Having confidence in yourself is essential to surviving calamities great and small, but you don’t ever want to make plans solely based on feelings of confidence. Remember, your careful, broad analysis and evaluation of circumstances were what enabled you to decide upon a plan. Confidence is what will enable you to see your plan through.
Sometimes people over-rely on their confidence. They allow an unrealistic appraisal of their abilities to determine their actions. Or, their in inflated view of themselves results in their underestimation of such uncontrollable factors as the weather. People also run the risk of deriving a false confidence from their past experiences.
These three tendencies—overconfidence in our own abilities, underestimating the unknown, and trusting historical out- comes—mark the ways in which confidence can lead you astray. While you must be confident in your survival plan, you must also be vigilant that you don’t fall into one of these traps.
Danger #1: Overconfidence in Our Own Abilities
Overconfidence is often responsible for people getting into survival situations in the first place. If you have a leader who is prone to overconfidence, entire groups of people can end up compromised.
Danger #2: Underestimating the Unknown
Underestimating factors that are beyond your control is not an uncommon tendency, and can be disastrous. People chronically underestimate the force external factors can exert. Sometimes the decision is a short-term one, like choosing to drive on icy roads at night. At other times, it is a series of decisions over a long period of time, like not taking proper care of our health until we are faced with a heart attack or diabetes. Misplaced confidence isn’t confidence; it is denial or arrogance about our abilities. We start to believe something could never happen to us, so we don’t prepare. Or, we have an overinflated sense of our own abilities and end up gambling at much higher stakes than we intended to.
Danger #3: Trusting Historical Outcomes
We rely on our experiences to help us predict the future. This is an incredibly useful trait, one we rely on constantly as we navigate our daily lives. But when circumstances change and we continue to view them based on our old models about how the world works, we end up in trouble. While you should place value in your experiences, you have to remain attuned to the present. Treat every decision as a new one that requires its own analysis. This kind of vigilance is key.
Interestingly, complacency becomes the biggest problem when you have enough experience to feel confident but not enough to have mastered a skill. Complacency is a killer in all survival scenarios.