I was a confident little girl who fell victim to a world that told me that I shouldn’t feel so strongly about myself or my beliefs. Do you have any advice on how to get that back? —Claire Burdick via Facebook 

So here’s the deal with confidence. I used to have no confidence, then I had a great deal of false confidence, and now I’m infused with real confidence. When people get the confidence knocked out of them, I feel like it was probably false confidence because you can’t, I don’t think, get it knocked out of you when you are truly confident. I think you have to be able to have everything taken away from you and be sitting in a ditch and know you could build it up from scratch. That’s how I feel and that’s how I know it’s true confidence.
Now, one thing I will say about women is that confidence tends to offend people a lot when you truly have it. You have to be really careful about that. So what I’ve noticed is, while I want to encourage women to be very confident, I think you can be quietly confident. If you’re just like, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” around everyone, that’s very unbecoming. Quiet confidence is the thing we need to be telling girls about, not shout-it-from-the-rooftops confidence, and that’s how I think you can really succeed.

Mindy Kaling. 

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jarettwieselman/advice-mindy-kaling-has-for-women#.cbEDXO1ON