"At least I'm not arrogant"

You probably know someone who is never in doubt. He talks over people in meetings. He doesn't check things. He's wrong fairly often and doesn't seem to notice, and when it's pointed out he explains why it wasn't really his mistake. You'd rather be you than him, and your doubt feels like the thing that stands between the two.

So the belief is that self-doubt is a form of humility, and that if you lost it you'd start sliding towards him.

There's something right in this. Overconfidence is a real fault, and it does real damage in hospitals, on building sites and in boardrooms. Knowing where your knowledge runs out is a virtue, and you have it. I'd like you to keep it.

But humility and self-doubt aren't the same thing, and the difference matters. Humility, as I'd use the word, means being accurate about your limits and willing to be corrected. Accuracy works in both directions. A humble person can say "I don't know much about tax law". They can also say "I'm good at explaining technical things to customers", in the same flat tone, because both are true. Self-doubt is an error that always leans the same way. Bathroom scales that read five kilos light every morning aren't being modest. They're wrong, and you'd replace them.

There's a second part to humility, which is being open to correction, and here self-doubt does worse than you might expect. You'd think a person full of doubt would take criticism easily. Usually it's the opposite. When you already suspect you're not up to the job, a criticism doesn't land as information about paragraph four. It lands as confirmation of the general doubt, and it hurts accordingly. So you dread feedback and put off asking for it, and when it comes you may be too busy absorbing the blow to make use of it. The person who thinks "I'm decent at this, and paragraph four needs work" is in a much better position to fix paragraph four.

It helps to see these as two separate questions. The first is how you rate your ability. The second is how open you are to finding out you're wrong. The man in the first paragraph rates himself highly, which is a small problem. His large problem is the second question, where he's shut. To become him, you'd have to stop listening, stop checking and stop admitting mistakes. Rating yourself accurately requires none of that. You can move on the first question and stay exactly where you are on the second.

I'd add something that may be uncomfortable, and I mean it kindly. Self-doubt feels modest, but it keeps your attention on yourself. In the Monday meeting the subject was supposed to be the fall in sign-ups. For you, in that minute, the subject became how you would look. The modest thing to do, in the sense of putting yourself second, would have been to say "the form's broken on mobile, in case that's useful", because the problem mattered more than your standing.

That points to a cost other people bear. The team needed what you knew. It got it eventually from someone else, but plenty of times there's no someone else, and the thing you noticed goes unsaid. More broadly, when the careful people in a room stay quiet, the decisions get made by whoever is left. If you think overconfident people have too much say where you work, part of the reason is that people like you have been leaving them the floor.

The fair objection is that people do dislike a show-off, and that the penalty isn't handed out evenly. In experiments by the psychologist Laurie Rudman, women who talked up their own strengths were rated as more competent than women who were modest, and also as less likeable and less likely to be hired. Men who were modest lost on competence, and the results for how much they were liked were inconsistent. I don't doubt that many readers have felt this. It's a fact about those workplaces, and I'm not going to tell you it's all in your head.

But consider how much room there is between silence and showing off. Mentioning something you noticed isn't boasting. Nor is applying for a job, or answering a question you know the answer to, or saying "thank you" when someone praises your work. Nearly everything this book asks of you sits in that middle ground. You may have been treating the whole of it as dangerous because one edge of it is.

One more thought, which I find reassuring. The worry about becoming arrogant is itself a decent sign. Arrogant people don't, on the whole, lie awake concerned that they might be arrogant. If you keep checking your work, keep listening, and keep saying "I was wrong" when you were, you can afford a much better opinion of your abilities than you have now.

Here's a short exercise. Write down three things you're good at, in plain sentences, the way you'd write them about a colleague in a reference. "She's reliable with deadlines." "She explains things clearly." Now write them with "I". Notice the pull to add "but", or "I suppose", or "compared with some people". Leave those off, and read the three sentences back. They're meant as description, and if they make you wince, remember that you'd have written them about a colleague without a second thought.