The more I open my eyes to it, I see how confidence is starting to become something that people have to hide, especially college-age people. It's becoming rude to be confident about your abilities, looks, success, etc., and it's commonly being confused for cockiness or arrogance.
While I would agree with anyone who says that cockiness and arrogance are both terribly unattractive qualities, I would also argue that the majority of the people who are considered arrogant are just confident in themselves. If someone is confident in him or herself, why would we condemn him or her for it? Let's review example situations that I have experienced where confident individuals were told that they were wrong to be confident.
Modesty is "the quality of not being too proud or confident about yourself or your abilities," or not wanting to toot your own horn when you think it should be tooted. In some respects, I can understand why an individual would want to be modest, for fear of coming off arrogant. But when does the line need to be drawn? When do we stop fearing what other people think of us when we know that we deserve to feel a certain way about ourselves? Here are two examples that I've encountered where people did not want others to feel confident about themselves.
Example 1: I am proud to say that I lost a considerable amount of weight. I did it the right way and was overall better off in how I was living my life. I adapted to the new lifestyle I wanted for myself. Was there praise for me? Sure, there was. Lots of people were very supportive of all the weight I've lost and the great progress I've made. But after a while, the support fizzled out. I was continuing to better myself, and I was more and more proud about it because I was doing it just for me and no one else. Why wouldn't I be proud? I am a naturally confident woman, and I don't see a problem with being proud and confident in the accomplishments I've made. And yet, the more progress that was made, the more the not-so-nice comments started to flow.
"Oh, you turned 21? All that weight will come flooding back. Guaranteed." was my favorite comment that was made. People were assuming to know me well enough to tell me that everything I worked so hard for was just going to fly out of the window because I aged an extra year. No matter how hard I would try to convince the naysayers, they just kept the negativity flowing, which started to discourage me, and I felt less proud and even less confident. I have no idea why those people had such an impact on me because they had nothing to do with my success. Why, all of a sudden, was I going to let them have an impact now? So, I completely ignored those individuals from that point on and assured myself that I would never be ashamed to be confident in my lifestyle change ever again.
Example 2: One of my friends at school was working ridiculously hard all year to get straight A's, and she accomplished this goal for both semesters. Everyone congratulated her for the first semester that it happened. When she set on the same path for the following semester, everyone who congratulated her were starting to chastise her for how hard she was studying, how she never came out anymore, and how she needed to re-prioritize. That last one was the biggest pain in my butt to hear. She let the incessant badgering from her "friends" get to her and she put her studies aside, she put something aside that she was proud of that she was doing because other people told her she shouldn't be confident or proud of it. Her test scores started to fall, not so dramatically to where she couldn't make a good recovery but the fact that it even happened was the biggest disappointment to herself. She saw her grades suffering and realized that those who were telling her that she should be changing who she was weren't the ones who had to deal with the poor grades. She put them aside and picked up her notebook once again. She was confident in her abilities to study and work hard, and she wasn't going to allow anyone to take that away from her any longer.
So, here we are, two different situations with the same common denominator. My friend and I both had our confidence stripped from us because we were told it wasn't right, we were told that it didn't matter how much success we had at the moment because we were going to fail in the future. My entire life I was always told to be confident in who I was and to be proud of what I was doing and accomplishing. Now that I've grown up, I'm seeing that those who are confident in themselves and their abilities are being chastised for it. How is that fair? I'll answer that, it's not.
If anything is taken away from this article, it would be to never allow anyone to take away your confidence. Whether it be in what you're wearing, how you're acting, what your hair looks like, how good your grades are, or anything else that you're confident about. You've earned that right to be confident and proud. No one has the power to take it away from you, unless you give it to them.
Embrace your confidence, love it, cherish it, and shoo away those who think you don't deserve it.
