Armaghan Saqib

There was a time when I was under-confident. Everyone said I was a wizard in my field. I never believed these “lies”. I was never confident enough. I wanted to learn, learn and learn. I now realize that I missed many opportunities to grow big, to expand my business and to make better contacts; just because I did not feel confident enough.

This under-confident thing had one benefit; I became a staunch self-learner. Whenever confronted with a new task, I always picked a book and started reading.

Then a time came when I had become over confident. I thought I could do anything, just anything, with all my knowledge and a bit of effort. Sky was not the limit. This over-confidence almost killed my business and burned all my savings. I literally had to start from scratch and survived, fortunately.

This over confidence did help me achieve couple of almost impossible goals.

Any emotions and thoughts based upon your experience and hunch for which you can’t offer much justification come under metaphoric red hat. Being over-confident or under-confident without any reason is red hat.

Red hat thinking is a necessary part of our day to day thinking. We should depend on our hunch; we should take emotional decisions. But we should also give due share to black, yellow, white, blue, green hat thinking.

Here is a common sequence of thinking:

==> red ==> [ACTION] ==> black yellow green blue white

With six thinking hats we want to transform it to:

==> black yellow green blue white ==> red ==> [ACTION]

Note that in both sequences emotions (red hat) precede action but the second one is a better way to being under-confident or over-confident.