Episode 158 - Overconfidence and Underconfidence
Learn how to effectively navigate new challenges by accurately evaluating your skill set. Join us in this episode as we delve into identifying the signs of overconfidence and underconfidence, paving the way for cultivating a balanced and grounded confidence essential for continuous personal growth. Tune in to gain valuable insights and actionable tips for achieving your goals with calm assurance.
Topics
Overconfidence, Underconfidence, and Impostor Syndrome.
The tendency to oscillate between overconfidence and underconfidence.
The potential roots of overconfidence and underconfidence in childhood experiences and perceptions of competence.
Taking responsibility for inadequacy and acknowledging gaps in skill sets.
Links
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Resources:
Transcript
[AUTO-GENERATED]
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:00:06]:
Welcome to the Self Growth Nerds podcast. I'm your host, Marie, a courage coach, creative soul, and adventure seeker. Since thru hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in 2019, I'm on a mission to help you embrace your most confident self so you can achieve your dreams too. If you're eager for deep conversations, big questions, and meaningful connections, join me on the quest to discovering how we can create a more magical and memorable life. Hello, nerds. How are you? I'm doing good. To be honest, I woke up feeling anxious for no specific reason. It's just, my internal weather today.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:00:51]:
It's funny because when I woke up, I was feeling anxious about something specific, and then I started making my coffee. And while I was making my coffee, I forgot what it was I was meant to feel anxious about. So then I just sat there trying to remember, and I laughed at myself because if I have to remember what it was I was feeling anxious about, then it must not be that important. Right? Before we jump into today's topic, I wanna share a few thoughts about anxiety. I'm sure some of you out there need need to hear this, need to be reminded of this. I read a a a great book by Shiva Razi. She's the founder and director of the Center For Anxiety and OCD in Irvine, California, and I love the way she talks about anxiety. She says we all have a a lighthouse scanning for danger, But when we feel anxiety, it's like the lighthouse is hyperactive.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:01:49]:
That light just turns and turns certain that there is danger, looking for anything that could be dangerous. And when you find something to focus on and you start thinking and thinking and thinking about it and trying to fix it and trying to make you yourself feel better, what you're doing is basically confirming to anxiety that it was right. You're giving power to your anxiety. Instead, what she she suggests is to increase your willingness to just sit with the anxiety and let it pass pass all on its own. Because at the end of the day, it's a physical sensation. It's a vibration in your body. It's an emotion, and emotion is energy in motion. It's going to move through you.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:02:36]:
And can you just sit and wait till it passes just like a storm? The more you do that, the more you train your brain, the perceived threat that your anxiety chose to focus on and is trying to protect you from is not important, and it's not intolerable. That it's nothing that you actually need to worry about for real. Shiva says that when her clients start to recover, what she notices is that they start talking less about the content of their anxiety, what is making them feel anxious, and they start to describe instead that the feeling of the brain looking for something to focus on, that light searching, searching, and them not biting anymore, not playing the game anymore, being able to just watch as it happens within them. So healing when it comes to anxiety is not the absence of anxiety, but it's changing the way you relate to it. Being able to tell yourself, I see you, brain. I see what you're trying to do. It's okay. It's okay.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:03:46]:
We can just do our best to keep going with our day and let anxiety come along for the ride without giving it too much power. It's just sitting there. We're driving the car. It's just sitting in the passenger seat. But that's a practice. I say it as if it's easy. It's not easy. It's simple, but it's not easy.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:04:05]:
So today, anxiety is gonna be sitting next to me as I tell you about overconfidence and underconfidence. This episode was inspired by Africa Brooks' episode of the beyond the self podcast called what if your imposter syndrome is leading to an uncomfortable Growth. If you resonate with the topic of today's episode, I strongly suggest going to listen to hers as well. We're gonna add a link to it, in the show notes. And if you wanna access the show notes, it's self Growth nerds.com/podcast. On that page, by the way, you can also download the podcast guide that my assistant friends put together. It's all the best episodes divided into categories. That's if you're a bit overwhelmed by the, 150 plus episodes that we have.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:04:59]:
So I wanna start with a little story from back in the days when I was a new coach. I was just starting out, and I didn't know how to navigate in this new world. And I was told by other more experienced coaches, you should charge x amount of dollars for your services. And I listened to them. I felt some form of what I thought was impostor syndrome about that, but I was told it was a mindset issue that I needed to work on. I just needed to be more confident, to be more courageous, and go for it. When when I look back, it was actually me knowing deep down that I did not have the skill set to provide that kind of value to my clients yet. And it was not impostor syndrome, it was me feeling out of integrity.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:05:53]:
