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

by Katty Kay

women have kept our heads down and played by the rules. We have made undeniable progress. Yet we still haven’t reached the heights we know we are capable of scaling.

Why is it that women sound less sure of ourselves when we know we are right than men sound when they think they could be wrong?

Imagine all the things over the years you wish you had said or done or tried—but didn’t because something held you back.

what we need to do is start acting and risking and failing, and stop mumbling and apologizing and prevaricating.

Women are so keen to get everything just right that we are terrified of getting something wrong.

With diligent effort, we can all choose to expand our confidence. But we will get there only if we stop trying to be perfect and start being prepared to fail.

Confidence is the purity of action produced by a mind free of doubt.

The propensity to dwell on failure and mistakes, and an inability to shut out the outside world are, in his mind, the biggest psychological impediments for his female players, and they directly affect performance and confidence on the court.

overthinking, people pleasing, and an inability to let go of defeats—three traits we had already realized belonged on a confidence blacklist.

The resonance of mastery is in the process and progress. It is about work, and learning to develop an appetite for challenge. Mastery inevitably means encountering hurdles; you won’t always overcome them, but you won’t let them stop you from trying.

“I am a valuable person and I feel good about myself.” Agree with that and chances are you have pretty high self-esteem.

Optimism is a question of interpretation, and that basic glass half-full, half-empty measure still works well.

Another hallmark of optimism is gratitude. If you are an optimist, you notice that good things happen to you, and you feel grateful for them.

far from being in conflict with confidence, or encouraging sloth-like behavior, self-compassion drives confidence—allowing us to take the very risks that build it. It is a safety net that actually enables us to try for more and even harder things. It increases motivation because it cushions failure.

Self-efficacy is defined as a belief in your ability to succeed at something.

Confidence is linked to doing. We were convinced that one of the essential ingredients in confidence is action, that belief that we can succeed at things, or make them happen.

It is a willingness to go out of your comfort zone and do hard things.

“Confidence is the stuff that turns thoughts into action.”

The natural result of under-confidence is inaction. When women don’t act, when we hesitate because we aren’t sure, even by skipping a few questions, we hold ourselves back. It matters. But when we do act, even when we’re forced to act, to answer those questions, we do just as well as men.

Confidence, ultimately, is the characteristic that distinguishes those who imagine from those who do.

When dopamine, which gets us moving, is commingled with serotonin, which induces calm thought, and oxytocin, which generates warm and positive attitudes toward others, confidence can much more easily take hold.

nurture is so powerful that it can alter nature’s original programming, turning genes on and off, as it were.

the power of habitual thinking creates physical changes and new neural pathways in our brains, which can reinforce and even override genetics and change brain chemistry, as well.

brain training, she explained to us, or methods of thinking, can carve new pathways in our adult brains, pathways that encourage resilience, or confident thinking, and that then become part of our hard-wiring.

It is in school that girls are expected to keep their heads down, study quietly, and do as they’re told.

encouraging our girls to be compliant can do real long-term damage, but she also thinks that it’s hard to avoid.

we do it because we can, and then because we’re rewarded for it. We do it for our teachers and our parents, too. Soon we learn that we are most valuable, and most in favor, when we do things the right way: neatly and quietly. We begin to crave the approval we get for being good.

Research shows that when a boy fails, he takes it in stride, believing it’s due to a lack of effort. When a girl makes a similar mistake she sees herself as sloppy, and comes to believe that it reflects a lack of skill.

Professional success demands political savvy, a certain amount of scheming and jockeying, a flair for self-promotion and not letting a no stop you.

Unlike our male colleagues, women often would rather be liked than respected,

women have an instinct to dwell on problems rather than solutions: to spin and spin

of all the warped things that women do to themselves to undermine their confidence, we found the pursuit of perfection to be the most crippling.

perfectionism keeps us from action.

It was doing hundreds of those small things that built my confidence as an adult. You’re not born with it. You build and you build. I built that confidence myself.”

there is little question that parents of a different generation, and perhaps from different cultures, have offered a hands-off approach that in many ways served kids better than our modern American meddling.

modern parenting has created hollow confidence for both genders, as it often gives kids little responsibility, matched with a lot of praise and prizes. They’re deprived of adversity and the chance to fail.

Confidence, at least the part that’s not in our genes, requires hard work, substantial risk, determined persistence, and sometimes bitter failure.

the secret to success may in fact be failure. By failing a lot, and when we’re young, we inoculate ourselves against it and are better equipped to think about the big, bold risks later. Failure, though, has to be handled in a constructive fashion,

Confidence requires a growth mind-set because believing that skills can be learned leads to doing new things. It encourages risk, and it supports resilience when we fail.

Being different is part of the story of every highly successful woman, just by virtue of the fact that there are so few women at the top. We can resent it, let it undermine us or limit us, or we can embrace our uniqueness and choose to wear it as a badge of honor.

genuinely confident women, perhaps genuinely confident people, don’t feel that they have to hide anything. They are who they are, warts and all, and if you don’t like it, or think it is weak to show vulnerability, too bad for you. These ambitious women have taken a risk in exposing their weaknesses, but it definitely hasn’t kept them from succeeding; indeed it may well be part of the reason for their success: They are brave enough to be not only different, but to be themselves.

people who base their self-worth and self-confidence on what others think of them don’t just pay a mental price; they pay a physical price, too.

When our confidence is based on external measures, the biggest risk is that we won’t act. We are more likely to avoid risk if we think we might feel a dip in approval.

the same menu we’ve been detailing—she took risks, she was persistent, she worked hard, and even failed. And it worked.

Our biggest and perhaps most encouraging discovery has been that confidence is something we can, to a significant extent, control. We can all make a decision, at any point in our lives, to create more of it,

When we say confidence is a choice, we mean it’s a choice we can make to act, or to do, or to decide. If you’ve read only this chapter, you know that confidence is work, hard and deliberative, though we have no doubt that it is doable.

If we can embrace failure as forward progress, then we can spend time on the other critical confidence skill: mastery.

quick failures will let us be choosy about how we spend our time. No longer will we need to try to get everything right. A lot will land in the garbage heap.

it’s not the strongest species that survives in the long run—it’s the one tha...

Nothing builds confidence like taking action, especially when the action involves risk and failure.