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Have you ever done anything that required extreme amount of confidence ? Tell me.
LaDama asked a question a few days ago about what turns you into a ‘don’t fuck with me’ person and my immediate thought was someone abusing an animal. And I was thinking about this time.
My brother and I were on the bus with our dog, Toby. Although Toby didn’t particularly like being on a bus, he was used it, and because he was well-trained, he always behaved himself. We were going to see my granny one Saturday afternoon - we’d been 12/13 years old. We were sitting upstairs, right at the front, out of the way of the stairs and anyone coming or going. A drunk man in his fifties came upstairs and sat across the aisle from us - Toby was sitting on the floor in between. He started petting Toby quite roughly, but that was okay. We’d been on the bus for quite a while and Toby started to cry a wee bit - nothing to annoy anyone. The man started shoving Toby and saying “shut up” really loudly. Then he whacked him over the nose. That was me! I said, “Leave my dog alone!” really sternly, even though I was shitting myself. And he did. He stopped immediately and looked out the window. We couldn’t wait to get off that bus!
Walk in on a meeting with own and foreign staff and your scientific opponent is there staring at you and you take the opportunity to directly address him before you sat down and make it clear who is the boss. He loved me for that. Some people are conditioned to only respect "male" alpha-gorilla habits.
I've given talks for over a 100 people, that's about it - for me though, it wasn't really about confidence so much as making my subject matter interesting and keeping an audience that was forced to be there engaged - THAT is the hard part
Oh and I guess talking to like models and shit, but again for me that isn't really about confidence so much as me just not caring much - maybe that comes across as confidence, good for me I guess
The national high school exam - which is used for uni admission here - back in 2021.
It didn't require confidence, per se, but I can say from experience that it's much more important than just having the knowledge if you want to endure 6 hours of taxing mindwork for a sufficiently high score.
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