I think about the concept of confidence quite a bit, mainly because I have social anxiety and I have struggled with my self-confidence or lack of it for many years. In that time I have read many books around the subject but one text in particular has stood out, perhaps most surprisingly it isn't a book about anxiety at all but rather a book about Cold Reading that had a generic extract that at first pass was so specific I thought it had been written for me personally, but that was the point. The extract served to demonstrate how statements that seemed precise and personal were actually generic when you stepped back and considered them objectively, free from the original context in which they were made.
Whilst the purpose of this extract was to demonstrate the effectiveness of confidence trickery, the key take away for me was the fact that the specific insecurities the passage referred to were considered generic which alluded to the wider experiences that people have; or more succinctly the prevailing relationship to confidence that people have in general. If a fear of being judged and what other people might think of you is considered generic in this regard, then it had to be a fear that everyone, or at least the vast majority of people had.
