Confidence, Arrogance, and Knowing Yourself

Journalled on Friday, 22 August  2025 | Santo Cristo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: 28 degrees, hot, sunny and blue sky.

I think I was taught, from a young age, to put myself second, to forget my own needs in the name of others.

And even when I did exactly that, it wasn’t always met with kindness. Sometimes it made me feel inadequate. Small. Wrong for even trying. I don’t say that looking for sympathy. I say it because I think understanding where a pattern started is the first step to actually changing it, and I’ve been doing a lot of that lately.

The Trip That Made Me Think About This

On my last trip to England, nothing I did was enough for my mother. I don’t say that lightly, and I’ve turned it over enough times to be fairly confident it’s not just my perception of a bad week. I think that because I wouldn’t play along with a certain dynamic, and because that refusal clearly registered with her, she pushed back more than once, suggesting I wasn’t good enough, wasn’t doing things right, and was arrogant.

Julie did something similar around the same period, even though I never once criticised her or tried to put her down. And that’s the part that sits strangely with me: there seems to be an odd double standard at play in these kinds of dynamics.

It’s fine for them to project onto others. But if you don’t return the favour or don’t have the energy to defend yourself against it, you’re the one who ends up judged for it. You’re the one labelled difficult, or cold, or arrogant, simply for not absorbing something you didn’t create.

I’ve thought about this a lot, and I think the honest answer is that my mother and I have probably projected onto each other over the years, in different ways and for different reasons. And because I didn’t take the bait this time- because I didn’t escalate, didn’t defend myself loudly, didn’t play the game back I think it actually got worse, not better. Silence isn’t always read as maturity. Sometimes it’s read as an insult in itself.

Knowing What Not to Say

I know myself reasonably well at this point. I think of myself as an empath, which is both a strength and a liability, depending on the day. It means I have to be careful with what I say, because I understand, maybe too well, that when someone tries to hurt you, it’s usually because they’re hurting inside themselves. Cruelty is rarely about the target. It’s almost always about the person delivering it.

That understanding doesn’t make the cruelty painless. But it does change how I respond to it. I know I can be cutting if I wanted to, to find the right handful of words that would land exactly where they’d hurt most. I know that about myself clearly.

And precisely because I know it, I try hard never to use it. There’s a kind of restraint that only makes sense once you understand the weapon you’re choosing not to pick up.

If that restraint is a form of power, and I think it is, it wasn’t given to me. It was forged, the hard way, out of defending myself against my mother’s cruelty, both as a child and on visits since. It built something in me: a shield, and behind the shield, a wall. I don’t keep them raised all the time.

I only bring them out when I truly need to, in situations that call for genuine defence rather than reflexive defence. That distinction matters to me. A wall you raise for everyone isn’t protection; it’s isolation. A wall you raise selectively, when something is actually at stake, is just good judgment.

What Confidence Actually Is

I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about the difference between confidence and arrogance, partly because I’ve been accused of the second when I know, as clearly as I know anything about myself, that what I was showing was the first.

Confidence, as I understand it, comes from genuine self-belief paired with real competence not a belief in your abilities that exists independently of evidence, but one that’s actually earned through experience. It shows up as self-assurance, yes, but also as humility, and as a genuine willingness to collaborate and take feedback from other people.

Confident people don’t need to be right all the time, because their sense of self isn’t riding on being right. They can hear “you made a mistake” without hearing “you are worthless.”

There’s a quieter source of confidence too, one I think gets overlooked: not breaking the promises you make to yourself. We talk endlessly about broken promises to other people: the friend you let down, the deadline you missed for someone else. But I think breaking a promise to yourself is worse, in a way that matters more long-term, because nobody’s watching to hold you accountable except you.

And when you keep those promises, consistently, quietly, without anyone else ever knowing you made them, you become something close to unstoppable. Not because you’re suddenly talented. Because you trust yourself. And trust, once it’s built between you and yourself, is very hard to shake from the outside.

What Arrogance Actually Is

Arrogance looks similar on the surface, which is exactly why it gets confused with confidence so often. But underneath, it’s the opposite thing wearing similar clothes. Arrogance is an inflated sense of self-importance, and it’s rooted not in strength but in insecurity a deep, usually unexamined insecurity that needs constant reinforcement from the outside. It shows up as dismissiveness toward other people’s ideas, an unwillingness to learn or be corrected, and a real, sometimes striking lack of empathy.

Here’s the clearest way I’ve found to put it: confidence is internal, and it radiates outward. Arrogance is a mask, worn on the outside, to hide an emptiness that exists inward. One is built from the inside out. The other is built from the outside in, and it collapses the moment nobody’s around to reflect it back.

I think that last row might be the most useful test I know of. Ask whether the quality would survive in complete privacy, with no one watching and no one to impress. Confidence does. Arrogance, stripped of its audience, tends to evaporate.

The Actual Skill: Looking Inward

When you have real self-awareness, you know who you actually are the good parts and the difficult parts. Your strengths, your talents, the things you do well without trying. And also the things you’re genuinely not good at, the flaws you’d rather not look at directly.

Knowing both, honestly, without flinching from either, makes you a rich person in a way that has nothing to do with money or status. It’s a kind of wealth most people never bother accumulating.

Most people spend the majority of their energy looking outward at other people, at circumstances, at what’s happening to them, and very little energy looking inward, at what’s happening in them. But I think the real power sits in the opposite direction.

What happens outside of us isn’t really the thing that matters most, as strange as that sounds. What matters is how we handle it internally. That’s the real skill of living well, and nobody teaches itdirectly. You have to work it out for yourself, usually the hard way.

Your good side deserves nurturing. Don’t hide it; don’t downplay it to make other people comfortable. Use it deliberately to keep growing. Your flaws deserve something different but equally important: honesty. You don’t need to hide them. You need to know exactly what they are, sit with that knowledge without shame, and work on them steadily.

That’s the only mechanism that actually produces change. Hiding a flaw preserves it. Naming a flaw is the first step toward outgrowing it. I’m actively working on mine, not as an abstraction but as an ongoing project I return to regularly.

The power, in the end, is in knowing yourself fully, honestly, without editing the inconvenient parts. Don’t look away from that. If you do, you risk losing sight of who you actually are, and that’s a much harder thing to recover than most people realise.

Be kind and be happy. If you cannot be happy, still be kind, but never be naïve.

In bed by 9 p.m.

Thank you for reading. Please explore my other posts and share your thoughts in the comments.

Richard

Photos by Richard George Photography