Longtime readers will be familiar with my love of cooking reality shows, specifically ones that showcase creativity rather than just performance. I’ve found something even better to scratch that itch, which is SyFy’s Face Off, a reality competition show for TV and movie special effects makeup artists. The creativity is paramount, because they’ll prompt them with something like “fear of cold” and they have to create some kind of humanoid creature representation of that. It’s utterly delightful to watch, because you can start to see the creative process, from the seed, to the person’s first sketches, to how it gets modified because of the realities of materials and time.
The reason for the post, though, is that it has me pondering another aspect of competitions. SyFy has edited it together reasonably low drama, compared to some shows on places like, oh, I don’t know, Fox. I don’t know how their editing reflects reality, still, but people’s interactions read as relatively true to life to me, based on my experiences with groups of people all trying to accomplish things, and blowing off steam by bitching about others in the group.
It struck me that social situations call for a delicate balance between no confidence and arrogance. Not enough confidence and you sell yourself short; too much arrogance and people get annoyed, and you quickly lose allies and possible collaborators. And the interesting part is since some of the no confidence/arrogance continuum is about the closeness of the match between how people perceive you as presenting yourself, and what people perceive your real abilities to be, it’s dependent on other people’s biases and wonky perceptions. Then again, at least in the show, often other people were not far wrong, in aggregate. One person would have a grudge or be wrapped up in themself, but the group had a sense. There’s also the old scientific finding about how incompetent people don’t know they’re incompetent. (Because when you’re incompetent you don’t know enough about the field to compare your own skills to anything) But others around the person know.
I’ve been thinking about having and presenting confidence myself, lately (happily in the middle between no confidence and arrogance). Gauging and adjusting to the perceptions of the people around you seems a little crazy-making (seems likely to lead you astray later in life, if you end up in, say, grad school at one end, or with a cult fan following at the other), but something I also noticed in the show was you didn’t necessarily have to do that. You didn’t represent your skills much at all, positive or negative, you just used them and let people decide. You came off as confident because you didn’t denigrate yourself, and not arrogant because you weren’t presenting anything greater than your skills (by presenting nothing at all!).
Of course, there’s a time and a place for selling yourself (like getting onto the competition show), but this post is too long already, and I think it’s an interesting mental exercise, to consider when it might not be the time to sell yourself, just use your skills and shut up about it so you seem confident.
And now for something completely different, because it amused me so much…a lolwulf!
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