As someone with pretty bad social anxiety, I never fit in in high school - got bullied badly, an outcast with other outcasts, don't fit in with society especially the sociable talky types know hundreds of social cluthes/techniques and people still call me weird. I'm however not autistic or not mentally disabled, my intelligence is reasonable, and i'm very well educated (went to private school) so having bad education and being a bad boy isn't the reason i get excluded either. I've spent years working on figuring this out and here is my take:
Confidence is complicated like intelligence. Its easy to confuse Confidence with focus/insensitivity. When you take adderall or have a lot of dopamine what you are achieving is making yourself a natural confident person, but this isn't confidence its' just focus and insensitivity, and people who are called confident are often this type. They just have a high latent inhibition. I for example have extremely low latent inhibition, the world is constantly screaming at me. Insensitivity has many social benefitis related to being kind of psychopathic, however it also leaves you blind to things that sensitive people are good with. Hence most great computer engineers, scientists and so on are sensitive people, and business leaders or management types tend to be insensitive. Insensitive because they are focused, or they have excellent control of focus in a loud environment This does make you feel confident, its the natural confidence people here are chasing elusively.
This above kind of confidence is hard to understand because people who have it don't see what they have, and people who see it just think the guys "got it" "alpha" and so on, really all it is is the capability to filter out noise in a loud environment and focus on a task, as the brain is filtering out irelevancy (often in social situations thats others bs), you connect with your body better and you live in the moment much more. Basically people who daydream a lot have "significant deviation" from what reality is, this is just because they are more sensitive. - its hard for these people to attain this kind of insensitivity without drugs, though meditation can achieve like 25% of what the real thing is like. ( I mean in an overly stimulatory environment, meditation can be used to counter the effects of over stimulation).
However these insensitive people may not be happy or really confident. Confidence in the traditional form means you are doing something and you know you will do it well, most of us are confident in something, and its also environmentally based. I've directed adverts and films before and I was confident because everyone placed me as important, and I'm focused on doing the job not making people like me, and I think thats confidence too. So this is complex - this is the one where you feel great because you are good at something not because you don't care. This is the one that is affected by how your parents raised you.
So if you used the natural form of confidence (the one from beliefs and the rational mind) and use it to compare with something that is more akin to brain configuration you will always misunderstand this and fight a losing battle. One form is a form, if you are not born with the only means to achieve it is via augmentation, the other form is something that you can have based on where you are or what you are doing - if we can even split something complex like confidence into two categories.
(sorry for my dyslexic like wording, the testosterone is destroying my ability to write - I think my mind is still mostly here =_=)
Edited by Major Legend, 23 July 2013 - 02:29 PM.