# Psychology of Confidence: Be So Confident It Makes People Nervous

Channel: PsychToons
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qL-uEtXmnqE
Duration: 14 min
Language: English
Words: 2623
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/qL-uEtXmnqE

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[0:00] There is one question you can ask about anybody that will tell you exactly how confident they are, and it has nothing to do with how loudly they speak or how straight they stand. The question is this, what does this person need before they will act? Watch someone closely enough and the list appears. One person needs to know the room already agrees before they will say the thing. Another needs the plan to be flawless before they will start. Another needs to feel ready and waits 11 years for a feeling that was never going to show up on its own. Every one of those is a fee being

[0:29] charged at the door, and the person charging it is them. That is the real psychology of confidence, and it is the reason most advice about self-confidence never works on you. You have been told to believe in yourself more, but confident people do not believe in themselves more than you do. They simply require less from the world before they move. So, we need to get something out of the way immediately because it is the most popular idea in this entire subject, and it does not hold up. The idea is that confidence is a feeling you top up, that somewhere inside you there is a tank labeled self-esteem, and if

[1:02] you can get the level high enough, the behavior follows. An enormous amount of money and schooling has been built on that assumption. In 2003, Roy Baumeister and his colleagues Jennifer Campbell, Joachim Krueger, and Kathleen Vohs reviewed the actual evidence for it in one of the most deflating papers in modern psychology. What they found was that the correlations between self-esteem and real outcomes do not show self-esteem producing those outcomes. People who do well tend to

[1:30] feel good about themselves afterward. Feeling good about yourself first does not reliably produce the doing well part, which means the thing you have been chasing is not the thing you want. You do not want to feel more confident. You want to stop needing so much before you act. Welcome back to Psych Tunes. Today we are taking apart the psychology of confidence, what it actually is, the four things you are quietly waiting for before you will let yourself move, and how to move through the world with effortless confidence. Let's start with what confidence is made of because there is a better word for it than the one we

[2:03] use. In 1990, and then in a widely used scale published in 1996, the psychologist Jennifer Campbell and her colleagues described something called self-concept clarity. Notice the word not self-esteem, clarity. They defined it as the degree to which your beliefs about yourself are clearly and confidently defined, internally consistent, and stable over time. Whether you know what you are, whether those beliefs agree with each other instead of contradicting each other, whether the answer is the same on Thursday as it was on Tuesday. Here is the part that should change how you think about this. Self-concept clarity is structural, not flattering. It is about the resolution of the picture, not

[2:45] how attractive the picture is. Two people can hold completely opposite opinions of themselves and both score high as long as each of them is clear. And you can feel broadly positive about yourself and still score low because the moment anyone asks you a specific question about who you are, the image goes soft. Campbell's work also found that low clarity travels with chronic self-analysis, the endless internal review. The person who thinks about themselves the most is frequently the

[3:12] person who knows themselves the least. That is what is really happening when you feel unconfident. You are not suffering from a shortage of positive opinion. You are working from a blurry file. And when your own picture is blurry, you have to go and get it developed somewhere else. You need the room to tell you whether that was good. You need the result to tell you whether you were right. You outsource the resolution because you cannot produce it yourself. Now, since the title of this video made a promise, let me honor it quickly and honestly, and then we will

[3:40] get to the work that matters the most. There are two proven routes to standing in a group, and a 2013 study by Joey Cheng, Jessica Tracy, Tom Folsom, Alan Kingston, and Joseph Henrich laid them out side by side. The first is dominance, force and intimidation which work by inducing fear. The second is prestige, freely shared competence and know-how, which works by earning respect. Both routes genuinely produce influence. Both routes even pull more of

[4:09] the group's visual attention toward you. So yes, you can absolutely make a room nervous. Dominance is the faster road and it is the one everybody instinctively reaches for and it has the one feature worth knowing about. It has to be maintained. Fear is a subscription, respect is a purchase. The kind of confidence we are building today runs on the second one and the nervousness it creates in other people

[4:31] is a side effect you will barely notice. Anyone chasing that reaction as the goal has already told you everything about what they are missing. Back to the mechanism, because this is the sentence I want you to carry out of this video. Confidence is the entry fee you charge yourself before you are allowed to act. Everyone has one. For some people it is almost nothing and so they move constantly, clumsily, early and they accumulate a life. For others the fee is enormous. Before they can speak in a meeting they have to be certain the idea is good, certain the timing is right, certain nobody will push back and

[5:04] certain they are the kind of person who speaks in meetings. Four separate payments all due before a single sentence leaves their mouth. Most of the time they cannot afford it so they say nothing and then they drive home replaying what they would have said. That is not a personality, that is a pricing problem. So let's look at what you are being charged. Four prerequisites. See which ones are on your bill. Prerequisite one, you need approval before you commit. Here is what it looks like. You have an idea at work, before you bring it to the meeting, you test it on a colleague, then another one. You send it to the group chat and

[5:37] watch for the reaction. By the time you present it, four people have already blessed it and you have rewritten it twice to survive their objections. You are not gathering feedback, you are gathering signatures. The mechanism underneath is simple. When your own picture of yourself is low-resolution, other people's reactions function as the developer fluid. Their approval does not make you feel good. It makes you feel real. And once you notice that, you notice something else. Whoever you need a signature from is holding a pen you handed them. Prerequisite two, you need certainty before you start. This one has the best disguise because it does not look like fear at all. It looks like

[6:15] standards. You will launch once the website is right. You will apply once you meet every requirement on the listing. You will have the conversation once you know exactly how it will go. You are not avoiding anything, you tell yourself. You are being thorough. But look at what certainty actually is. Certainty is a report about the future,

