The Professional's Opinion

Confidence

Recently I got to thinking about confident people and how we perceive them. These people who always seem to have everything together, who know exactly who they are, who never seem to encounter anything that gives them pause. These are the people that we tend to admire. We want to be them.

Well, my dears, I am here to tell you that most of those people are charlatans.

Convincing others of your deserved self confidence is a full time job and it's exhausting. You plebs think, 'wouldn't it be nice to be those people'? Well, I guarantee you if you could switch places with them you'd be quite surprised to discover that their lives are not all they seem to be. Are a lot of these folks truly confident people? Of course they are. But this doesn't mean that they are impenetrable fortresses. Confident people have their struggles too.

We treat confident people differently. We don't offer them as much help, as they tend not to ask for it. We don't ask them if they are alright, because they always seem to be doing just fine. We resent them for their certainty and poise and direct our caring towards the people who's lives are an obvious mess of sadness and drama. People who's lives seem less together than our own are the ones who we focus on as 'needing help'. It's why I feel like literally every person I've ever met is in need of my sage advice.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and confident people tend not to squeak. We see them as self sufficient machines with zero emotional needs. But even machines that are operating at top efficiency need to be maintained regularly. You can't just ignore people until they run dry and break down. Yes, many of us can certainly perform a lot of our own upkeep, but we have hard to reach spots. Spots we need others to lubricate for us. Some of us are less flexible than others and need more help with these places. Just make sure that your help is consensual before you start slathering it on.

Anyways, lets skip the lube and go back to the emotionless machine metaphor. Just because someone keeps their emotions in check doesn't mean that they don't have them. In fact, 'in check' mostly means 'bottled up inside and will eventually explode'. Emotionless people exist, sure; probably in an asylum somewhere, or they are off biding their time before they become the next great serial killer. Either way, they are certainly not well balanced individuals.

While confident people are far less demanding on others, self sufficiency still leaves room for emotional support from the outside. No one gets through life without at least a little help from others. Assuming that these people don't need anything often times leads to them feeling lonely and isolated. Of course you'll never know that because they are so confident and have so many friends, right?

So, check on your confident friends. They are highly unlikely to admit to you that they need someone to do this, so you'll just need to take the initiative and do it on your own. Don't intrude upon them, just make sure that they don't need anything. They might even lie to you and tell you that they are fine. That's alright. Don't push the issue. Just the fact that you inquired about their well being was likely enough.

How do I know? Let's just say that I know and leave it at that, shall we?

(And that was just a clever segue, don't ever skip the lube.)