussing is this rather common thinking that people have of thinking that if you are confident then you don’t have insecurities, and if you have insecurities then you can’t be confident. When I think that is old fashion and quite frankly absolutely wrong. Confidences and insecurities are not mutually exclusive.
Everyone in the world has insecurities and will have them for the majority of their life. Some insecurities stay with you throughout your entire life, some you gain throughout time, and luckily some you lose throughout time. Because of that fact, it means we carry around insecurities with us at all times. Confidence unfortunately is not something that is as easy to carry as insecurities. Confidence is the same as insecurities in the way that some stay with you throughout your entire life, some you lose throughout time, and again luckily some you gain throughout time. You can be confident in your smile, but insecure about your height. You can be confident in your knowledge, but insecure about your social life. There are a billion more confidences and insecurities out there for everyone to have. And not only that but some days people are insecure about pretty much anything. The way their clothes fit, their hair, maybe they have a zit on their face, the competency of doing their job, even the decision they make for what they are having for dinner. And then there are other days where their clothes fit perfectly, their hair looks like they just left the salon, they killed it at work, and they are just floating on cloud nine.
My point is, life is full of both insecurities and confidences. Everyone has them both. People try to show off their confidences. They try to hide their insecurities when in reality, others might not even see their insecurities. These two parts of life ebb and flow through each person, throughout their life. If we can learn to understand this, and genuinely become okay with this fact, life becomes just slightly easier. People become more approachable, we have empathy towards others and their insecurities, and we start to encourage their confidences. We overall become better people.
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