While many people struggle daily with a lack of confidence, there are folks who have the opposite problem – people who are routinely overconfident. And, as several stories in my humorous memoir demonstrate, overconfidence can be dangerous. Sometimes hilarious, yes, but potentially disastrous.
So how can you find out if your confidence is justified? And how can you adjust your self-assessment if it’s not?
Here are three ways to overcome overconfidence:
1. Test Yourself
Think you got this? Prove it. But ideally, prove it in a low-consequence environment.
If you’re a student with an upcoming exam, and you’re feeling very confident that you’ll ace the exam, there’s a good chance you’re mistaken. Many students fall into the trap of thinking they know something just because they’re familiar with it, even though they don’t truly know it. Luckily, there’s an easy cure for this kind of overconfidence: self-testing. Take a practice test, do a brain dump, or try teaching the content to someone else. If you can do those things, your confidence is justified. If not, you’ve got work to do.
If you’ve got a presentation or speech to give and you’re feeling confident about it, practice giving the performance in advance. Odds are, you’ll stumble over your words more than anticipated, and you’ll be glad you worked out the bugs in practice.
Athletes practice before game day, musicians practice before their recital, chess players practice before their tournaments, and much of that practice is self-testing. Athletes play scrimmages. Musicians try to play pieces from memory. Chess masters play matches.
Whatever your domain, find a way to do a “dress rehearsal” (or several) prior to the real performance. It’s much better to learn that you’re overconfident during a practice test than during the real thing.
2. Look at Exemplars of Excellence
If you are highly skilled at something, it’s easy to compare yourself to the people of low-to-average skill you encounter in your daily life. But this breeds overconfidence. In a small pond, a 12-inch trout thinks himself a big fish.
So look at exemplars of excellence in your domain – the outliers and world-class performers – not so that you feel diminished and ashamed of yourself by comparison, but for the reality check. They will serve as a reminder that you’ve still got a lot to learn.
Also look to them for inspiration. What you’ll find in their examples are people who are much more skilled than you, who are nonetheless still working on becoming better.
3. Pursue Mastery
There’s an old saying that the more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know. Well, the same is true for skills. The closer you get toward mastery of a skill, the more you notice elements of that skill you need to learn or practice.
The mastery path isn’t a trail with a final destination you can actually reach. It’s an asymptote: You can approach mastery forever, and you can always get closer, but you can’t ever get there. Even if you’re a world-class expert, there is room for growth, so make relentless learning a lifelong habit.
Remember that true confidence comes from self-efficacy: the certainty, based on actual evidence, that you have the skills, knowledge, and experience to succeed. So ultimately, the best remedy for overconfidence is cultivating genuine confidence by pursuing mastery.