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Leitura de 12 min

Self Confidence is Accepting Your Weakness

Summary

The episode begins by establishing trust as a critical ingredient for healthy teams and relationships, noting that without trust, we waste energy creating systems of accountability and reinforcement. Jonathan Cottrell then pivots to discuss trust from a personal angle: how we trust ourselves. He distinguishes between areas where we feel confident and those where we don’t, using the example of not being a practiced basketball player.

Cottrell proposes a mental exercise: think of things you don’t trust yourself to do. He asks listeners to accept two realities. First, you have the power to change your perspective and comfort level through skill development or shifting perception. Second, just because you can change this doesn’t mean you should or have to. This acceptance of areas where we lack confidence is framed not as a weakness, but as a component of self-awareness.

The core argument is that understanding what we can’t trust ourselves to do is a critical factor in self-confidence. True confidence isn’t about being the best at everything or having confidence in our ability to do specific tasks. Instead, it’s confidence that we know ourselves well—our strengths, what we can be trusted with, and, importantly, when we need to lean on others.

Cottrell warns against trying to bolster insecurity with something fake, which leads to an artificial and transparent version of ourselves. In contrast, embracing our shortcomings, recognizing they are a part of life, and knowing we are dynamic and can overcome some of them, is presented as the marker of true self-confidence. The episode concludes by tying this self-knowledge back to being able to take responsibility confidently, whether operating in our strengths or willingly trying in our areas of weakness.

Recommendations

Tools

  • Linode — A cloud computing provider offering Linux virtual machines and services like S3-compatible storage and managed Kubernetes. The sponsor is offering $100 in credit to listeners to develop, deploy, and scale applications.

Topic Timeline

  • 00:00:00 — Introduction to trust in teams and relationships — Jonathan introduces the episode’s theme by discussing the importance of trust for healthy teams and relationships. He explains that without trust, we waste energy creating inefficient systems of accountability and reinforcement. The episode will look at trust from a new angle: how we trust ourselves.
  • 00:02:10 — Shifting focus to self-trust and personal confidence — The discussion pivots from team trust to personal self-trust. Jonathan notes that everyone has areas of confidence and lack thereof, using the example of not being a practiced basketball player. He introduces the idea that self-trust involves both hard skills and softer, situational comfort levels.
  • 00:03:38 — A mental exercise on accepting lack of confidence — Jonathan guides listeners through a mental exercise to think of things they don’t trust themselves to do. He presents two key realities to accept: first, you have the power to change your comfort level through learning or perspective shift; second, you don’t have to change it. This acceptance is framed as a healthy part of self-awareness.
  • 00:07:12 — Distinguishing healthy acceptance from low self-confidence — After the sponsor segment, Jonathan clarifies that accepting areas where we lack trust is not the same as having low self-confidence. In fact, knowing what we can’t do is a critical component of confidence. It allows us to confidently accept responsibility for both our strengths and weaknesses.
  • 00:08:23 — True self-confidence as self-knowledge, not perfection — Jonathan defines true self-confidence. It is not confidence in being the best at everything, but confidence that we know ourselves well. This includes knowing our strengths, what we can be trusted with, and crucially, knowing when we need to lean on others. Trying to fake confidence in weaknesses creates an artificial persona.
  • 00:09:30 — Embracing shortcomings as a marker of authenticity — The episode concludes by arguing that embracing our shortcomings, recognizing they are a normal part of life, and knowing we can grow, is the true marker of self-confidence. This authentic self-awareness is contrasted with the insecurity that drives people to create a fake, transparent version of themselves.

Episode Info

  • Podcast: Developer Tea
  • Author: Jonathan Cutrell
  • Category: Technology Business Careers Society & Culture
  • Published: 2020-10-05T09:00:00Z
  • Duration: 00:10:37

References

Podcast Info

Transcript

[00:00:00] We talk about trust on this show all the time.

[00:00:07] This is one of the key ingredients for a healthy team, and it’s certainly a key ingredient

[00:00:13] for healthy relationships in general.

[00:00:17] In today’s episode, I want to talk about trust from a different angle, from the angle of

[00:00:22] looking at yourself.

[00:00:24] My name is Jonathan Cottrell.