There's a super interesting cognitive bias called the Dunning Kruger effect. Wikipedia tells us that that's when, quote, people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. Some researchers also include the opposite effect for high performers, their tendency to underestimate their skills, end quote. It was not that I was not good at what I did. I actually stood out in my coaching classes and was given amazing feedback, but I was good for where I was at. But part of me felt entitled to charging the same amount as a coach with a few years experience. And I would often go from that overconfidence straight to underconfidence in, like, the same day, watching a video of a coach with 15 years of experience, for example, and feeling desperate when I compared myself to them, expecting myself to be as good as they were even though I was a beginner. Now why do we do this? There are multiple theories in academic literature.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:07:01]:
The original one that not everyone agrees on is that part of learning a skill is learning what is a good performance versus a bad one. You just can't tell in the beginning. If I go on a construction site, for example, and I look at people building foundations, I would be completely unable to know if they are doing it well or not. That would be part of learning the skill. The other reasons why I think we do this, and but keep in mind, I'm not a researcher, but from what I've read, my 2 personal hypotheses are as follows. The first one is if you tend to think positively of yourself because you grew up being told your ugly drawings were beautiful, that you were super smart, that you were super talented, that you could do anything that you want, then you'll be more likely to think you're good at something. You'll be also more likely to feel entitled to get what you want. Same goes if you tend to think negatively of yourself because you grew up with critical parents or teachers, you'll be more likely to think you're bad at something.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:08:11]:
And if you were never given what you needed, then you'll be more likely to think you don't deserve to have what you desire or that you actually need to work really, really, really, really hard for it. But both assessments are not rooted in objective reality. The second reason why I think we lean towards overconfidence or underconfidence is that we are very quick to associate incompetence to shame. Somewhere along the way, we started to believe that we should be good at at something right away. Otherwise, it just means it's not for us. But incompetence is just a necessary part of the journey when you're learning something new. Incompetence just means that you have not mastered the skills needed to do something successfully yet. And because we're so desperate not to seem incompetent, some people might pretend that they are better than they actually are to protect themselves from the from the shame.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:09:07]:
That's overconfidence, whereas some people are gonna choose to lean into the shame and say, oh, I know I'm really bad at it and feel bad about themselves, about their worth as human beings. Many people are even going to prefer not trying anything new to, to avoid that feeling altogether, and that's underconfidence. Let's look at 3 examples, and and then we're gonna talk about what the solution is, what we want to aim for instead that's way more sustainable. Example number 1, let's say you go on a bunch of dates with interesting people and no one wants to go on a 2nd date with you. You could tell yourself, oh, well, I'm perfect as I am, and it's their loss for not seeing it. They don't deserve me. Or you could go all the way to the other side and say something is deeply wrong with me, and I will never find anyone. Both are unhelpful extremes because they keep you from reflecting and growing.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:10:11]:
Example number 2. Let's say you're a new painter and you decide to charge $2,000 for a painting because you have always been told you were an amazing artist since you were 3 years old, But no one wants to buy your painting. You might think, oh well, I just haven't found the right clients yet, or people don't understand my art, when the reality is that there is an inconsistency between the price and your skill set or your reputation. On the other hand, it's not necessarily better to charge $50 for it or to give it away for free because then you're undervaluing your work, your time, your energy, and the value that you can bring when someone's going to hang the painting in their living room. Example number 3, let's say you're jealous of someone who has written a book, something you've always dreamed of doing. You might decide to think, well, I know I could do it better than them, but I have kids. I don't have the time. It's easy for them.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:11:17]:
They don't have kids. They have all the time in the world. That would be overconfidence mixed with a little bit of self righteousness or self pity, and you'd be doing yourself a disservice. Your overconfidence keeps you from doing it imperfectly. You have such a high view of what you think you're capable of that you prefer doing nothing than risking writing an average book that doesn't really take off. Whereas under confidence in this scenario would be thinking something like they are so good at everything, and I fail at everything that I try. Okay. So these were my 3 examples.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:11:57]:
Now we're gonna go through them again talking about the solution. The solution is death of the ego. That sounds very intense, but bear with me. You you will understand what I mean. Let's go back to the dating example. You've been going on a bunch of dates and, no one wants to go on a 2nd date with you. Death of the ego here means removing the idea of right versus wrong and just being curious about what might be going on. Just like a scientist in a lab who's trying to, to get to a certain result, if they don't manage to get to that result, they're gonna try and problem solve instead of giving up or blaming someone else.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:12:44]:
