Confidence Versus Arrogance

Growing up I played a lot of sports. Baseball was my favorite and then when I got older I played softball. One thing that I found to be very true no matter what age I was, was that when you were playing well, you wanted the ball hit to you. When you were playing poorly, you begged the ball to be hit to someone else. Anyone else! I don’t know if I can ever explain the feeling of a close game being all up to you. Getting the game winning hit or making the final play of the game isn’t something you can just casually explain to someone who never played the game. The more I played the more confident I was, I was always expecting myself to make the play or get the hit. I had a lot of confidence, and to some that translated into arrogance. When you are young and trying to establish yourself, arrogance is fun. Talking about yourself and having the numbers to back it up is amazing. Then a funny thing happens, you get older and hopefully more wise. It was sad for me when I realized that the older version of me probably would have hated being around the younger version of me. I would have scolded that young man and told him to shut up many times. The older you get, you fear being that arrogant person that people can’t stand and don’t want to be around. But the crazy part is, you also realize that people want to hang around someone who is confident. The older you get, the harder it is to be around someone that you always have to try and lift up. There is a huge difference between helping someone with a short-coming or a weakness, and someone who is bringing the whole team down because they need to have a pity party for themselves. So how can I stay within the boundaries of confidence without always sliding into arrogance? Most of us now have reached that age when it’s just not cool to brag about yourself. For me, I feel like all of those team sports I played when I was younger showed me how fun it is to win as a team. When I think about the difference between being a team player and winning and winning individually, I always seem to think about golf. Let’s say you are a golfer, and you win a big tournament. How many people are actually happy for you? Maybe a few people watching, but the competitors you played against, they can’t be happy for you. You don’t have family close by, so what do you do? Whenever I see someone win at golf, it seems like the only thing they can do is look towards their caddie. Hopefully they get along, but it seems weird to me that you just made him carry that heavy bag all around while being told what to do, while you get all of the recognition, then when it’s over you want him to hug you and tell you how awesome you are. How often does a golfer thank his caddie in his winning press conference? Now think about what it’s like when you see a team win a championship. That visual of everyone piling on top of eachother and celebrating. Each of those players on the field know that they did something to help that team. Some played a huge role, other players didn’t play as often, but had a big role in practice. When that final play is made, everyone is equal and had a part in that win. Everyone is hugging everyone, people are crying together. How can you not want to be a part of that? But in the workplace, it seems like we all have to play golf. The rules are simple, don’t talk to me when I am working and everything I do is for my benefit. I want to win and that means that you have to lose. It also means that we can’t brag about anything we do because we know how much we hate hearing from someone else about all of their great accomplishments. Then something strange happens, review time comes. The expectation is that you spent the whole year writing down every single thing that you did and now you need to look at the person across from the room and tell them all of it. Tell them every single little thing that you did that might have made an impact. Some people only mention 2-3 big things they did throughout the year. Sometimes that works, other times it sounds like you didn’t do anything all year. Then sometimes you have that person who has a list of like 500 things that they did and none of them actually made an impact. Those are the people who are going to be devastated when they get that mediocre review year after year. So what is the sweet spot? What is that perfect combination of listing all of the major contributions you made while still adding in enough things that make it known that you did something everyday that you came in? It’s funny, we all seem to want recognition, but we can’t seem to ever remember anything that we have done. We also seem to have forgotten everything that everyone else did. That’s probably why it will always be hard to brag about myself. I think I will just stick to bragging about everyone else, and hopefully if I keep doing that then at the end of the year we can all celebrate in a pile together about everything we did as a team.