Competence leads to confidence, but not vice versa.

OverconfidenceThe self-help and business section of any good bookshop will offer a wealth of advice as to how you can improve your confidence, the narrative will suggest that confidence will lead to success not only in your career but in life.

However, there is a subtle and important distinction to be made.  Although you can appear confident, it doesn’t mean you are competent. Confidence is a feeling of self-assurance arising from an appreciation of your own abilities or qualities. It’s a belief in your ability to succeed, it doesn’t mean you will or strangely enough even notice that you haven’t.

Confidence does not make you any more likely to be right than a person lacking in confidence.

The Confident student

When I was studying I remember meeting a colleague after work for a drink. We had agreed to get together when the examination results were out from our first year. The individual concerned was a very confident person, he displayed this in his body language, loudness and use of language. The truth is I had just about scraped through the exam with a mark only 5% above what was needed. As the evening went on I listened quietly, impressed by his grasp of the subjects we had studied and how well he was doing at work. I didn’t particularly want to get onto the topic, but just before the evening ended I plucked up the courage to ask, how he had done? He then said, he had failed the exam, but went on to add that he thought this was a very good result given that he hadn’t tried very hard, largely due to the responsibility of his day job. The odd thing was I remember nodding in agreement, impressed he had done so well. “How about you”, he said, “oh I managed to pass but only just” I replied. In fairness I think he complimented me.

It was only driving home in the car that I realised that I had past and he had failed, odd isn’t it what confidence can do.

Confidence bias

How was my friend able to remain so confident even though he had failed? Well phycologists have a word for this, it’s called confidence or confirmation bias. In effect you ignore or delete evidence that does not fit with your existing beliefs. There is in fact a lot of it about, you may not be surprised that it’s more common in men than women and it tends to be age related. This is the reason that a 20-year-old will base-jump of a mountain with no more than a wingsuit to keep them in the air, but a 50 year would probably think it too risky. The 20 year is so confident they won’t die, they will delete the statistics that say they might.

And it gets worse, the Dunni ng-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein people of low ability suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their cognitive ability as greater than it is. There is a great story here of a bank robber who covered himself in lemon juice thinking he was invisible, unfortunately he was wrong and got caught.

“The only thing I know is that I don’t know anything.”


Confidence should be earned not learned

Its very easy as a student to be intimidated by others who appear to know more. The truth is it doesn’t matter what other people know, only what you do. The danger is you begin to judge your own performance by that of others, and if its not as good it can impact on how hard you work, learn and study, worse still it lowers your self esteem.

Confidence comes from the little successes you have, keep thinking about them even when the studying gets harder and others appear to be doing better. After all they may be suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect, they just don’t know they are.