I took my first CPR and First Aid class on adults, children, and pediatrics when I was sixteen, as part of my health class in school. As a whitewater kayak instructor, I have continued to take such classes regularly, in fact when my schedule allows I join the Scouts instructor trainings to take wilderness first aid instead of the standard first aid portion. I’ve got a bachelors degree that was primarily along the pre-med track to support my future in medical research. And there are those 2 years as a research assistant in grad school and 17 years of professionally supporting medical research – both of which you do much better at when you understand the biology of the medical thing you’re studying. For not being a medical professional, I’m pretty competent at understanding what is going on in the human body, in sickness, in health, and in injury.

But let’s not confuse that with a lack of fear. Fear is your body’s way of telling you to pay attention, that the consequences are high. If you are scouting a river, you are staring at a drop and you can’t work up the saliva to spit, that’s probably a drop you should be portaging. The longer you stare at the drop without being able to commit to a line down the rapids, and to walk back up river to your boat, the more likely it is you should carry that boat down and around. (If you are a whitewater boater and you’ve never read the classic William Nealy book Kayak, it’s priceless.)

If, as my CPR/First Aid instructor reminded us, most medical incidents happen within 7 miles of home, and therefore there’s a relatively high likelihood that you will know the person who you are assisting with their medical emergency, then you are likely to care about them. Doesn’t it make sense to feel fear for their future?

To fear for their future may be expressed as nervousness or anxiety in you as the provider of assistance. That is only natural.

Therefore I took issue when my most recent CPR/First Aid instructor took time in our class to repeatedly tell us that if we were nervous, we had no business passing his class. That if we had anxiety, we would not pass. That if we were afraid, we should leave now.

I am so glad this wasn’t my first certification, that I wasn’t younger. I might have walked right out, and missed out on valuable practice, a useful set of skills, vital material for my instructor certification. Because I would have assumed he meant what he said, rather than he was finding bad ways to explain what I think he really meant. While he kept talking about the importance of confidence, what I think he really meant was the importance of competence.

In our culture, we often confuse confidence for competence. It’s why politicians brashly proclaim the rightness of their decisions, no matter how much they are shooting in the dark on something that is not at all formulaic or pre-determined. And it’s why scientists are so often under-listened to, when we value curiosity and intellectual re-assessment with each new piece of data; to others we sound less confident. We follow confidence, when we should follow competence. Unfortunately, one of these takes a lot more time and effort to assess, and therefore we take mental short cuts that we probably shouldn’t take.

One of the highest compliments I can give someone is call them highly competent. I know a few such people, they are amazing, and I consider myself lucky to get to spend time with them.

Now to be fair, it is possible to have both confidence and competence. This is common among those both competent and trained in command, such as those who need to take charge in swift water rescues. It’s also common to have neither confidence nor competence. But don’t mistake confidence for competence. And don’t mistake fear for a lack of competence. Healthy fear is your body telling you to pay attention, that what you are doing matters. You can be afraid, and still do the right things.

Are you spending your energy projecting confidence? Or are you spending it accumulating competence?