3 ms·

I can honestly say that I have never needed to 'blow up' at one of my employees. Ever. If I had an employee that was totally unwilling to listen to direction,

by donw 16y ago

I can honestly say that I have never needed to 'blow up' at one of my employees. Ever. If I had an employee that was totally unwilling to listen to direction, they would be an ex-employee very quickly. I'm not a dictator or a micromanager -- I do my best to hire smart people and let them do their jobs. But sometimes, someone needs to take charge and make a decision. If someone's ego can't cope with that, they are bad for the business, and need to go. If you have to bite someone's head off to get them to do their job, that's not confidence -- that's arrogance. Two very different things.

lsc 16y ago
I've never gotten a clear explanation of the difference between confidence and arrogance, I mean, except as just a matter of degree. People tell me "well, that explains a lot about you" which, I'm sure, it does. but nobody seems to have an answer to the question that makes even a little sense. As for "blowing up" what I mean is that you need to adjust the, ah "volume" or "intensity" of your feelings upwards, vs. managing a person who isn't very confident, in which case you want to seem very low key, especially when the shit hits the proverbial fan; as I was mentioning in a previous post, if your emotions seem too intense when there is a failure, you can inadvertently train your less-confident people to avoid risk more than you like. I'm trying to say that more confident people will often ignore the less intense criticisms. they are more likely to assume everything is OK unless you make it very clear that it is not. If you try to be low key about it, a more confident person generally gets quite irritated, calling you "passive aggressive" (even if you are direct in a soft voice... it is the soft voice or soft framing, I think, that they find irritating.) and, well, getting quite irritated. My experience has been that an error on the side of too much emotional force usually has better results than an error on the side of not enough emotional force with the more confident sort of person. The interesting thing, I think, is that you can almost say the exact same words to the two groups of people. Being direct is almost always a good thing. But with the two different groups, you need to frame it and communicate it very differently. Having an appropriate amount of emotional force behind your words is key, and that appropriate amount of emotional force varies quite a lot depending on what sort of person you are attempting to communicate with. I'm approaching this problem from the perspective of someone who is naturally not all that aggressive, who has learned how to fake it, to some extent. (and yeah, to tie this back to the article, one of the things I taught myself was to sit in a very relaxed and expansive way that takes up a lot of space. I got the idea because I read a lot of feminist literature as a youth, and that is one of the behaviours a particular author found irritating in men. "wow," I thought "I sit like a woman." because yeah, I tended to sit very compactly, to take up little space. So as I got older and tried to fake this confidence, I started to sit more, uh, expansively. To consciously take up more space than I needed to. It feels pretty natural now. The really funny thing about this is that other people are aware of it too. try putting your feet up on the table or otherwise visibly relax and take up more space while talking with a male who is of greater status. You will often notice them doing the same thing, sometimes to a ridiculous extent.) so yeah, you are probably better at modulating your emotional force on the top end than I am, just 'cause that's not my natural state- that is something I learned. But my experience has been that even overdoing the emotional force by quite a bit usually results in more positive outcomes, when dealing with a confident person, than underdoing the emotional force, and looking like a wimp. Really, though, I think the key to this emotional confidence is having that willingness to experiment, and to screw up. I have yelled at people (and yeah, it's almost always the wrong thing to do.) I've made people cry without really meaning to. I mean, it's not something I regularly do, and it's something I'll try not to do again, but for me it was part of this learning process.
donw 16y ago
Have to reply here, since there's a limit to nesting depth. To me, confidence stems from knowledge and experience. A confident person can back up their assertions to a very deep level. They can explain and defend their reasoning. With this also comes the experience that the world isn't perfect, and that sometimes you just need to do something you don't want to do. Arrogance, on the other hand, is nothing but ego and fear. Fear that anything that might threaten that huge ego. An arrogant man has little knowledge or wisdom, but plenty of bullshit to masquerade as such. A confident man can lose well. An arrogant man can't.
- lsc 16y ago
  >To me, confidence stems from knowledge and experience. To me, this entire continuum from not confident, to confident to arrogant has to do with how you act when you encounter a new situation, or some other unknown, well, and how you act around other people in a social situation. Re-reading my posts, this is obviously most of what I'm talking about. The guy I think of as the least confident guy I know is an absolutely awesome c++ programmer. Incredible. The man holds himself like he thinks you are about to punch him. He looks a good four inches shorter than he really is because of his posture. He speaks with such a soft voice that he's usually got to repeat himself several times when he orders food. In any sort of social situation, he looks pretty uncomfortable. But if you talk about C++? He'll look you in the eye and say "I don't write segmentation faults" or "My code has no buffer overflows." and he believes it, too. (hell, after working with him, I believe it.) - but to me, that doesn't seem like confidence. that's just experience, and being obviously very, very good at something. >A confident man can lose well. An arrogant man can't. Logically, I don't think that is the whole story, but emotionally, I really like that definition.
  - Psyonic 16y ago
    I think thats precisely what confidence is. He makes statements that would be arrogant coming from someone less experienced, but since he can back it up, its confidence.
- tome 16y ago
  > Have to reply here, since there's a limit to nesting depth. Not as far as I know, and if there is, a depth of 4 or 5 isn't it! Sometimes the "reply" link doesn't appear and you have to reply via the permalink "link" instead.

