Confidence is self-rewarding and not a superiority contest

A few minutes ago, I had to reactivate my Quora account to update my email address. Yes yes, don’t remind me how I change my email addresses too often. I know my sins.

Anyway, I received a notification of a woman who commented on one of my answers. She said the following.

Casey Palmer
Feb 20
Hey! So, I actually just worked out with my BF for the first time and we learned I can lift a lot more than him. He got really upset and made us wrestle in the living room when we got home but I beat him 5/5 times (he passed out the last time because he refused to tapout). Now he’s super emasculated about it and I don’t know what to do. It sounds like you could have had a similar experience, any advise?

Which I responded with this.

Leeman
Original Author · Just now
Sorry, my account was deactivated and so did not get any notifications.

The problem here is the character of your boyfriend. It’s not a problem with you. So you actually don’t need to do anything and you shouldn’t. If you feel you have to do something, it means your boyfriend isn’t showing you the respect this relationship deserves.

Let’s put it this way, confidence is self-rewarding. If a person must compete with others to feel superior, then they’re not actually a confident person. In this case, he felt super emasculated because in his world view, he thinks men should be superior to women. That is a wrong, dark-ages way of thinking. What he should really be thinking is that he is himself and you are yourself. You two complement each other and do not compete with each other.

If this was my wife and I, we would simply talk it out, but like my answer dictates, I wouldn’t have an issue in the first place.

Note the sentence I bolded in my comment.

Confidence is self-rewarding. If a person must compete with others to feel superior, then they’re not actually a confident person.

Now, I would like to address a few things with the word “confidence” or “confident” because I feel that too many people use these words incorrectly.

For example, if someone asks if you’re confident in winning something like a sport event or a spelling bee, and you answer by saying, “Yes, I’m confident I will win”, you’re not actually confident. What you have instead, is faith that you will win. Whether you actually will win or not isn’t up to you. If you lose, it’s possible you lost because you lacked confidence, but if you won, it’s not because you have confidence that you would win. You won because you had the ability. Ultimately, confidence isn’t about winning or beating someone else. It’s not about the other person or other people. It’s about you and only you.

It’s about how you feel about yourself. It’s about the positivity you feel on the inside, regardless of the situation you’re in. It’s what puts you back on the path to try again. Confidence is about attitude.