Confidence

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Transcript:

I’m a sneaky confident person.

I’m riddled with anxiety.  But it doesn’t stop me from doin’ stuff.

At least stuff that I want to do.

I’ll be terrified, but I’ll still have a deep seated inner confidence that I’m capable of accomplishing something, if I want to accomplish it.

Despite all evidence to the contrary.  I’m a stubbornly confident person in the face of repeated personal failures.

But the anxiety doesn’t go away either.  That’s why it’s sneaky confidence.  You can’t always tell it’s confidence.  Sometimes it looks a lot like nervous panic in the face of insurmountable odds.  Sometimes it looks like diarrhea before a big show.  But I still do the thing.  So long as it’s something I want to do.  I’m selfish like that.

Confidence is important in stand-up.  You gotta exude some level of confidence.  People need a reason to believe you’re worth paying attention to.  Confidence is one of the criteria people judge you by, to see, “Is this person worth my time?”  People are harsh that way.  If you come across as confident, they’re more likely to pay attention.

I used to get emails from an author, Mark Manson.  He wrote that book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Hoot.  It was a different word than hoot.  The book I liked more was actually his second book, Everything is Hooted, A Book about Hope.  That’s the one that convinced me to sign up for his email list.

I don’t subscribe to the emails anymore.  They weren’t bad emails, but I went on a self help kick for a few years when my life was fallin’ apart and I signed up for like 6 or 7 weekly email lists and I needed to pair that down to more like 3 weekly email lists.  So I only get 2 weekly emails now and 1 monthly email.  That’s enough email self help to keep me chuggin’ along.

But anyway, one a’ Mark’s emails was about confidence.  He had some interesting things to say about it.  Here were some of those things.  If you like these things, maybe check out Mark Manson’s email list.

So he wrote, “To unconfident people, narcissism in others looks like confidence.  To confident people, narcissism in others looks like a lack of confidence.”

So what’s that mean?  False confidence, aka narcissism, appears to be real confidence if you yourself are an unconfident person.  If you don’t know what real confidence feels like, you can’t recognize it in other people.

So that’s one thing.  It takes confidence to know confidence.

He says another way to tell confidence apart from narcissism is “to see how it affects other people.  Narcissism…needs to diminish others in order to maintain a sense of comfort and security.  Confidence is a comfort and security regardless of what others say or do.”

Interesting distinction.  Narcissism has a negative energy to it.  It seeks to overpower and engulf others.  Confidence may need to have a combative component, if it comes to that.  But confidence can be just as happy being apathetic toward other people’s opinions.

I’m not saying that’s always good.  But narcissism is also apathetic toward other people’s opinions.  Narcissism is apathetic and seeks to belittle others.  Confidence is apathetic and that’s it.  So long as you don’t get aggressive and try to mess with confidence.  Confidence is content on its own.  Narcissism needs to feed off others.  It’s inadequate on its own.

Mark makes a further distinction, saying that true confidence “is not expressed through bravado but rather vulnerability.  A confident person does not feel a need to prove that they are right – rather, they are simply comfortable in the fact that they may be wrong.”

So confidence is confident that it has a reasonable answer and approach to the question or situation.  But confidence is not the same as overconfidence.  A balanced level of confidence is not the same as hubris, aka excessive confidence or pride.  Confidence can say, “I’m taking a stab at this.  This is my educated guess.”  But confidence doesn’t get all bent out of shape when it was wrong.  Errors are still acceptable to confidence.

It’s easy for stand-up comedians to tip over into hubris or narcissism.  You can end up with too much of a good thing, hubris, or end up directing your “confident” energy out at a weaker opponent in the audience to try to boost yourself up.

Hubris is too much confidence.  Narcissism is fake confidence that tries to bully other people.

You want the Goldilocks version of confidence on stage; the level of confidence that’s just right.  You’re holding court sharing ideas and stories and opinions that are worthy of being shared, but you’re not being a dick about it.

And the audience is going to try to buck you.  That will happen.  Cuz if you’re any good as a comedian; really if you’re any good as a public speaker of any kind, you’re gonna say some stuff that an unconfident person would not be able to pull off saying.

Those are the kinds of things people gather into groups to hear a person say.  No one gathers in a big crowd for someone to say, “Today is Tuesday.  Just wanted to share that.”  That’s not gonna get anyone to cheer or boo or gossip  – people just aren’t gonna care.  Public speakers, we gotta say some stuff that’s worth hearing.  It’s be a little exotic and controversial.

So you’ll say somethin’, and people will react to it.  They might pull back and get quiet.  They might get a little rowdy and clap back.  They might gasp or groan.  They might shake their head in protest.  How are you gonna handle that, Captain Confident?  How are you gonna steer the ship when they don’t always laugh at your little skits the way you expect them to?

You have to take them into account without losing yourself in the process.  You have to avoid a mutiny and get everyone to agree you’re the right one for the job of continuing to steer the ship.  There’s no set way to do that.  It’s an adaptive process.  It’s dynamic.

The only way to build this confidence, this ship steering confidence, is to do the thing over and over again.  Confidence comes from being good at something.  You have to be qualified.  If you’re more qualified to be on that stage than every other person in that room, that’s a good start.

You get there by putting in reps.

Until you’ve put in your reps, where does that leave you?  Well, you gotta be a little bit of a narcissist.  That’s how everyone starts out in stand-up comedy.  You’re not more qualified to be on that stage than anyone else.  You do have a false sense of confidence.

Oh well.  Hopefully you can turn your pathology into a virtue over time.

What about when you get really good at stand-up comedy and you know what it’s like to crush a room for 30 minutes or an hour or whatever?  There’s always an ever present danger of being overconfident or narcissistic.  Never goes away.  You can always think you’re better than you are or more important than you are.  Comedy is dynamic.  Just because you knew how to ride the bull yesterday doesn’t mean you can do it tomorrow.  Tomorrow is a different bull.  The only way to maintain that confidence is to keep riding bulls over and over.

I was listening to John Mayer on Conan O’Brien’s podcast.  They were talking about how important it is to never apologize for anything on stage.  Mayer was saying how you never want to tell the audience that you have a cold or acknowledge when a guitar string breaks.  You never want the audience to know they aren’t getting the best show.

They mentioned, cult leaders don’t apologize, “Oh sorry, my prediction about the end times was off.”  No, they jus’ make more cult leader predictions and rules.  You have to look in control at all times because that creates an illusion or fantasy that everything is going great, and that sets an excited, buoyant mood for everyone else at the show.  The show is a little bit of a cult.

So it may be that under certain circumstances, a little hubris and a tinge of narcissism can actually better serve the audience.  Even if you are a fraud in some ways here and there, maybe the audience doesn’t need to be hip to that fact so long as you have some true confidence and ability in some areas of the performance.  Maybe there is a little room for faking it until you make it in the biz?

In summary, always be working toward and aiming for true confidence.  Confidence that you have earned from putting in the time and effort.  But for the sake of the audience and the show, sometimes you gotta put on a bit of a show that maybe isn’t fully based in reality.

Put your best, most confident foot forward without hesitation, and, don’t apologize for any missteps until after you get off stage.

Off stage, go back to being an anxious, paranoid mess.  That’s fine.  Do that in your real life.  No worries.  But don’t let on that that’s going on while you’re performing.  Hide the diarrhea.