People say that ‘confidence’ is valuing your own opinion on yourself more, than the opinion of others.
Right, but how does my own opinion matter?
This concept seems really stupid to me. You want to improve socially. How will you ever get somewhere, if you’ll listen to your own opinion of yourself (which could be wrong), and ignore the feedback from others?
Your value is literally determined by how others see you, because we live in a society. If you consider your own opinion only, you are being delusional (and rob yourself of all the valuable feedback.)
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Please challenge my thought process, I’m someone who wants to start valuing my opinion on myself more than the opinions of others.
4 comments
what other people think of us is the least important thing in life. They aint gonna be there when you go to bed and they aint gonna be there when you need them. You are what you believe of yourself. If you are a shadow of other people’s thoughts then you’ll always be just a puppet and you’ll never be free or truly grow beyond societal norms. You’ll only be average and normal. The human race needs constant growth, constant overcoming of our limits, dont be just part of what everyone else is, be more when you can if you want
There’s more to it than valuing your own opinion, and being open to new ideas is always a good thing. Even if you wind up rejecting them. An educated mind can entertain an idea without believing it to be fact, after all.
Now, let’s brush aside opinions like “pineapple belongs on pizza” for a moment. All the trivial stuff. And look at meaningful opinions, like “murder is bad”.
Your opinions on large topics are representative of your personal values. Be it opinions on gun laws, equality, child rearing, or what have you. An opinion of “murder is bad” reflects a value of “life has value”.
Stepping back a moment to something that’s more controversial than an opinion that’s basically fact in our society, let’s take a gander at an opinion with 2 sides; abortion.
The Pro-Life argument holds the opinion that abortion is wrong. They believe life begins at conception, and hold the value that every life is sacred.
The Pro-Choice arguments holds the opinion that bodily autonomy is paramount. They believe that a woman has the right to choose what happens with their body, and that there is some sort of line that needs to be crossed before the fetus is considered a life; usually a number of weeks or a heartbeat, but sometimes the idea that it’s not too late until the child has been born (or even after that point).
Your values make you, and they’re integral to aspects of your personality. “Someone who stands for nothing will fall for anything”, after all, and if you’re always at the mercy of the latest trend or outrage, are you really human at that point? Or just a wild, angry beast?
[The more self-esteem you have, the better your social relationships are. Following that, the better your social relationships are, the more confidence you have](https://linksharing.samsungcloud.com/gaUD9N0cTVlj)
Therefore, it matters very much how you see yourself.
I don’t think anyone is reasonably saying you should completely *disregard* people’s opinions. But your opinion is significant too, plus you have access to a lot of information about yourself that others don’t. And there are, like, a *lot* of different people in the world with all kinds of different perspectives, you can’t appease literally all of them.
The point of confidence is not the belief that someone’s opinion of you is meaningless, certainly it’s valuable feedback that you can use going forward. But it’s not the ultimate truth either, and your happiness/success/capacity for being valuable to the world is not predicated on each and every person’s view of you. You can believe in your resilience and ability to improve and get past the effects of someone’s negative opinion. Have the knowledge that maybe this person thinks this part of you is bad, but there are also other parts that are good, and this doesn’t make you worthless.
To see yourself clearly, you should see the negatives *and* the positives, and have the ability to discern whether someone’s opinion of you *does* matter, whether it’s based in facts or just their biases, what is of value that you can take from it, etc. For that you need to trust your judgement and capacities and have a certain level of self-assuredness. I think that’s what constitutes confidence, just thinking you’re the shit is merely conceit.
Edit: Actually saw an article the other day saying that the form of confidence that makes you appealing in social interactions is not the kind where you believe it’ll definitely go amazingly and everyone will love you, it’s the kind where you believe that you’ll be fine even if it doesn’t go that well. This also helps put others at ease around you. And I mean you’re right that we live in a society and ultimately perceptions do matter, but every individual doesn’t have that big an impact, and every individual *interaction* certainly doesn’t have to go well for you to be seen positively on the whole.