by donw 16y ago

lsc 16y ago

I've never gotten a clear explanation of the difference between confidence and arrogance, I mean, except as just a matter of degree. People tell me "well, that explains a lot about you" which, I'm sure, it does. but nobody seems to have an answer to the question that makes even a little sense. As for "blowing up" what I mean is that you need to adjust the, ah "volume" or "intensity" of your feelings upwards, vs. managing a person who isn't very confident, in which case you want to seem very low key, especially when the shit hits the proverbial fan; as I was mentioning in a previous post, if your emotions seem too intense when there is a failure, you can inadvertently train your less-confident people to avoid risk more than you like. I'm trying to say that more confident people will often ignore the less intense criticisms. they are more likely to assume everything is OK unless you make it very clear that it is not. If you try to be low key about it, a more confident person generally gets quite irritated, calling you "passive aggressive" (even if you are direct in a soft voice... it is the soft voice or soft framing, I think, that they find irritating.) and, well, getting quite irritated. My experience has been that an error on the side of too much emotional force usually has better results than an error on the side of not enough emotional force with the more confident sort of person. The interesting thing, I think, is that you can almost say the exact same words to the two groups of people. Being direct is almost always a good thing. But with the two different groups, you need to frame it and communicate it very differently. Having an appropriate amount of emotional force behind your words is key, and that appropriate amount of emotional force varies quite a lot depending on what sort of person you are attempting to communicate with. I'm approaching this problem from the perspective of someone who is naturally not all that aggressive, who has learned how to fake it, to some extent. (and yeah, to tie this back to the article, one of the things I taught myself was to sit in a very relaxed and expansive way that takes up a lot of space. I got the idea because I read a lot of feminist literature as a youth, and that is one of the behaviours a particular author found irritating in men. "wow," I thought "I sit like a woman." because yeah, I tended to sit very compactly, to take up little space. So as I got older and tried to fake this confidence, I started to sit more, uh, expansively. To consciously take up more space than I needed to. It feels pretty natural now. The really funny thing about this is that other people are aware of it too. try putting your feet up on the table or otherwise visibly relax and take up more space while talking with a male who is of greater status. You will often notice them doing the same thing, sometimes to a ridiculous extent.) so yeah, you are probably better at modulating your emotional force on the top end than I am, just 'cause that's not my natural state- that is something I learned. But my experience has been that even overdoing the emotional force by quite a bit usually results in more positive outcomes, when dealing with a confident person, than underdoing the emotional force, and looking like a wimp. Really, though, I think the key to this emotional confidence is having that willingness to experiment, and to screw up. I have yelled at people (and yeah, it's almost always the wrong thing to do.) I've made people cry without really meaning to. I mean, it's not something I regularly do, and it's something I'll try not to do again, but for me it was part of this learning process.

donw 16y ago

Have to reply here, since there's a limit to nesting depth. To me, confidence stems from knowledge and experience. A confident person can back up their assertions to a very deep level. They can explain and defend their reasoning. With this also comes the experience that the world isn't perfect, and that sometimes you just need to do something you don't want to do. Arrogance, on the other hand, is nothing but ego and fear. Fear that anything that might threaten that huge ego. An arrogant man has little knowledge or wisdom, but plenty of bullshit to masquerade as such. A confident man can lose well. An arrogant man can't.

lsc 16y ago
>To me, confidence stems from knowledge and experience. To me, this entire continuum from not confident, to confident to arrogant has to do with how you act when you encounter a new situation, or some other unknown, well, and how you act around other people in a social situation. Re-reading my posts, this is obviously most of what I'm talking about. The guy I think of as the least confident guy I know is an absolutely awesome c++ programmer. Incredible. The man holds himself like he thinks you are about to punch him. He looks a good four inches shorter than he really is because of his posture. He speaks with such a soft voice that he's usually got to repeat himself several times when he orders food. In any sort of social situation, he looks pretty uncomfortable. But if you talk about C++? He'll look you in the eye and say "I don't write segmentation faults" or "My code has no buffer overflows." and he believes it, too. (hell, after working with him, I believe it.) - but to me, that doesn't seem like confidence. that's just experience, and being obviously very, very good at something. >A confident man can lose well. An arrogant man can't. Logically, I don't think that is the whole story, but emotionally, I really like that definition.
- Psyonic 16y ago
  I think thats precisely what confidence is. He makes statements that would be arrogant coming from someone less experienced, but since he can back it up, its confidence.
tome 16y ago
> Have to reply here, since there's a limit to nesting depth. Not as far as I know, and if there is, a depth of 4 or 5 isn't it! Sometimes the "reply" link doesn't appear and you have to reply via the permalink "link" instead.