I bet I know something about you.

I bet there are occasions when you put your confidence out there – times when you feel comfortable, safe or bold enough to be yourself and your self-confidence just flows out of you.  Then there are other occasions when you rein your confidence in, times when you feel vulnerable, scared or uncomfortable enough to pull yourself back and keep a lid on it.

You put your left confidence leg in, your left confidence leg out, in, out, in, out, you shake it all about.

You get the idea.  This is what I call the confidence hokey-cokey (or hokey-pokey for you folks in the USA), the continual in and out, back and forth, contract and expand of your self-confidence depending on your environment.

There are all kinds of reasons to pull your self-confidence back – a new job with new people, a party where you don’t know anyone, a room where someone else is taking the lead, a situation where you decide to keep quiet to maintain equilibrium, a first date or a gazillion other things.

But this post isn’t about those reasons, it’s about the one reason why dancing the confidence hokey-cokey is bad for you.

It makes you less than.

Across the board, whenever you pull in, restrain, tether or contain your self-confidence, it gives reality to a smaller you.

The more space you give over to that smaller you, the smaller you get.  The more you rein in your self-confidence the harder it becomes to put your confidence out there, and the easier being small becomes.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to end up a speck.

Why dance the confidence hokey-cokey in the first place?  It comes down to the driving force behind the vast majority of automatic decisions – it’s about wanting to belong and not wanting to be different.

As Seth Godin said recently, it’s about fitting in or standing out.  “You have this choice to make in everything you do,” he says, and that choice is everywhere in your life.

Making choices to fit in by sitting on your hands or missing out on something is one of the saddest things in life, it really is.

Don’t let yourself do it.

There’s a knack to this – you need to notice when you’re about to sit on your hands and do something that’s more “you” instead.  Stretch out your arms to hug someone, reach out to shake a hand or start waving them around, whatever (I’m talking metaphorically but feel free to do any of those things too).

David Billings put this brilliantly in his article “Be Your Own Bot” – “One of the most important skills I want to pass on to my kids isn’t how to blend, it’s how to feel comfortable being different.”

I notice when I’m about to do it, which typically happens when I’m around new people who might not know my little eccentricities.  Just last week I was at some Birthday drinks for my friend Jules, and met a bunch of new people in the bar.  I noticed the hokey-cokey about to kick in and could have pulled myself back and given them the lead, but I stopped myself.

What happened instead was that I let myself expand into the situation, and we talked and talked and talked; some serious, some nonsense, I found out a good deal about them (and they me) and we laughed ourselves silly.  I had a great night and I know they did too.  If I’d held my confidence in, not only would I have had an ‘average’ night, but I’d have kicked myself for being small.

Same goes for other situations – job interviews, family occasions, parties, networking events, dates and more.  The point is this – you won’t do anyone any good by pretending to be less than you really are.

You’re more powerful than you let yourself be.