Everything coming down to "confidence"

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I don't understand this fetish many people seem to have with confidence, and attributing any difficulties one has to "lack of confidence", and believing in confidence as the Holy Grail of success.
I recently had to see a psychologist who I was sent to by my job agency, and I spent the whole time trying to explain that no, my poor social skills were not caused by "lacking confidence", they were caused by lacking social intuition and having trouble generalising rules between situations. I spent the whole time trying to explain that no matter how confident I was in my ability to perform work-related tasks, if I didn't pre-prepare responses to job interview questions, no answers would be forthcoming from me, because my spontaneous-speech-generator is broken.

Why can't people make an honest assessment of their abilities, and admit that they're bad at something, without it being a "confidence problem"? People sometimes are bad at things.
I suck socially. People who regularly and sincerely tell me that they love me and that I'm awesome, also tell me that I suck socially. It's not due to "low confidence". My confidence is fine. I'm a decent person and I'm damn good at a lot of things, but there are things that I am bad at.

The advice "just be confident" is useless if a person doesn't know how to perform a skill.
I teach music, and if a student came up to me saying "I'm having trouble with this passage" or "I can't remember where middle C is", what do you think the best response would be: "Just be confident and you'll get it!", or to listen to them play the passage, identify the problem areas and explain what they're doing wrong and how to do it better, and have them go over the problem spots slowly until they get it right/show them where middle C is, re-explain how to find C, explain that it's the C closest to the middle of the piano, and on a real piano, the one closest to the lock.?
Here's a hint: one of those responses is what's had me successfully teaching music for years. The other would have me out of a job within a week.

I keep seeing an ad on a bus that says "My Business Administration qualification gave me the confidence I needed to succeed!" No. It gave you the SKILLS and KNOWLEDGE you needed to succeed.

If the confidence-worship catches on, we'll be left with a society of people who are useless at everything but who think they're awesome at everything, because why undermine your confidence by wanting actual evidence of your skills?

I tend to blame many of my problems on my lack of confidence and I think it's mostly true. However, I agree with you. The confidence issue is not the only problem. Not having confidence is often associated with other problems. I sometimes can't figure out exactly what my problem is because so many things seem to be interrelated.

I've known some people that have the confidence but don't have other necessary skills etc in succeeding in whatever they are trying. In those cases having the confidence is the problem.

Funnily, confidence generally means you actually know what you're capable of based on the fact that you're doing what you think is right.

Bravado seems to be what lots of people mean when they say "confidence".

OP: Awesome post.