First question – is “swagger” good or bad?
The answer, of course, is both, like many things in life.
Swagger is a behavior that is confident, strong, even defiant. However, swagger can easily slip over the ever-moving line (depending upon who is doing the judging) to arrogant, insolent, or aggressive.
Do you have swagger? What is the source of your swagger?
Are you particularly competent in your field? Are you incredibly athletic and competitive? Do you have great beauty or charm? Have you earned or inherited prodigious assets?
Whatever the cause, can we agree that we should keep our swagger geared toward the power of good, and rein it in once we see we might be crossing over the invisible line toward the negative?
Second question — what happens when the source of your swagger changes? You leave or lose your position in your field, you get an injury or physical setback, you age and lose some of your excessive beauty, or you suffer financial losses.
Where does your swagger go? It just might swagger itself out the door.
If you are the type of person who gets what they want by using the swagger card, it might be time for some self-reflection. Swagger may not be a permanent condition given the vagaries of this world. And if swagger is the tool you most often rely upon to get what you need, it might be time to develop some other means to the ends you desire.
A longtime friend and colleague once counseled me on “the power of nice.” At that time, I was younger and full of swagger, and basically laughed off that idea. Nice? How quaint. Clearly, I had crossed that nebulous line from confident to cocky.
Having recently retired from a 3-decade career as a business owner, I suddenly felt like a house pet who was sent into the forest to ferally fend for myself.
How can I get things done without a team of people helping me because I pay them to do so? How will I be able to convince the truculent and unhelpful customer service person on the other end of the phone to do what I need them to do without the authoritative and confident demeanor I used to wear like second skin? Will I still just assume that the people I encounter respect me for who I am now, rather than who I used to be when I owned my business, or is there some reckoning I must face?
As I continue to build up my “power of nice” muscle, I realize that I feel better about myself as a human. Being nice rather than swaggering almost comes as a relief to the constant posturing of the assertive. I’m not advising just rolling over and getting your belly rubbed, I’m positing that there might be some happy medium.
