Becoming More Than Confident

Confidence and self-possession can look remarkably similar.

Both may appear as ease, certainty, independence, a willingness to speak plainly, or an apparent lack of concern about what other people think. But they are not the same thing.

That’s certainly part of it. But I think there’s something underneath that description worth examining.

Confidence has largely to do with what you believe you can do. It tends to develop through experience, competence, success, preparation, and evidence. I may be enormously confident in one area of my life and considerably less confident in another.

Self-possession seems to operate at a different level. It has less to do with how certain I am that I can succeed and more to do with where the final authority for evaluating my experience resides.

Confidence asks whether you believe you can win. Self-possession asks whether you get to decide what winning means.

When the room stops applauding

Two people can appear equally confident when everything is going well. Both may speak decisively. Both may command a room. Both may be charismatic, successful, and comfortable being watched.

Then the room stops applauding.

Someone disagrees. A joke doesn’t land. An audience loses interest. A colleague thinks you’re arrogant. Someone you respect doesn’t like your work. You fail publicly.

Suddenly, what looked like the same quality can reveal two very different things happening underneath.

One person becomes louder, more defensive, more performative. Perhaps he begins explaining himself. Perhaps he needs to restore the audience’s previous impression of him.

The other may be disappointed too. He may even become defensive for a while. But somewhere inside remains the possibility of saying:

“Well. That didn’t land.”

Or:

“Maybe they have a point.”

Or even:

“They think I’m arrogant. Maybe I was.”

None of these statements requires an identity emergency. That, to me, is closer to self-possession. It isn’t certainty about yourself. In some ways, it may require considerably less certainty.

Who gets the final say?

NLP describes a number of largely unconscious filtering mechanisms. One of them is called Frame of Reference. It refers to where we look for information when evaluating something, including ourselves.

Some people tend to evaluate themselves internally. They refer primarily to their own standards, judgments, and experience. Others look more externally. They notice feedback, reactions, expectations, social standards, and the judgments of other people.

Neither orientation is inherently better. Interestingly, someone can be exquisitely sensitive to external information without surrendering psychological authority to it.

Suppose someone says you came across as arrogant. One response is:

“Oh God. Did I? Do other people think that? I need to fix this.”

Another is:

“No, I didn’t. They’re wrong.”

But there is another possibility:

“Interesting. Let me think about that.”

And after thinking about it:

“Yes. They have a point.”

Or:

“No. I don’t think that fits.”

The external information was received. It was considered. It may even have changed the conclusion. But it did not automatically become the conclusion.

A useful sequence might be:

Internal → External → Internal.

1. Here’s what I think.
2. What information am I getting from the environment?
3. Having considered that information, what do I now think?

Self-possession doesn’t require refusing to look outside yourself. You can take other people’s perceptions seriously without granting them final jurisdiction.

The exhausting maintenance of identity

One of the things that makes external judgment so powerful is our investment in maintaining particular descriptions of ourselves.

I am intelligent. I am kind. I am competent. I am humble. I am a good person. I am self-possessed.

The more desperately I need any of those descriptions to remain uncontested, the more leverage another person acquires simply by suggesting otherwise.

Someone can say: “You’re being selfish.” Now I must prove I’m not. Another may say: “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Now I must establish my competence. A person says: “You’re arrogant.” Now I need to demonstrate my humility.

It becomes an exhausting maintenance project.

There is another possibility. Maybe I have been selfish. I’ve certainly been arrogant. I have unquestionably been foolish. I’ve been wrong more times than I could possibly count.

None of this requires me to construct an immaculate self-concept in response.

That doesn’t mean criticism should be ignored. Quite the opposite. When criticism is no longer experienced primarily as a threat to identity, it becomes easier to examine. You don’t have to maintain a spotless record of being the person you prefer to imagine yourself to be.

What are you willing to become to keep the room applauding?

There is another test of self-possession that interests me even more than what happens when approval disappears.

What are you willing to become to keep it?

I spent many years as an actor in Hollywood. Friends in the industry sometimes found me baffling. They believed I had the ability to be very successful in the entertainment industry, but I had remarkably little interest in doing many of the things they considered necessary to make that happen.

I wouldn’t “play the game.”

From their point of view, this could look almost like self-sabotage. And from within their criteria, perhaps it was. If the most important outcome is success in the industry, then refusing behaviors that increase the probability of that success is irrational.

But there was another cost in the equation that mattered to me.

I had to live with how I got there.

Once, a talent agent expressed an interest in representing me. He also expressed another kind of interest.

I declined.

As he handed my demo reel back to me, he said:

“Well, you certainly have a lot of integrity.”

I replied:

“Yes, and it’s certainly gotten me far in this business.”

I was joking, but I wasn’t kidding.

Integrity does not guarantee that things work out. Sometimes you refuse something and lose the opportunity. Sometimes somebody else is willing to do what you won’t do and gets the opportunity instead. Sometimes your friends think you’re insane because they can see what you’re giving up and cannot understand why you won’t make the necessary compromise.

That is what makes integrity meaningful. Integrity isn’t integrity because it gets rewarded. It matters precisely when there is something to gain by abandoning it.

There are two uncomfortable rooms. One disapproves of you because you won’t perform the role it expects. The other applauds because you did.

Sometimes the applause costs more than the disapproval.

Protecting your image isn’t protecting your integrity

This distinction matters because self-possession can easily be confused with indifference.

“I don’t care what anyone thinks.”

That can be self-possession. It can also be defensiveness, grandiosity, avoidance, or an extraordinarily efficient way of remaining ignorant.

Other people sometimes see things about us that we don’t. Their perceptions matter. But protecting an image and protecting integrity are two very different activities.

Protecting an image requires managing what other people believe about you. Protecting integrity requires managing what you are willing to do.

