Overconfidence

Imagine, for a moment, that you are overhearing a male neurotic narrator talking about his steamroller overconfidence. You are the listener and observer. Feel free at any time to interrupt him, to offer him advice, or, if you are willing, to identify with him. Be patient with him; he does manage to offer himself some gentle alternatives.

When I am overconfident and manically attached to an idea, a process, a value, or an opinion, I often don’t expend any time on allowing myself to settle back and let the world in. I am on a mission. I know what I’m about. I am convinced that a mere stream of ideas will purge the demons, settle the dust of my confusion.

Extreme overconfidence, however, often has no release. It is raw, unbridled energy that keeps the adrenaline moving and, in the end, keeps feeding itself with new muscular energy. Numbing exhaustion, for me, is usually the end result. And even at this point, I am unable to sleep because my body and mind have been whipped into a frenzy by my need to get things right

I am not sure why my psyche goes into this cycle of rabid overconfidence. But like Niagara Falls or the Leaning Tower of Pisa , I am too often powerless to stop its precipitous inevitability. I am pulled into its negative force and am unable to gently withdraw from the game of winning or of being right.

If you happen to walk in front of the tank-of-my-overconfidence by offering a different perception or a even a more nuanced approach, you run the risk of becoming another one of my victims. I will, as they say, take no hostages.

Confidence. I know, is not a bad thing. Overconfidence, on the other hand, tips the balance over to the side of negative energy. It is oppressively sinister in its ability to aggrandize, to give me an overly inflated sense of power and self-righteousness.

What is it like to occasionally inhabit this übermensch world of high-volume, fast-speed feelings of superiority, one of the effects of my overconfidence. Tenderness becomes an anachronism. Psychological moats are dug even deeper and wider. My need for territoriality and protectiveness start to metastasize. I go into the on-guard mode. I try to defend myself against corrections and edits. Everything becomes more literal, less nuanced, less fluid. My world becomes smaller and more static. I create my own endangered species of fairness and objectivity by taking control of the field of which I become the assumed master.

Wanting to be right is nothing new to me. At a very young age, I pictured myself as the great explainer. I justified my desire by rationalizing that I would help others unravel the same problems in history or math that I was having. I either tried to imitate those teachers who could explain things or I imagined myself in front of a blackboard unwinding the mysteries, defining the issues, outlining concepts. I pictured myself as the great teacher-magician who could pull the rabbit-of-an-answer out of any hat.

I sometimes wonder if my overconfidence is a mask, a defense against my fear that the world will fall apart without me in it. I know that it is ego-driven, but it is also a result of my need for order, for symmetry, for clarity. Order requires some kind of taxonomy, labels, categories, and linguistic acumen (command of the language has always been important to me).

And I am too often afraid of the silences, especially if something important continues to remain unexplained. I will dig, peel, strip, deconstruct, google-surf until I get the answer. It continues to be no surprise to me that I often feel I could do a better job at explaining something than somebody else (I justify my ego-driven behavior here by conveniently rationalizing that I spend a lot of time honing my linguistic skills and that other people are just too lazy or just plain incompetent—time and experience become the power tools I use to defend my ego).

I am beginning to realize that my overconfidence consistently misses the mark. I am more apt to leave out an important part of the puzzle I am trying to solve because I am hell-bent on assuming I know the answer. When I am immersed in my own expertise , I often become filled with kundalini, serpent-coil energy, and I am ready for a confrontation.

Because there is nothing soft or malleable about overconfidence, I have found that placing myself in situations where I can experience tenderness gives me momentary relief from my ego–without analysis, without trying to be an accurate observer, without trying to get it right.

When I watch a child, a simple family setting, a wedding party, or two lovers having a glass of wine, I often feel connected to others. It is that connection which softens me, makes me more transparent, more generous, more open. But I have to be willing to engage in those observations, to feel them, to have them wash over me, to be silent in their presence—without judgment and without trying to characterize them. When I just give myself over to experiencing them, I am more inclined to rest quietly inside their presence.

I have also found it necessary to periodically remove myself from the world of language, analysis, facts, and opinions by doing physical labor, exercising, going for a walk, or engaging in a simple conversation with a friend about the price of gasoline, airport security, the cost of cigarettes—the mundane conversations that have no meaning in and of themselves but are emotional bridges that enable me to let go, to surrender to the moment with no reservations.

If you identify with this character, join the conversation.