The line between confidence and arrogance

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So they can blame women for rejecting them. It doesn't make sense, because it totally invalidates personal opinion and interpretation, which is really all you have. I bet many here have been viewed as arrogant or standoffish due to social limitations and poor communication, so does that mean they are just arrogant and the Autistic influence over their social behavior is a myth?

Alliances are often made in desperate situations

Yet there is no female team Boo, just me

Now to answer how can I assess genuine confidence at a first meeting... I can't and don't.

Instead... Rdos you should like this bit, I observe in action and reflect on it later, if the actions and words aren't syncing up, I know there is a level of fakery at play, and that is enough for me, thank you.

HighLlama, I believe that you are on to something there.

Who else should I blame? Myself? I used to make that mistake. I thought it was entirely my fault women rejected me because I wasn't fit enough or I wasn't educated enough or I wasn't wealthy enough.

This lead to years of depression where I beat myself up for being fat and lazy and not having a proffesional class job.

But now I don't blame myself for women rejecting me because I can't control their decisions.

No one should ever be blamed for something that is under someone else's control.

In context I take this comment to basically mean that becoming genuinely confident is not easy, whereas blaming another for the negative experience is easy.

Yes it does.

It's true that I want to improve my self image but the reason I posted this thread in L&D is is because I want to know how to appear confident and not arrogant in the eyes of girls.

I want t know how to be confident in my abilities without girls finding me boastful.

Here's an example I was thinking about, if a guy works out a lot and gets muscular, will women find that physically attractive, will they find it intimidating, will they think he's a meathead jock or will they think he's a bodybuilding narcissist?

The problem with that question is there is no one answer to it: there are as many answers as there are women in the world, because each individual woman you meet is going to have different tastes and a different history and a different way of looking at things. There is no one way to appear confident to women, you can't control how individual women perceive you. The whole idea of confidence is that you don't need the opinions of other people to prop yourself up; it means you are happy with and accept your own estimation of yourself. If you know yourself well and know your strengths and weaknesses well and accept yourself for who you are, other people's opinions of you shouldn't matter that much, certainly not more than your own opinion of yourself. THAT'S what confidence is--confidence in your own estimation of yourself, separate from the opinions of others about you.

I'll give you an example: I sing relatively well. I enjoy it and I've been doing it many years, starting with voice training for choir when I was in elementary school. I feel confidence in my voice because I know how much work I've put into it and I can hear for myself when I sing that I hit the right notes and that my voice is pleasant-sounding (to me). I don't need someone else to tell me that my voice sounds nice because I can hear it for myself. Don't get me wrong, it still feels good when someone compliments my voice, but if someone were to tell me they didn't like my voice it wouldn't make me like my own voice any less, I would just accept that not everyone is going to like it. I don't perform because I have anxiety issues related to public performance, but that doesn't impact my estimation of the sound of my voice either and my confidence in it. I don't go around telling people I'm some great singer either, because that would be arrogant (and untrue--I'm not great, just competent). I just sing when I feel like it when I'm at home or with friends (I had friends in school who also liked to sing and had good voices so sometimes at parties or while we were just hanging out we would sing together) and I enjoy it. Does that help illustrate the difference between arrogance and confidence?

Women are under no obligation to like you or any man in particular, so blaming them will never be fair. If you have to blame someone, blame yourself, but don’t think anyone is guaranteed to like you if you do this or that, because they don’t have to. The only thing you can do is better yourself and try your chances, without thinking you’re ever entitled to anything, and accept the outcome, good or bad as it may be.

Confidence is awareness of your strengths and weaknesses, having good measure of your capabilities. It involes humility, and the ability to see (and admit) where you're wrong without feeling hurt or, you know, suffering a psychotic break.

Arrogance is thinking you have no weaknesses (or in some cases around here, no strengths), and can never be wrong. It is a position of fear and emptiness, of needing others' approval, with an undertow anxiety of being found out.

An arrogant person can be caught out, exposed. A confident person cannot. That's how I see it.

I don't know if there's anything particular can be done to somehow seem more confident, as it's earned attitude not, I don't know, a dance routine or a remarkable speed with mental arithmetic. And seeming confident somehow misses the point of being confident.

Also, I hope those with the huge chips on their shoulders brought their own salt.

I used to blame myself but I now realise I cannot accept blame for other people's decisions.

Very true.Also true but the purpose of this thread is to determine how I can be attractive to women.

Is the only I can be attractive to women to not care about whether or not women find me attractive? That is a paradox I can't deal with.

It's like, if a man gives all his money to the poor just so he can get into Heaven, is it selfish act?

You missed my point: it's not that you don't care at all about what other people think about you (the people closest to you that you trust should be relied upon to give you accurate feedback about your behaviour, so you should care what they think), it's that what other people think about you is not more important than what you think about yourself. If you expend the effort to get to know yourself accurately and to recognise and accept yourself for who you are, your flaws and your virtues alike, then you should be able to trust in your own estimation of yourself before anyone else's estimation of you, because presumably you know your internal landscape better than anyone else does. If you have a foundation of confidence within yourself that is based on knowing yourself honestly, that is bound to show externally. It looks like healthy self-respect.

And Hopper is also right: you will know you are confident when you can admit that you've made a mistake and it doesn't devastate you emotionally to do so, because you can accept that we are all bound to make them occasionally and you can forgive yourself for being imperfect and most importantly can learn from your mistakes. That looks like healthy humility.

I think we see a new definition of being confident that is not aligned with confidence in dating. A girl simply cannot know if a guy is confident in himself, or if he accepts his own flaws unless she knows him pretty well, so this doesn't apply to first contact or a first date. On first contact, many girls would judge him based on how secure he is (social confidence), which is not related to his self-confidence at all.

True:
http://www.eharmony.com/dating-advice/a ... 7AXZcjXfCQ

http://www.askmen.com/scent/attraction/ ... dence.html

Amity, we are victorious.

/thread


ps: I am confident that I won.
:p

- So imagine a person who is scientist, he is very good at his work, inside he is confident in his knowledge and skills, has tons of achievements- yet he is very accepting of his flaws in other areas and try to improve.

Yet from the outer he has a bad posture, he is thin, he has a baby face, he is too shy to make eye contacts, can't speak clearly much, and he struggles in his fashion sense.

So which side a woman would see on the first encounter? eh?
He would be labeled Not confident anyway.


I feel that "Confident" in first encounter is pretty much related to radiating "sexy and "positive masculinity" because this is what the media and magazines keep feeding your brains: Confidence is sexy, and Sexy is confidence.
Sexy body, sexy posture, sexy eyes, sexy clothes, sexy voice....and you automatically associate these traits to confidence without knowing.
... it's all about sex and romance fantasies.

i like your interpretation

that's far from everything it's about, but if all you want is to make a distinction, then yes, that sounds perfect

Well, yes, you are right--it's not necessarily your fault. What I meant was to find an excuse to be angry or bitter, rather than focusing on personal happiness. Focusing on what others think with this relationship goal implies that women exist only to provide some level of sexualized companionship to men (at least in heterosexual cases), and anything else is some failure or problem. Of course, no confident woman would respond well to that.