Where is Quiet Confidence These Days?

These days I feel like everyone is completely in your face about their confidence. Boasting about achievements, posting selfies, sharing stories of themselves and how great they are. Constantly.

It wasn’t until this last week that I had this question pop into my mind — What ever happened to quiet confidence?

First off, I’ll explain what I mean by quiet confidence as I think I made up the term when it came to my mind. Actually! I just googled it to check if I’m the genius behind this word combo, sadly I am not.

Here’s what google had as a definition: “Quiet confidence means that you believe in yourself 100% to the point where you know that success is the only option or outcome. In other words, you don’t talk about what you’re going to do, you let your actions and results speak for you.”

This is similar to how I defined it in my mind when the thought first came up, but more specifically — why does someone have to boast about it, wear a t-shirt saying “Boss Bitch” and verbalize (especially through instagram posts & stories) all their achievements? My first reaction to this is that they actually LACK confidence.

An example that has been hard for me to watch has been seeing one of my a younger family members (early 20s) move from a small town, to the city and how it changed her. She has always been confident, but never vocally until she moved here and became more active on social media. She’s a gorgeous girl and I knew things would change when she moved to Vancouver and surrounded herself with a new group of people.

Sure enough, she did, and she posts selfies with captions like “I wouldn’t like me either”…it makes my stomach turn in discomfort because…well, why?

The recent event that caused me to really have this moment of what the hell happened to being silent about your confidence, was when chatting with a good old friend of mine. I have known her for years, we used to spend a lot of time together in our late teens and early 20’s, partying, laughing, having a great time.

We grew apart naturally as I became quit the drinking scene and focussed on my career and she was still partying. There was no bad blood, we were just simply on different paths.

Fast forward a decade to about two years ago and she started reaching out to me. Pre Covid, we went for walks and talked about alignment, the universe, relationship, business, health…all sorts of topics that I really enjoy bantering on about. She was still smoking weed constantly as we hung out, but she was keen to move forward with her life, work hard and build a successful business. I loved feeling like I could help her with that.

Being someone who has had a business of my own for 9 years, she came to me for guidance and I was happy to help. I spent many hours listening to her, providing her with tips, talking her through all the ideas she had, assisting her with her emotions, mindset and goals while she doubted and questioned herself.

It wasn’t until recently that I felt a tension build in me when she would reach out, because I realized how one sided our conversations have been. She would call me, I would listen for hours, provide her with info, build her up and then at the end of the chat when you can feel it winding down or when we’re about to have to hand up, she always asks: “so whats new with you?” but theres really no time left for that.

There have been times, don’t get me wrong, where I get my word in, but it always seems to make it back to her talking about her, rambling on and on. Now where am I going with this you might ask? Is this just my rant? Am I just annoyed at a friend? No. This goes bigger than that.

I’ve had a lot going on lately, and my tank was teetering on empty. For once, I really felt that I needed the reciprocative support if I was to talk to her, or just to spend some time alone, as an introvert — thats how I recharge. So, at first thats what I chose, because I wasn’t confident I would get the undivided attention I needed from her, based on our conversation track record.

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Fast forward to a few days ago, I was having a really rough morning. I was struggling with some relationship issues, work overwhelm and was really drained. I thought, hey, maybe I’ll call her up, she might have some good advice and we can bounce ideas off each other, banter about relationship stuff. A good chat always made me feel better, and I decided to give it a chance with her again.

I texted first and she said she didn’t have much time to chat but was free, I called anyway because I was kind of testing the waters anyway to see if she was capable of listening to me so the time limit was kind of ideal in case she went off on a tangent about herself again.

I was really awkward about it to be honest, since I wasn’t used to talking about me, but I tried. I wish I had better prepared, because I felt that I sounded really small in this convo, but I essentially explained I was having a tough morning and asked if she would hear me out.

To give a little more back story here, she had recently starting a life coaching business, which I was aware of and very excited for her to pursue. As I always am with my friends positive endeavours, and as friends should be. I also knew she was quite the “boundaries” gal, so I sort of expected what happened next, but not to this extent.

She was very reluctant to share any info at all or delve into detail with me with her advice and clearly stated something along the lines of “I reeaallly want to help you, and I know that I can, based on what you’re saying, I have some simple tips that will really help you, but I’m drawing a boundary here and if you want to book a consult with me for Tuesday, I can get you in, but its filling up, so you’ll need to let me know today.”

I completely respect her business, 100%. And as much as I kind of expected this comment, I wasn’t prepared to answer it, so I agreed and said “Oh absolutely! Let’s book a consult and then I can see what your coaching style is like too because I’d love to refer you business.” It came through awkward and maybe gritted teeth.

She was thrilled about the business referral and inside I was thoroughly un-thrilled about the idea of a friend who I had coached for the last two years, with free, valuable information on building confidence and launching a business had full on just pitched me. I felt super small. Yet, it got worse.

She continued to talk down to me about what I was “going through” and telling me, out loud, multiple times (yes, more than one time) how great she is at what she goes and how much she will be able to help me.

“Like, I’m really good.”

I am certain the context of this article makes me sound jealous and like I’m throwing shade, but thats definitely not what I want to portray here. What I want to portray is that some confidence, in my opinion, should be left quiet. Silent. To yourself. Inside.

Saying it out loud actually deters me, makes my stomach turn and makes me kind of cringe. I mean, unless its in a joking way, or unless you’re like…Michael Jordan. But, otherwise I miss the days where you meet someone and you can feel their confidence.

They simply exude it.

It’s attractive. They just have that little je ne sais quoi and you are kinda intimidated, but also want more of them because who doesn’t look up to someone with confidence? It’s inspiring. It’s attractive.

Nowadays, it just feels like the world is breeding narcissists, with all this cult like behaviour boasting about yourself, with all the social media, with all the bad b*tch swag.

I’m ALL FOR confidence. Everyone deserves to be confident, everyone should love themselves as they are and should rock it. However, I’m really over the constant boasting. In my opinion, it looks like the opposite of confident, it makes you sound like you have to say it out loud to make people believe it, because you don’t believe it yourself. It’s insecurity at it’s finest.

So my hope for humanity is that when it comes to confidence, build it from the inside, we will know it’s there. I promise.