I bet you think you can tell the difference between confidence and arrogance. But you are wrong. You are biased. If you take offence to that, don’t worry, you aren’t the only one, I’m biased too.

Disagree? Think you can tell the difference?

Sure you can when it’s obvious. But it’s not always obvious.

We have gender biases about what confidence looks like. Age biases. Cultural biases. Friend group biases.

We even have beauty biases… tell me you don’t judge a pretty or handsome person who finds themselves attractive confident, while someone you deem less attractive sharing the same view of themselves being attractive as more arrogant than confident. Why can’t they be confident too? Or, oddly enough, this could be inversely true with the attractive person’s confidence seeming more like arrogance. Or it could be deemed confident for an 8 year old and arrogant for an 18 or 28 year old.

Yes, there is a big difference between confidence and arrogance, but be careful to judge too quickly… or too arrogantly. Confidence can be a superpower, but it’s also fragile. We shouldn’t be too quick to judge others who are confident, or to attack confidence as if it is arrogance.

We tell people it is important to be humble all the time, but we admire confidence more than we admire humility. Are they just showing humility or are they shy? Or are they not confident when they should be? Is it arrogance if they know they are good at what they do and show confidence rather than humility?

It’s all judgement calls. And as I mentioned before, when it’s obvious, it’s obvious, but I think we are more judgemental than we think we are. When judging confidence versus arrogance, we shouldn’t be too confident about our judgement… unless we want to show our own arrogance.