First of all, shout out to you! You’re here, reading this, because you’re a bad-ass and you know it. You are confident and you’ve come to recognize that it makes other people uncomfortable. Why is it that confidence bothers people? Are they not self-validated? Do they envy you? Do they wish they had half of the confidence you exude? Or are they just haters? If you find yourself in a weird space where you feel sorry for your accomplishments, the self-love you give yourself, and the growth that you’ve experienced, please stop! Your job is NOT to make people feel comfortable with the things that you have worked so hard to achieve or the person you’ve worked so hard to become! Apologizing for your confidence is unknowingly putting a target on your back to be put down by other people or receive unsolicited advice. Yes, people are judgmental as hell, but you have to be so self-validated with who you are, whose you are, and what you offer that their opinion cannot shake you!
Think about all of the times you proudly told someone about your latest accomplishment and it went from being a genuine conversation to a competitive dialogue. Think about the last time you proudly announced an accomplishment and someone made a passive-aggressive statement with the intentions of lessening your accomplishment. Think about a time when someone simply tried to diminish you for just being who you are, all in the name of making themselves feel comfortable and/or bigger around you. People do this because they see you as the giant, that you need to see yourself as, and when you enter their presence they feel little. NOT BECAUSE OF ANYTHING YOU’VE DONE, simply because of their own insecurities.
Being openly confident can easily reveal who will be happy about your wins and who secretly rejoices your losses. Peep game and get rid of the latter, real talk! The last thing you need in your life are toxic people who don’t want to see you succeed or who see your success as competition.
Toxic people: Never let things go, can’t move forward, bully, intimidate, lie, create drama, play the victim, and act out of fear and insecurity.
Apologizing for your confidence also minimizes your accomplishments. Don’t soften or devalue the things that you’ve achieved in the name of protecting someone else’s insecurities. This is not a daycare and we do not have time to babysit the feelings of individuals who sit at the back of the room and hate from a distance. Don’t devalue yourself – this is even applicable when you are being wronged in relationships or when you are negotiating a salary. It’s okay to be confident about who you are and what you bring to the table.
In my last blog post, “Regrouping Halfway Through 2019” I talked about celebrating your small wins. Confidence is a very easy way to give yourself a pat on the back. Be okay with shifting the energy when you walk into a room. Don’t be afraid to have a presence that both lights up a room and unintentionally draws positive energy towards you. Anyone who feels less than because of this has their own issues to work through and you don’t have to compromise who you are while they work through their insecurities.
Keep in mind that there is a fine line between being assured and confident and being boastful and obnoxious. We do confident, we do not do cocky. Cockiness comes from a place of narcissism and can be an annoying habit that pushes people away from you. The line between arrogance and confidence is actually much finer than you may believe it to be. Confidence is built from within and cockiness is built from external sources such as other people or even privilege.
Confidence is not walking into a room thinking you are better than everyone. It’s walking in and not having to compare yourself to anyone at all. -Unknown
With all of that said, STOP APOLOGIZING FOR IT – your confidence! You’ve worked hard to become who you are and you don’t deserve to allow negative energy and insecure people to make you feel bad about how you do you. Stop letting these haters shake you. Your confidence will make them SICK, but that’s not your problem.
