It took a while for me to come around to understanding how similar those traits can be.

You see confidence and ego in the same face, until one of them gets knocked out of the water. Ego leaves you in the strange position where the opinion of others is the only stable foundation for your sense of self, and every argument is a potential referendum for your worth as a person. If someone questions you, it's an attack on everything you stand for.

It's not something that people readily admit, and it's far easier to lie to yourself about when you've crossed the line into self-obsession. It's normal to want people to accept our principles; it's easy to lie to ourselves that we're always right about what we believe. There are times to stand up for yourself, and defend your principles when they're being attacked. It's also true that there are moments in a life where it's more important to save face than admit fault. There are ways and times for either of these, and I'm not saying that there's no place for drawing lines in the sand.

I think that the best way to examine this kind of behaviour is to look at how we react to being corrected. If you've made a mistake in front of other people, misunderstood something, or you've made a confident statement that you later discover was incorrect, there are two things that you can do. You can admit the mistake and continue on, or you can go into great detail as to why what you said initially was correct. It would be easy to become annoyed at the person correcting you as though they personally offended you by pointing out your error.

I think we've all done this at some point, and I doubt that I'm the only one who has. No sane person enjoys being made a fool in front of others, but there's a strange amount of time and energy that we can spend avoiding this happening to us. We can spend so much time trying to avoid being made the fool, that we forget to protect our ability to grow as people. It's not wrong to want to get better at things. If you've spent years working towards a particular goal, it'd be nice to be able to take pride in your accomplishment. If you're knowledgeable about a subject, there's no reason not to show it, but confidence allows you to acknowledge the skills that you have without doubting that you have them at every opportunity.

Ego creeps into the picture when you start needing to use those skills in proof of something else. You need to be the smartest person in the room, the one with the best story, the most compelling argument or the most impressive accomplishments. Once you become fixated on being in this position, conversations become little contests you weren't aware you were entering. This is exhausting on both sides, I'd wager. Nobody wants to feel that they are constantly in danger of being made the fool. You may be intelligent and a great communicator, but if people feel like they're walking on eggshells around you, eventually it's far easier to simply not be completely honest about some things. You don't go out of your way to insult or undermine you, but they might lie to your face to avoid a situation where they have to admit that you were right.

It's a particularly nasty position to be in because you can spend years convincing people of how amazing you are, and never notice that nobody has said anything meaningful to you in years. You might still be able to achieve great things, but it's far harder to get useful feedback from people. The people who care about you may notice mistakes and think that it's best not to be too vocal about them. The people who don't care about you have no reason to.

Eventually, you have to come to terms with the fact that people don't respect you in the grand scheme of things. They either admire you, or have worked out how to be polite around you so they don't find themselves getting in unnecessarily bad arguments with you. It's a very nasty trap to fall into because your ego convinces you that all of the respect and admiration is due to you, but it's actually being distributed across your entire personality. Some of those opinions are bound to be harmful in some way, but it's not like the rest of them are good either. I think, to a certain extent, that it's necessary to have disagreements. Some people are deliberately disrespectful and there are times when you need to stand your ground and not be swayed. You don't have to roll over and let people get away with disrespecting you just to prove that you're a better person than they are. You don’t need to spend the rest of your life second guessing yourself over each and every difference of opinion.

It is important to be clear on what you are disagreeing about and why you feel strongly about it. Are you firmly sticking to your beliefs, or are you angry because you’ve been made to look like a fool? The difference isn't always clear, I know, but it's worth considering once the dust has settled and the anger has abated. There are times that the other person is wrong, and times that you are. There are times that either of you are right in what you're saying but it doesn't matter at all.

It's also worth remembering the difference that confidence makes when it comes to your friends. If you're reasonably well-adjusted, then you can stand by other people's successes without feeling the need to immediately point out your own achievements. You can listen to people's ideas without immediately trying to improve them, and admit when someone else has far more knowledge in a particular area than you. You don't have to be the most interesting person in the room, or the one who has the answer to every question or the one who makes every achievement sound like an accomplishment greater than it is.

I think that a lot of the unnecessary tension around life can be removed simply by not approaching day-to-day things as a test for your ego. It is extremely reassuring to be around individuals who have an awareness of themselves without needing to continuously prove themselves to other people. They can defend themselves in instances where they have something worthwhile to say while keeping quiet at other times. These people don't have to put on a show every time they get criticized, nor does anyone need to tell them that they are comfortable in their own skin when challenged by other people.

You identify the traits through the lack or presence of such traits in other people. It is fairly easy for one to appear confident when the going is good, but how are you in times when everything else fails?

These are the traits that define a person's confidence in real life.

Perhaps this is the point to remember with ourselves, and it's something worth noting. Do you acknowledge that you've been wrong without spending the next ten minutes trying to explain how your mistake was justified?

You won't always get it right, of course. No one does. Sometimes you'll be a bad person in an argument, or make a mistake and feel like you should explain it away out of pride. Sometimes it will just take too long to argue for something you no longer believe in. It is not about being a person who does not feel insecure, but knowing how to stop these feelings from taking control of your actions.

It's easy for ego to creep into your head so that you feel like you're always being tested; if you've spent years calling it confidence, I suppose it's even easier for you. For me, it all comes down to defending yourself against certain things. You do not have to defend your dignity, principles, and other things you care about all the time. You don't need to protect a particular illusion of yourself that leaves no room for doubt or change. That illusion will be a burden to you in the end, and it'll be far easier to spend your life making sure that nobody knows that it isn't a reality.

Confidence allows you to walk away from things on your own terms, and ego makes you afraid of ever being seen stumbling in public. Life will give you plenty of opportunities to stumble, and there's no reason to make those moments any harder than they already are. You can be proud of yourself without needing to feel superior, confident in your thoughts without doubting that you're wrong more often than you admit, and secure enough in your skin that not everybody has to acknowledge you.