In skydiving, there are two kinds of jumpers: Confident jumpers and cocky jumpers. Retiring, hesitant, wishy-washy jumpers don’t have much staying power in the sport and, if they make it to their solo skydiving licenses, they tend to exit the sport before more than one or two seasons has come and gone. After all: In the sky, decisions need to be swift, definitive and delivered with the force of all the skydiver’s conviction. Tiny hesitations matter: from of a fraction of a second in the door to a lagging turn to a hint of uncertain slowness in a transition, unconfidence manifests itself in — well — a whole lot of unintended solos, at best.

It’s the confident jumper that gets into the formation; that gets the docks; that enjoys the videos where her/his visor sits inches from the camera on an angle jump, tongue hanging out in a labrador grin; that sticks with it to break-off. That said: With the wrong inflection, confident overripens to cocky in much the same way that a perfect avocado goes to brown goo. And cocky jumpers are, generally speaking, the ones that end up with scars, stitches and hospital stays. What makes this harder is that the boundaries of the two states of mind, due to the pressures of our sport, often blur. Luckily, the most efficient keys to understanding the differences are right there in the very words we’re using.

Confident: The Word

ORIGIN late 16th century: from French confident(e), from Italian confidente, from Latin confident- ‘having full trust’, from the verb confidere, from con-(expressing intensive force) + fidere ‘trust’.

When you think about what trust looks like, what do you picture? You probably don’t picture a person with a bullhorn, making sweeping statements about how they’re trustworthy. (Snake-oil salesperson, much?) If something looks like confidence but it’s too loud, we instinctively know not to trust it; if we’re smart and we’re paying attention, we are repelled. Trust, on the other hand, has magnetic qualities. The people around it can feel its pull, generally reacting to it as leadership.

True trust is quiet and sure. It takes a step back when it needs to evaluate the landscape of the reality it’s moving across (otherwise, it’s faith; faith has very little to do with the kind of trust we exercise in skydiving). True trust moves forward with open eyes and an open heart. When it says “no,” it does so with the courage of its convictions. Trust has to be cautious because it’s a precious resource that can’t afford to go to waste. And confidence is, per the definition above, enjoying that resource in its full flower.

Cocky: The Word

ORIGIN Old English cocc, from medieval Latin ‘coccus’; reinforced in Middle English by Old French ‘coq’.

Have you ever ordered the classic ‘Coq a Vin’ at a French restaurant? That dish, as you might recall from pictures of animals in your high school French classes, is made from rooster. Cockiness, then, is the state of being like a rooster. CA-CAW.

The humble rooster is not known for being quiet and sure. Its key qualities are startling, indiscriminate loudness and–if its job is to announce the dawn–reliably wrong. Nobody looks to a rooster as a source of dependable information. In fact, this Japanese experiment discovered that roosters generally crow to announce their place in the (actual) pecking order, and to assert ownership over food and other resources. But the rooster does not care. S/he goes right on crowing.

After you’ve been a sport skydiver for a while, you kinda get a sense for confidence vs. cockiness in practice. Together, we witness feats of incredible extremity being pulled off with immense confidence (example: A Door In The Sky, wherein the unflappably confident Fred Fugen and Vince Reffet flew their BASE wingsuit jump right into the door of a flying plane) and feats of comparative simplicity starting cocky and ending poorly (Example: the regular parade of close calls on Friday Freakout.) We notice that it’s the cocky people jumpers that, by and large, break or scare themselves out of the sport; that the confident people often to lead its advancement.

If you’re in a situation where it’s hard to tell the difference and the five-minute call just went up, here’s the quick-and-dirty Cockiness Revealer Test:

1. Is the volume of the decision turned up to hide an insecurity beneath it?
2. Is the person making the decision looking for any kind of attention?
3. Would the smartest person you know agree that it’s a good idea?

If the situation fails any of the above, you’re looking at cocky. Don’t be this evening’s internet-video Coq a Vin.

Interested in learning to skydive in a cockiness-free environment? We take pride in raising confident skydivers at Skydive Orange. Join us!