Today I am going to talk about the difference between confidence and over confidence. This is a very interesting topic. We need to understand it carefully. There is a very thin line between both of these. Let’s first understand what confidence is.
As per Oxford dictionary, confidence is ‘the feeling that you can trust, believe in and be sure about the abilities or good qualities of somebody/something’. Basically, it is the trust or belief which you have in someone including yourself to do something.
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How Confidence gets build?
It gets build over a time, with multiple confirmation on something happening the same way again and again. For example, you started driving car in traffic, initially you will be scared and unconfident. You do it successfully first, you gain some experience, you do it successfully second time, you will gain more experience. You drive car in traffic multiple times, you will be fully confident to drive car in traffic any time. So this is how you developed it by doing same thing successfully multiple times. You kind of made it a habit to do something same way every time.
What is Over Confidence?
As the name says, when you are more confident on things/habits/actions than you should be, you are overconfident. Let’s understand from an example. Same car driving experience. So now you are confident to drive in traffic, but you now must drive in hilly area, and you still carry the same confidence, even though you never drove the car in hilly area, you have no idea about. Still, you are confident of driving, just because you have drove successfully drove in traffic. Now this becomes your overconfidence. Just because you have done something similar in past, will not guarantee success, if you are not doing any homework there.
You know driving, you know how-to drive-in traffic, but you don’t know how to drive on hills. If you go without any preparation on how to drive on hills, you are inviting troubles there. Another example may be, suppose you have been good academically. You have been scoring good every year. So, you think that for a particular exam I would not study just because I have been scoring good all the previous years and I can score good this year also, without studying. This means you are going to be in trouble for sure.
Difference in Confidence and Over Confidence
Difference is very small . Confidence is good but overconfidence deviates from the path and takes us in different direction. Also, should not feel low on confidence. Whenever such situation arises, just have a quick check. Just see whatever efforts/things/preparation needs to be done are there in place or not. If you are done with the adequate preparations, it is ok to be confident. But if it is not done and you still feel that things would be fine, then you are for sure, overconfident.
Low confidence can stop you to perform as per your capacity/talent. So it is not good. Over confidence can make you do blunders sometimes, so it is also not good. Have confidence with appropriate validations to make sure you are having right balance of things and are enjoying life fully. So next time ask yourself, are you confident or over-confident ?