[6:34] and the future does not file reports. What you are waiting for cannot be delivered. So, the waiting has no natural end, and the research stage becomes a very comfortable room with excellent lighting where nothing is ever risked and nothing is ever finished. There is also a quiet tell. People who demand certainty before starting rarely demand it once they have started. The requirement evaporates the second you are moving, which is how you know it was never about information. Prerequisite three, you need to feel ready. This is the most expensive one because it inverts the actual order of events. You are waiting for a feeling of readiness

[7:09] to arrive so that you can begin. Readiness does not work that way. Readiness is manufactured on site. It is a byproduct of having already begun, which means you are standing at the door waiting for a package that only gets delivered on the other side of it. Think about the last thing in your life that

[7:24] you became genuinely comfortable doing. Driving, speaking another language, making a phone call you dreaded. You did not feel ready and then do it well. You did it badly while feeling terrible several times, and the feeling caught up afterward. Every single time, and yet here you are still waiting at the door. Prerequisite for you need a verdict on yourself first. This is the deepest one and the hardest to see because it is disguised as self-knowledge. Before you do the thing, you need to have settled the question of whether you are the kind of person who does the thing. Am I actually creative? Am I a leader? Or am

[8:02] I pretending? Do I have what it takes? And you will notice you never reach a verdict. You just hold court. You review old evidence, you cross-examine yourself, you adjourn, you reconvene at 2:00 in the morning. This is exactly the chronic self-analysis Campbell's work connected to low clarity, and here is the cruel loop inside it. The only thing that produces a clear picture of who you are is watching what you do. You are refusing to act until you know who you are, and you cannot know who you are until you act. You have locked the door and you are searching your own pockets for the key. So, how do

[8:38] you get out of this? Not by manufacturing the feeling. I want to be direct because this is where most advice fails you. You cannot talk yourself into confidence for the same reason you cannot warm yourself up by describing a fire in detail. The feeling is downstream. Every technique aimed at generating it first is aimed at the wrong end of the process, and that is

[8:59] also why willpower does not solve this. You are not lacking force. You are being asked to pay something you have decided you cannot afford. And now the part you are not going to enjoy. Most people who say they want confidence do not want it. They want permission. They want a moment where someone with authority looks at

[9:15] them and says, "Yes, you are allowed. You are qualified. Go ahead." That moment is not coming. Not from your boss, not from your parents, not from the person you are hoping will finally see it in you. Every year you spend waiting for someone to wave the entry fee is a year you are choosing not to

[9:34] pay it yourself. The fee is small. Waiting is what is expensive. Three practices, they are not complicated and they are not comfortable. Practice one, read the receipt. Take whatever you have been circling for months and finish this sentence out loud. I will do it once blank. Whatever fills that blank is your prerequisite and I want you to look straight at it. I will do it once I know it will work. I will do it once I feel more prepared. I will do it once someone tells me it is a good idea. Set out loud, most of these are visibly unpayable and that is the whole point of

[10:07] saying them out loud. You have been negotiating with a condition you never examined. Examine it. Practice two, act under prepared on purpose at a size where it does not matter. Not a leap, a size so small that the prerequisite becomes absurd. Send the email at 70%. Ask the question in the meeting without workshopping it first. Post the thing without the third revision. Order for yourself at the restaurant before asking what everyone else is getting. You are not trying to succeed at these. You are demonstrating to yourself that action is available without the payment and that the ceiling does not come down. Do it 10 times in a week and something shifts

[10:42] that no amount of reflection would have shifted. Practice three, stop asking who you are and start noticing what you did. Retire the internal trial. The question is not am I the kind of person who can do this? The question is, what would someone doing this do in the next 20 minutes and then you go do that. This is how clarity is built and it is the only way it is built. You learn who you are the same way everyone else learns who you are, by watching your behavior. A person who has run four times this month does not need to determine whether they are a runner. The question dissolved

[11:17] because it was always the wrong question and it was always answered by the legs rather than the courtroom. Here's what happens as this takes hold and it is stranger than people expect. You do not become louder. Most people do not even notice at first. What they notice is that something they used to be able to do no longer works. They cannot move you with a tone of voice. They cannot make you rewrite the idea by raising an

[11:40] eyebrow. You are not defiant about it. You are just not available because you are not waiting on them for anything. Some people find that genuinely unsettling and that is the nervousness the title promised you. It is not something you perform at anybody. It is what it looks like from the outside when somebody stops collecting permission and on the inside it is quieter than that. The entry fee drops

[12:03] toward nothing. You still feel the fear. Confidence never meant the absence of fear. It meant the fear stopped being a toll booth. You act while afraid early, imperfectly, and often. You get a clearer picture of yourself because for the first time you have footage. Joan Didion wrote an essay in 1961 called On Self-Respect and one line from it has outlasted almost everything else written on this subject. "Character," she wrote, "the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the

[12:34] source from which self-respect springs. Not the applause, not the certainty, not the feeling, the willingness to be the one who decides and the one who carries what follows. Everybody is waiting for something before they start living and the ones who look unshakable are simply the ones who stopped waiting first. So, tell me in the comments of the four prerequisites, which one is on your bill? Approval, certainty, the feeling of readiness, or the verdict on yourself. Be honest because the one you recognized fastest is usually the expensive one. And if you saw yourself in more than one, you are not broken and you are not behind. Nobody ever told us

[13:15] that the feeling comes second. We were all handed the sequence backwards. If this gave you something real today, hit like and send it to the person you know who has been standing at a the for a year with everything they need already in their hands. They may not know what they are waiting for until someone names it. Subscribe and turn on notifications so we can keep decoding the hidden mechanics of the mind together. Thank

[13:38] you for being here with Psych2Go. Goodbye and see you next time.

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