Mila Kunis said “knowing who you are is confidence. Confidence, not cockiness. Cockiness is knowing who you are and pushing it down everyone’s throat.”

Finding this balance between confidence and cockiness is hard. We have been trained to be polite and modest. Because of this we usually find ourselves rejecting compliments; And why? Because we are too uncomfortable to just say thank you and feel we must repay the compliment with another. In other words, we do not have the confidence to just smile, say thank you, and move on.

Receiving compliments is not the only problem. Being able to compliment ourselves is one as well. I am a victim to this. It is easy to list bad things about yourself; what’s hard is listing things you like about yourself.

At Hockaday we succeed at many things; we are a fantastic school filled with very intelligent, well-rounded women, but we still have this one problem of which we can’t seem to rid ourselves: low self-esteem.

Attending Hockaday for 15 years, I have learned many things. I have had my successes and I have had my failures, but the one thing I wish I had a better grip on was self-confidence.

To better my confidence, and my friends, this year I have tried to make my friends compliment themselves three times when they say something undervaluing about themselves.

The hope of this exercise was to show girls that it is not cocky to proclaim things they like about themselves, whether it’s personality traits or physical  characteristics.However, trying to tell someone reasons why you love yourself is hard and uncomfortable: we don’t want to seem cocky. But it’s not cocky at all, actually. It’s necessary.

Finding that balance between self-confidence and cockiness is tricky. It is uncomfortable to accept a compliment and to give yourself a compliment; it all takes confidence. However, it is important for our health to be able to feel proud and comfortable of who we are and what we look like.

Although I only have a couple of months left here, I do hope I am able to leave a new trend of self-confidence behind me at Hockaday. Perhaps it will be made fun of, but I do believe this school would grow if the students inside of it felt comfortable with themselves.

– Gretchen O’Brien