[Arch0wl]

Originally Posted by Reincarnate

This is different from confidence, where you don't have to advertise your strengths. You show, rather than tell. There is no expectation put on the audience -- they are free to come to their own conclusions rather than be told what to think. That annoying sense of neediness is not present.

I think this places a lot of trust in audiences to know how to appraise a skill accurately. Since we've settled on bench press for an example, I'd bet that most people register 315lb and 405lb bench presses as "a lot", as some nebulously huge amount of weight in their head, even though someone who can bench 405lb is enormously more rare than someone who can bench press 315lb. (315lb is rare as it is; here's a discussion of this.) You might also expect people to estimate (based on your musculature) that you can bench a lot, but observers have no idea what that number actually is, so expecting people to guess that you can bench some vaguely large number because of some mental correlation with you being a large person is hardly an actual understanding of your skill.