Protecting integrity can require the courage to be disliked.

Someone can say you are: Difficult. Uncooperative. Arrogant. Not a team player. Unambitious.

If preventing those interpretations becomes more important than remaining congruent with what you actually value, they have acquired considerable power over you.

Sometimes maintaining your integrity means allowing yourself to be misunderstood.

“Aren’t you going to show us what you can do?”

For a decade, I was also an instructor in a particular healing modality.

There was another instructor in the region who, in addition to teaching and demonstrating the techniques, would spend considerable time demonstrating their own abilities. Some of their students eventually took my training.

One of them asked me:

“Aren’t you going to show us what you can do, like so-and-so does?”

Of course I demonstrated the techniques. Demonstration is part of teaching. But I’ve always thought there is a point at which demonstrating what the teacher can do stops expanding the student’s sense of possibility and begins diminishing it.

At first, the student thinks, “I didn’t know that was possible.” That can be enormously useful. But if the emphasis remains on the exceptional abilities of the teacher, the conclusion can gradually become something else:

“I could never do that.”

“This isn’t about me,” I told them. “I’d rather show you how you can do it.”

And I meant it.

I believed they could.

I simply wasn’t interested in making my abilities the center of their learning.

The emphasis wasn’t: “Look what the teacher can do.” It was: “What might you discover that you can do?”

The moment students become fascinated primarily with the extraordinary person at the front of the room, I think something worth examining has happened.

Where is the flashlight pointing?

This may be one reason I have never been particularly comfortable with teachers who position themselves as gurus. Expertise is valuable. Surrendering your own innate sense of what is right to the expert is something else.

Years ago, I heard a story about a seeker who found a spiritual teacher he admired and asked to become his disciple. The teacher asked: “Are you willing to do everything I tell you without question?”

The seeker enthusiastically said yes.

The teacher responded: “Are you fucking stupid?”

I’ve always loved that story.

A teacher worthy of your attention should not require you to surrender the faculty with which you determine whether the teacher is worthy of your attention.

The purpose of teaching, as I understand it, is not to acquire someone else’s flashlight. It is to help them become better at using their own.

“7 Steps to Authenticity” aren’t

We have become remarkably good at turning ways of being into instructions for appearing to be that way.

Confident people maintain eye contact. Authentic leaders admit mistakes. Charismatic people use certain gestures. Emotionally intelligent people respond in particular ways. Self-possessed people are comfortable with silence.

Once a human quality is decomposed into observable behaviors, it becomes teachable, marketable, and imitable. But something important can disappear in the process.

Imagine someone who has learned that self-possessed people are comfortable with silence. So he deliberately remains silent.

One second… two… three…

Meanwhile he is intensely monitoring the other person:

Is this working? Do I look confident? Does she think I’m uncomfortable? Should I say something now?

He has successfully reproduced the behavior. He has not necessarily reproduced the psychological organization that naturally produces it.

The same thing can happen with authenticity. Someone learns that audiences respond positively to vulnerability, so he strategically reveals an imperfection in order to appear more authentic. Perhaps it works beautifully.

But the moment authenticity becomes primarily a strategy for influencing how other people perceive you, something rather important has happened to the authenticity.

We’ve become very good at describing the choreography of desirable human qualities. I’m more interested in what makes someone move that way without choreography.

A description of self-possession can be learned in seven steps. Self-possession cannot.

Self-possession isn’t perfection

There is a trap here. Once we have a description of self-possession, we can immediately turn it into another identity to maintain.

“I am a self-possessed person.” Wonderful. Now try becoming defensive. Or needy. Or embarrassingly concerned with whether somebody likes you.

Suddenly there is another problem: “How could I behave that way? I thought I was beyond this.” Now we’re protecting the identity of being self-possessed.

I know this one well.

Self-possession doesn’t prevent any of this. A person can become defensive, seek reassurance, lose his center, make an ass of himself, and discover afterward that he was considerably less self-possessed than he’d imagined.

The more interesting question is what happens when you notice.

Can I say: “Oh. Look what I was doing.” Can I laugh? Can I learn something? Or must I explain why what happened wasn’t really what happened because acknowledging it would threaten who I believe myself to be?

Embodiment does not mean perfection.

Things worth noticing

I have no interest in offering seven steps to self-possession. But there are some things worth becoming curious about.

After you speak, where do you look for the verdict? Which descriptions of yourself are particularly difficult to tolerate?

What happens when someone thinks you are selfish, foolish, arrogant, incompetent, difficult, or wrong? How much explaining do you do primarily to control another person’s representation of you?

Can you sincerely consider the possibility that they see something you don’t—and then ask:

What do I think now?

There is a great deal of advice about becoming more confident. Some of it is useful.

Develop competence. Accumulate experience. Take reasonable risks. Discover that you can survive failure. Build evidence that you are capable of doing things you once doubted you could do.

But self-possession seems to ask something different of us.

It asks whether we can remain the subject of our own experience while other people are having experiences of us. Whether criticism can be useful without becoming a verdict. Whether approval can be pleasurable without becoming necessary.

Whether we can want to be understood without requiring everyone to understand us. Whether we can discover that we were wrong without discovering that we are “nothing.” Whether we can lose an opportunity without automatically concluding that we should have become whatever the opportunity required.

And whether, when we inevitably lose our center for a while—as all of us do—we recognize what happened.

Perhaps self-possession isn’t finally arriving at an unshakable conviction about who you are.

Perhaps it is something quieter.

Becoming sufficiently at home in yourself that other people’s perceptions can inform you without defining you, approval can please you without owning you, and losing your center doesn’t require pretending you never left.

Self-possession doesn’t mean never leaving home. It means knowing how to come back.