So let's get curious. What could be happening? Maybe people are not interested because you spent the whole day talking and not asking questions. Maybe they're not interested because you complain a lot. You have a negative attitude, and they don't wanna be around that. Sometimes I notice that people have very high standards for the kind of people they want to date, but they don't hold themselves to those same standards. You can't have expectations for someone else if you don't meet those same expectations yourself. It makes me think of a profile I saw on Bumble. This guy wrote at the very top, he said, I feel like there's no more good women out there.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:13:26]:
Prove me wrong. He is so convinced that he deserves to be with a good woman, but what if the fact that he writes that is exactly what's going to keep those so called good women away? There's this messaging in the world of personal growth and self care and well-being that you're perfect as you are, that you shouldn't change, that you should just be authentic and let the the right people find you. And, obviously, there there's some good to that messaging, but I also think it can keep us from looking at ourselves in the mirror and being honest about what we could improve, not in a self flagellating way, just in a matter of fact way. Let's take the example of the the new painter who's trying to put a price on on their painting. They can sit down and consider different factors like their skill set, their their, reputation in the industry, if they have contacts, who their potential clients are, the, the size of their paintings, whatever makes sense. Right? It's not like there's a right or wrong way to approach this. A new painter that is in a small community is not going to price their painting the same way that a new painter in New York who's selling to, lawyers would. What we want is to make decisions that are informed by logic more than by how you feel about yourself in the moment.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:15:04]:
Let's go back to the example of the the person who dreams of writing a book, but they have kids and they don't have a lot of time. They can be honest about that. Okay. Here's what I wanna do. Here's the amount of time that I have in a given week. I could write maybe I could sit down and write maybe 2 hours every week, And on my drive to and from work, I could listen to a podcast about writing. I have no idea what's gonna come from this, but I'm gonna do my best, and we're gonna see what happens. Can you notice the difference? How there's so much less drama? How we're much more grounded? That's what we want to aim for, not overconfidence and underconfidence, but a calm and grounded kind of confidence, an acceptance of what is versus a kind of desperation and a need to fill a hole or to be loved or to prove something.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:16:01]:
If I go back to my own personal story, I remember moments with my coach telling her that I felt like I was not good enough. I was not good enough to get my clients 10 out of 10 results. And she said, no. You're not good enough yet. It makes sense. You're starting out. You're not at the same place that a coach with 15 years of experience would be. Maybe you cannot get your clients to 10, but you can get them to 5.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:16:35]:
Then you've just got to be honest about that. Here's my skill set. I can get you from 0 to 5. If you wanna work with someone who can get you all the way to 10, then that's not me. You can you can go find someone else. That is calm, grounded confidence. You're not trying to pretend that you're further along on the journey that that you are, and you're also not undervaluing what you can actually do and the value you can actually provide. One last example.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:17:08]:
Let's say you recorded a music album and no one bought it or not much people listened to it. You decide, I'm gonna stop. I'm just not good enough at this. That's true. You're not good enough yet. But in order to get better, you will need to be willing to do it poorly repeatedly. You will need to throw spaghetti at the wall. You will need to, write blog posts and record podcasts that no one reads or that no one listens to or that just 2 or 3 people, care about, you'll need to do that again and again and again.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:17:45]:
You'll need to mess it up in order to strengthen your skill set. There's no shortcut. There's no way to get to the top without climbing the mountain. Africa Brook in her podcast says you've got to take responsibility for your own inadequacy, and I love that. It's not shameful to be inadequate when you're doing something new, when you're doing something for the first time. It just makes sense. You can tell yourself instead of, oh, I'm not good enough, you can tell yourself, I'm not quite there yet. My skill set does not match up with where I want to be, with where I aim to be.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:18:29]:
I'm working on it. It's not negative. It's calm, grounded confidence. Okay. That's it for this week. It was a short one. I hope it was helpful for you. If you wanna work with me on your calm, grounded confidence so that you start making real progress, You can book a discovery call with me at self growth nerds.com/audacity.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:18:54]:
We're gonna talk about where what you want to accomplish in your life, where you are, what's getting in your way, what are the blind spots that need to be addressed. I'll let you know more about what my services are, how I work with my clients, and then you get to decide what you wanna do moving forward. Okay? I, really look forward to getting to know you, and, otherwise, I wish you a wonderful week. Bye, everyone. Hey. If you love what you're hearing on the Self Girl Nerds podcast and you want individual help finding a new direction for your life and developing the courage to make your dreams a reality, you have to check out how we can work together nerds.com or message me on Instagram at self growth nerds. My clients say they would have needed that support years ago. So if you're tired of feeling like you're wasting your life, don't wait.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:19:56]:
Get in touch now, and I cannot wait to meet you.