[00:00:25] You’re listening to Developer Tea, and my goal on the show is to help driven developers

[00:00:29] like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers.

[00:00:34] I want to preface this show really quickly by letting you know that you might hear a

[00:00:37] little bit of rain in the background.

[00:00:39] I thought about waiting until the rain ended, but in the spirit of transparency, I decided

[00:00:46] to leave it in.

[00:00:47] Also, I personally like the sound of rain, so maybe I should do this more often.

[00:00:52] Anyway, enjoy the episode.

[00:00:56] Trust is critical for relationships.

[00:00:58] Trust is critical for teams, because so much of our energy is wasted when we don’t have

[00:01:05] trust.

[00:01:07] When we don’t have trust, we try to prop up all of our promises and each other’s promises.

[00:01:15] We try to prop up all of our values or our commitments with ways of ensuring that those

[00:01:20] commitments are kept.

[00:01:24] Very often, we will put into place negative and positive reinforcement in order to take

[00:01:31] the place of trust.

[00:01:33] All of this is inefficient, ultimately.

[00:01:37] Unfortunately, this kind of effort tends to backfire in negative ways, and it doesn’t

[00:01:44] lead to incredible results in the end anyway.

[00:01:49] There are times, obviously, when we can’t have trust, when we have to rely on certain

[00:01:55] systems of accountability, but most of the time, trust is a critical ingredient for high-performing

[00:02:01] teams.

[00:02:02] Now, of course, we’ve talked about this on the show before.

[00:02:05] Today, I want to talk about trust from a different angle.

[00:02:10] I want to talk about how you trust yourself.

[00:02:16] There are things that you trust yourself to do.

[00:02:20] There are ways that you trust yourself to be.

[00:02:24] You have confidence about certain things in your life and a lack of confidence about other

[00:02:30] things in your life.

[00:02:32] It’s easy to prove this because all of us have a vast majority of skill sets that we

[00:02:39] haven’t developed, and it’s not like we necessarily have to confront this every day.

[00:02:45] If I was suddenly to be put on a basketball court, then I would have a lot of trust issues

[00:02:51] for myself.

[00:02:52] I am not a practiced basketball player.

[00:02:56] But there are plenty of other skills that I do have plenty of confidence in, and it’s

[00:03:03] not just about these straightforward skills, these obvious kind of big, high-level skills.

[00:03:09] It’s also the more nuanced skills, the softer skills and the things that we wouldn’t necessarily

[00:03:16] call skills directly.

[00:03:18] There’s not really a name for those things, but rather situational experiences or situational

[00:03:25] comfortability.

[00:03:26] I want to talk about both sides of this coin because there will be things that we don’t

[00:03:32] trust ourselves to do.

[00:03:35] I want to go through a mental exercise with you.

[00:03:38] I want you to think about a couple of things that you do not trust yourself to do, that

[00:03:44] you don’t feel confident in, maybe you don’t feel like you have the right skill set or

[00:03:48] maybe the right experience, or for whatever reason, you just don’t trust yourself to operate

[00:03:54] in that particular environment.

[00:03:57] Now I want you to accept two things, two realities about the things that you don’t trust yourself

[00:04:05] to do today.

[00:04:07] The first reality is that you have the power to change your own perspective on your comfortability.

[00:04:16] In other words, if you want to become more comfortable with a particular skill set, a

[00:04:22] particular situation, then you have the opportunity to do that.

[00:04:28] You can grow to become more comfortable with those experiences, with those situations.

[00:04:34] Sometimes this is about learning a skill set.

[00:04:36] Sometimes this is about becoming more comfortable with situations where you already have the

[00:04:41] right skill set and your perception is telling you that you don’t or that you somehow are

[00:04:48] inadequate.

[00:04:50] You have the opportunity to change this.

[00:04:52] And then the second thing that I want you to accept is that just because you can change

[00:04:57] this level of comfortability, this trust in yourself about this particular situation doesn’t

[00:05:03] mean that you should.

[00:05:06] It certainly doesn’t mean that you have to.

[00:05:10] So these are two very important things to accept about your trust in yourself.

[00:05:16] That number one, there are things that you can change about your self-trust.

[00:05:21] And number two, you don’t have to.

