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In Pursuit
of a Powerful
Presence, Part 2
Can You Be Too Confident?
Remember that you are just an extra in everyone else's play.
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
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Confidence is an essential aspect of persuasive verbal communication. The confident speaker
gets noticed. The confident speaker has credibility. The more confidence you have in yourself,
your beliefs and your product or services, the more confidence others will have in you.
It is easy to know when you lack confidence. You may feel anxious, uncertain, perhaps
a bit shy. It is easy to understand the risks of a lack of confidence. But now consider
the risk of having too much confidence.
In the last issue of The Beacon, we focused on the topic of presence, which requires
a certain degree of confidence to be effective and a great degree to be powerful (please
see In Pursuit of a Powerful Presence, May 2007). In this issue, we challenge
you to consider if it’s possible to have too much confidence.
If a lack of confidence reduces your verbal effectiveness, what about having too much?
Can too much confidence impede your ability to persuade? At first glance, many
might answer an emphatic “yes.” What do we say? We offer an emphatic “no.” Why?
The answer is that over-confidence is a misnomer. When the pendulum of confidence swings
too far, the problem is not too much confidence, but rather arrogance.
Confidence or Arrogance
We recently heard from a good friend named Steve, a successful high school coach and a
student of great communication and competitive motivation. Steve is confident in himself
and his abilities, and he should be. He is universally acknowledged as a strong and inspiring
coach. But after reading the last issue of The Beacon about presence, Steve
shared that his biggest fear is the perception he is too confident.
Steve is afraid his strong decision-making style, which is based on his confidence, may
be perceived as arrogance. As a result, he continually scales back the certainty of his
messages and the decisiveness with which he speaks. He says things with less conviction,
and therefore risks reducing his ability to persuade.
Steve’s question to us was simple – and common: How do you protect yourself
from being seen as too confident and thus being perceived as arrogant? In our effort
to answer Steve’s question, we spent time speaking with clients and friends about
confidence and what it means to have “too much” of it. We asked people to
describe the negative connotations of confidence and what behaviors they associate with
it. We then asked the same people to provide good examples and descriptions of confidence.
The result of this experiment showed that the problem is not one of having too much confidence,
but rather when confidence transcends into arrogance.
Confidence
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Arrogance
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| Confident people have their own opinions. They do not balk at or shrink
from the opinions of others, even those in stark contrast to their own. |
Arrogant people demonstrate an unwillingness to listen
to others and their ideas. |
| Confident people invite the input of others and actually listen to it. Arrogant
people treat others on the team poorly. |
Arrogant people treat others on the team poorly. |
| Confident people are not afraid to be challenged or receive negative feedback. |
Arrogant people display discomfort with receiving negative feedback
but freely give it to others. |
| Confident people create a collaborative environment. They share credit with their
colleagues. They promote the people around them. |
Arrogant people can be intellectual “bullies.” |
| Confident people continually seek to improve their skills and the skills of those
around them. |
Arrogant people stop working hard. They rest on their accomplishments
and act defensively to protect their positions. |
None of the entries in the right column are traits anyone should aspire to. If you are
described in these ways by your colleagues, it is likely that you are on the high speed
train to ineffectiveness. Colleagues won’t want to work with you. Employees will
follow you grudgingly, if at all. Customers won’t buy from you. Constituents won’t
vote for you.
But while each of the characteristics of arrogance is negative, are any of them directly
related to having too much confidence? When we compare the behaviors associated
with arrogance to those associated with confidence, we do not see the difference being
the degree of confidence. What we see when we look at the descriptors of arrogance is not
an overly confident person, but rather a highly insecure one.
So let’s return to Steve’s question and his fear that his high level of self-confidence
could be perceived as a negative. We believe that as long as Steve’s actions reflect
the positive behaviors of confidence, he has nothing to worry about. It’s not too
much confidence but rather arrogance that gets in the way of effective and persuasive communication.
At The Latimer Group, we believe there is no such thing as having too much confidence.
We believe that the truly confident person is comfortable believing in others. We believe
that the truly confident person is comfortable hearing other opinions – even those
contrary to his or her own.
We devote significant time to coaching the less-than-confident professional and helping
him or her acquire the skills to become more prepared and more skillful. By improving their
skills, our clients increase their effectiveness.
Conversely, when a confident person like Steve asks how to protect himself from the perceptions
of arrogance, we tell him to rest easy. We believe that if he is truly confident, he only
needs to demonstrate the traits of the truly confident person. If he does so, it’s
unlikely he will be attributed with the negative perceptions he fears. Confident people
like Steve should heed the following list:
- Listen to what others have to say.
- Encourage dissenting opinion.
- Treat everyone with respect.
- Share credit.
Public acts of verbal communication (such as being the keynote speaker, leading the town
hall meeting, giving the presentation, making the critical sales call or leading the meeting
or the conference call) make many people nervous. But not everyone. For those fortunate
people who exhibit great confidence, they shouldn’t worry about negative perceptions – as
long as they follow the simple rules listed above.
Being an extremely confident person who believes passionately in your organization or
team, your product or yourself will never put you at risk. Great confidence, however, combined
with any number of other negative characteristics – lack of an open mind; an unwillingness
to listen to others; an inability to work well with others on your team – brings
enormous risk.
Readers of The Beacon and clients of The Latimer Group frequently hear us talk
about the importance of knowing your audience. Without a thorough knowledge of your audience
it will be difficult to be a persuasive communicator, which in turn makes it difficult
to sell, lead and succeed. This analysis has led us to an important corollary of the “know
your audience” rule. Knowing your audience first requires caring who they
are and what they have to say. The confident person does. The arrogant person does not.
Dean M. Brenner
President |
Marni H. Lane
Media Specialist |
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© 2007 The Latimer Group. All Rights Reserved.
Dean M. Brenner -
The Latimer Group: 203.265.4344.
Feedback or comments: dmbrenner@thelatimergroup.com.
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