Confidence

As a professional, you should project confidence in order to signal that you can be trusted to get a job done well. However, the line between confidence and arrogance is very thin, and if that line is crossed, instead of people trusting us, they will come to dislike us, regardless of our ability.

It is very easy for someone to be confused as to whether they are dealing with someone who is confident, or arrogant. For example, if you were to meet a professional athlete who just won an Olympic gold medal in the 100-meter dash, it may be very difficult to figure out if you were talking to someone who was confident in their ability to win races, or someone who was arrogant because they thought they were superior to everyone else.

The conundrum of wanting to project confidence while also not being perceived as arrogant is one that can plague even seasoned professionals throughout their entire career. The solution to this conundrum, however, has been well known for thousands of years, and is simplicity itself: be humble, even if you have a good reason not to be.

Projecting confidence while being humble is often called, "Quiet confidence," as instead of telling people how good you are, you simply let your accomplishments speak for themselves.

Returning to our previous example, let's say that you were the professional athlete who had just won a gold medal. At a celebration commemorating your victory, you could walk around with your medal around your neck, and every time you met someone you could hold up your medal and say, "Hi, I just won this, so I'm the fastest person on the planet - just thought you should know." While this is definitely true, and while you would be justified in making this statement, saying this would be incredibly off-putting. The fact is, everyone already knows your accomplishment, and there is no reason to remind everyone of something they already know. Instead, it would be better to be humble, never bring up your victory, and let your accomplishment speak for itself.

This implies that you should maintain a proportional relationship between your accomplishments and humility: in that the greater your accomplishments, the more humble you should be.

What then should be your approach if you do not have an accomplishment as grand as winning an Olympic gold medal? If we consider accomplishment and humility as having a proportional relationship, then that would mean that the less accomplished you are, the less humble you should be.

This approach is often captured in the phrase, "Fake it until you make it," which indicates that when you have no accomplishments, you should project confidence as if you do. The advice to "Fake it until you make it," is most often given to people at the very start of their careers, when they are trying to land their first job.

If we consider someone fresh out of college at a job fair, trying to get an interview, as they go from booth to booth handing out their resume, being humble may not help them land a job. Instead, they should project confidence by amplifying whatever accomplishments they do have - no matter how small. In the context of a job fair for soon-to-be-college graduates, it is expected that students tout their GPA and extracurricular activities, as these are often the only accomplishments they have.

Assuming they do get an interview, they should continue to project confidence that they can do the job no matter what it is, and if they don't know how to do something, they will learn. They should show enthusiasm, capability, and trustworthiness, so that people give them a chance to show what they are made of.

If we were to take this same person, however, and fast-forward 40 years, after they had a long career of successes, there would be no need to shove their achievements in people's faces, as people should already know what they have achieved, and if they don't, they most likely would eventually find out.

The skill of projecting professional confidence is being mindful of your accomplishments, knowing when to stop beating your own drum, and trusting that people already know how good you are. This is how we can grow into accomplished professionals, with all of the recognition and accolades appropriate for our achievements, while still not being considered arrogant.

If you happen to be a very seasoned professional, with a high level of specialized expertise, to help prevent your confidence overflowing into arrogance, it's helpful to reflect on the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is the phenomenon whereby the less you know about something, the more you think you know; as well as the more you know about something, the less you think you know.

For example, if you are a new homeowner, the less you know about plumbing, the easier you might think it is to replace all the pipes in your home. An expert plumber, on the other hand, knows everything that could go wrong in a whole-home pipe replacement project, which would lead them to approach the work with a lot more humility.

Whenever we are feeling extremely confident, we should ask ourselves, "Am I caught up in the Dunning-Kruger effect? Do I feel confident because of how much I know, or because of how little I know?"

For example, if you are an expert neurosurgeon, and are asked a question about the physiology of the brain, you can be fairly certain that you do know what you are talking about. If, however, you were asked a psychological question, it would be wise to pause and question the relevancy of your expertise in answering the question, as no matter how accomplished a neurosurgeon you may be - you are not a psychologist, and should instead defer to professional psychologists for matters of psychology. Often, a moment of self-doubt is all we need to make sure that we stay in the realm of confidence, and don't cross over into arrogance.

If ever you find yourself tempted not to be humble, and instead recite your resume, list your credentials, or boast about your accomplishments; ask yourself if you are willing to run the risk of alienating others with excessive self-promotion. Provided you want to be a professional who is both respected and well-liked, you should always lean towards humility, as it is much better to be known as someone who is too humble than to be known as someone who is too arrogant.