The Two Kinds of Confidence

Whether employers are hiring employees, clients are choosing contractors or potential mates are sizing each other up for compatibility, everything boils down to confidence.

Employers want to know that they can trust the person they’re paying to get the job done.  Ditto for clients, who need to know they’re in good hands before they relinquish their future to someone they can’t control.

And regardless of your preference for certain body types and personality quirks, nothing gets one person’s pheromones crackling like sensing another person’s confidence.

I’m not talking about hubris, ego, showing off, commanding attention, “owning the room” or any other displays of wannabe alpha-domination meant to convince other people that you’re The Man.  (Or, depending on your chromosomes, The Woman.)

I’m talking about the two actual kinds of confidence.

There’s the confidence that comes from knowing what you’re talking about, and there’s the confidence that comes from being able to admit you have no idea what you’re talking about.  In theory, it’s important to be able to tell these two types apart, so employers, clients and mates don’t get hoodwinked by fast-talking charlatans.

But it isn’t.

Do You Know What I Know?

If you don’t know what you’re talking about but you’re trying to convince someone you do, you’re not going to appear confident in the first place.  You’re going to appear bombastic.  You’ll be overly jovial or subtly hostile.  You’ll act and speak in ways that obscure your lack of knowledge, and betray your own lack of faith in your ability to get the job done.

If you don’t know what you’re talking about but you do know how to learn, you’ll be confident in your ability to deliver an end result that will please your client even if you’re entering uncharted waters.  Because confidence doesn’t come from knowing the waters; it comes from knowing where to find a boat and a map.

You may not be an expert in a field, but you’re an expert at becoming an expert in a field.  Your confidence stems not from your ability to execute, but your ability to adapt and apply previous experience to new obstacles.

Either way, the client wins.  And the client knows it.  Which is why the client doesn’t need to know if you know what you’re talking about.

They just need to know if you can row.

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Photo by estherase, via Flickr.

Tags: Business, common sense, ethics, expert, Freelance, honesty, language, networking, perception, Sociology