The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance – What Women Should Know

by Katty Kay

Not for the first time, we wondered about the tipping point between assertiveness and jerkiness. To put it bluntly—does one have to be an asshole to be confident?

The resonance of mastery is in the process and progress. It is about work, and learning to develop an appetite for challenge.

What matters is that mastering one thing gives you the confidence to try something else.

The meritocratic academic classroom, where we excel, doesn’t teach us to play very confidently in the assertive, competitive world of the workplace. With all their focus on getting high academic scores, too many girls are ignoring the really valuable lessons that wait outside of school.

Academics confirm what we know from our own experience as teenagers: girls suffer a larger drop in self-esteem during adolescence than boys, and it takes them longer to get over those demoralizing years.

But somewhere between the classroom and the cubicle, the rules change and they don’t understand it. They slam into a world of work that doesn’t reward them for perfect spelling and exquisite manners.

you don’t always have to dominate a conversation to have an impact.

If perfection is your standard, of course you will never be fully confident, because the bar is always impossibly high, and you will inevitably and routinely feel inadequate.

The anatomical difference in capabilities is usually resolved by age eighteen, but that gap, if misunderstood, can easily reinforce stereotypes at a critical learning age. You can imagine why, at sixteen, a girl may conclude she’s bad at math, or a boy may declare that he will never get Shakespeare. And yet, if they just waited for their hormones to settle by their late teens or early twenties, the necessary brain functioning for both math and Shakespeare would be online in both boys and girls.

Men have, after puberty, about ten times more testosterone pumping through their systems, and it affects everything from speed to strength to muscle size to competitive instinct.

There’s a downside to testosterone, to be sure. This egocentric hormone is also associated with an inability to see others’ points of view. When you have a lot of testosterone coursing through your body, you’re less interested in connecting and cooperating.

The main hormonal driver for women is, of course, estrogen, which promotes very different instincts from testosterone. Estrogen encourages bonding and connection; it supports the part of our brain that involves social skills and observations. It is part of what drives women to avoid conflict and risk and so it might hinder confident action at times.

We uncovered one startling study that found testosterone levels in men decline when they spend more time with their children.

The way we often think and behave isn’t wrong, but rather, understandable.

Self-compassion, you’ll recall, centers on the acceptance of our weaknesses. Instead of saying, “I am not a failure,” it’s more useful to say, “Yes, sometimes I do fail, we all fail, and that’s okay.” It’s extending the same kindness and tolerance—the very same qualities we find so much easier to afford our friends—to ourselves, while coming to terms with our own imperfections.

Teaching a child to accept and even embrace struggle, rather than shy away from it, is a crucial step along the path toward instilling confidence. You are showing the child that it’s possible to make progress without being perfect.

So, let your children make a mess of the cutlery, fall off bikes, crash from monkey bars. And for your part, stop getting overwrought about it. How you react can help build a spirit of independence and an aptitude for risk in your child.

We can help each other most by giving each other permission to act. One little nudge might be all we need.

We can speak calmly but carry a smart message. One that will be heard. Confidence, for many of us, can even be quiet.