[00:05:26] This acceptance of areas of our life where we don’t necessarily feel comfortable or confident,

[00:05:33] it’s a common message that self-confidence is broadly a good thing.

[00:05:39] And while it makes sense from a high level, there are things that we will never be confident

[00:05:45] about, and we should be able to accept that and to affirm it.

[00:05:51] Why should we be able to accept it?

[00:05:52] Well, that’s what we’re going to talk about right after we talk about today’s sponsor,

[00:05:57] Linode.

[00:05:58] Whether you’re working on a personal project or if you’re managing enterprise infrastructure,

[00:06:03] you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to

[00:06:07] take your project to the next level.

[00:06:09] And Linode is going to help you do that.

[00:06:11] In fact, they’re going to give you $100 to help you do that.

[00:06:15] I’ll tell you how to get that in just a second.

[00:06:17] With Linode, you can simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode’s Linux virtual machines and

[00:06:22] develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier.

[00:06:27] With that $100 worth of free credit, you can do all of this stuff and more.

[00:06:32] You can find all the details at Linode.com slash developer T. Linode has 11 global data

[00:06:38] centers and provides 24-7, 365 human support with no tiers or handoffs.

[00:06:45] Hopefully you’re not working all 365 of those days, but if you are, so is Linode.

[00:06:51] You can use your $100 credit on both shared and dedicated compute instances, but you can

[00:06:56] also use it on things like S3 compatible object storage, managed Kubernetes, and more.

[00:07:02] Visit Linode.com slash developer T and click on the create free account button to get started.

[00:07:08] Thanks again to Linode for sponsoring today’s episode of developer T.

[00:07:12] We’ve been talking about trusting yourself in today’s episode, and I want to make something

[00:07:16] clear here.

[00:07:18] When we say that it’s okay that we should affirm ourselves in things that we don’t trust

[00:07:24] ourselves about in these situations that we don’t trust ourselves to be in, this is

[00:07:31] very different from broadly not trusting ourselves in general.

[00:07:36] This is very different from having low self-confidence.

[00:07:40] In fact, in some ways, understanding when we can’t trust ourselves is a critical factor

[00:07:47] in our self-confidence.

[00:07:51] So let’s break this down.

[00:07:53] When we know what we can’t trust ourselves in and what we can trust ourselves in, then

[00:07:59] we can more confidently accept responsibility for both sides of that coin.

[00:08:07] When we know that we’re not very good at something and yet we still have to participate in that

[00:08:13] particular activity, then we can take responsibility upfront, knowing that we’re not very good

[00:08:19] at that thing, but being willing to try anyway.

[00:08:23] And this willingness to understand our strengths and weaknesses, that is a marker of self-confidence.

[00:08:32] It’s not our confidence in our ability to do something.

[00:08:36] It’s not confidence in being the best at everything.

[00:08:41] Instead, it’s confidence that we know ourselves well, that we know what we’re good at, we

[00:08:50] can trust ourselves to do, and perhaps most importantly, we know when we need to lean

[00:08:57] on someone else.

[00:08:59] This is, once again, an incredibly important part of self-confidence, because if we feel

[00:09:05] insecure and we try to bolster our insecurity with something fake, we try to fill in that

[00:09:14] gap as if we needed to, well, now we’ve lost all sense of self-confidence and instead we

[00:09:23] participate in this artificial and often transparently artificial version of ourselves.

[00:09:30] But if instead we can embrace the parts that we don’t understand, if we can embrace our

[00:09:37] shortcomings and remind ourselves that those shortcomings are okay, that having shortcomings

[00:09:44] is a part of life and that not only is it a part of life, but we also are dynamic and

[00:09:49] we can overcome some of those shortcomings in our lives, this is the marker of true self-confidence.

[00:09:59] Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of Developer T. Thank you again to

[00:10:02] Linode for sponsoring today’s episode.

[00:10:05] Head over to linode.com slash developer T to get started today.

[00:10:08] You’re going to get $100 worth of credit if you start a new account, open a new account

[00:10:14] on Linode, linode.com slash developer T. Thanks again for listening.

[00:10:18] This episode and every other episode of Developer T can be found on spec.fm.

[00:10:23] Today’s episode was produced by Sarah Jackson.

[00:10:26] My name is Jonathan Cottrell and until next time, enjoy your tea.

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