Talking about confidence

[chrisvenus]

I read something that suggested that finding out more about confidence from the point of view of others was helpful to building your own self-confidence. So here we go. I am at times very un-confident in myself so I am going to ask a few questions to get people going on the subject. If you want to add in more comments or questions then feel free. I have a vague feeling I did something similar before but now I'm copying from a book so it will be much better. Anonymous posting welcome if you don't want to put your name to your answers. :)

1) What do you think confidence is?

2) Where does confidence come from?

3) Can you think of someone who is completely confident?

4) How can you tell if someone is confident or not?

5) How do you feel when you talk to someone who is not at all confident?

6) Does a confident person always feel confident?

and my own one for number 7:

7) What is the difference between being confident and acting confident?


I will try to put up my own answers later but I don't have time right now.

Comments

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

Another demonstration that confidence is to do with the person not the circumstances is that confidence can be justified or unjustified. Someone's confidence is not determined by their actual success or probable success, it's just an emotion or attitude associated with their success-as-they-perceive-it.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Yes, as with knowledge and belief. A person's knowledge is not determined by actual facts, just facts-as-they-perceive-them.

The differences are that people have very strong intuition and emotion around risk, and that risk is not directly observable. So unjustified confidence levels (high or low) about easily measurable things are even more common and understandable than unjustified belief about easily measurable things. "Knowledge" is a prejudiced term in this respect: there's not really any such thing as "unjustified knowledge".