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

by Katty Kay

our lack of self-belief.

In the most basic terms, what we need to do is start acting and risking and failing, and stop mumbling and apologizing and prevaricating.

we don’t seem to believe we can succeed,

we are terrified of getting something wrong. But, if we don’t take ri...

the next ...

Perhaps most striking of all, we found that success correlates more closely with confidence than it does with competence.

male and female brains do indeed work differently in ways that affect our self-assurance.

volitional: our choice.

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.

Having talent isn’t merely about being competent; confidence is actually a part of that talent. You have to have it to be good at your job.

If you are an optimist, you notice that good things happen to you, and you feel grateful for them. If you’re a pessimist, you probably don’t pay attention to positive things as often, and when they do happen, you believe them to be chance occurrences. Psychologists suggest this simple test: Open a door for an optimist, and the chances are she will thank you. A pessimist is much less likely to even notice the door being held for

her and, if she does, she will assume it was merely being opened for someone else.

“Don’t beat yourself up; put yourself in the broader human condition, and accept some failure.”

“I was mean to my friend, failed to make dinner, didn’t talk to that lonely-looking person, didn’t do my homework, didn’t go to the gym, didn’t finish my project at work, didn’t take the tough college course. Oh well, I’m only human. Where’s the remote?”

“Most people believe that they need to criticize themselves in order to find motivation to reach their goals. In fact, when you constantly criticize yourself, you become depressed, and depression is not a motivational mind-set,” Neff said.

It is the acceptance that it’s okay to be average sometimes.

“Being called average is considered an insult. We all have to be above average. It sets up a very comparative mind-set. But the math doesn’t work. It isn’t possible for us all to be above average, even though many studies show most Americans think they are.”

Self-efficacy is

defined as a belief in your ability to succeed at something. Bandura’s central premise was that those beliefs, our sense of self-efficacy, can change the broader way we think, behave, and feel.

Indeed, you have to get out of your head to create it and to use it.

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.

“Confidence is the stuff that turns thoughts into action.” Other factors, he explained, will of course play a role. “If the action involves something scary, then what we call courage might also be needed for the action to occur,”

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.

So is confidence encoded in our genes? Yes—at least in part.

Both 23andMe and Genomind offered some, but not all, of the testing we were looking for, and 23andMe was still in full operation then, so we doubled down. We understood, by that point in our research, that genetics aren’t determinative. But still it felt like an important decision.

The young men at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, have a name for female students. They call them DUBs—dumb ugly bitches.

Peggy McIntosh, associate director of the Wellesley Center for Women, thinks that encouraging our girls to be compliant can do

real long-term damage, but she also thinks that it’s hard to avoid. It’s actually easier for young girls than young boys to behave well, because our brains pick up on emotional cues from an earlier age. So 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. And there’s certainly no harm intended: Who doesn’t want a kid who doesn’t cause a lot of trouble?

Carol Dweck, author of the best seller Mindset and a Stanford psychology professor, puts it this way: “If life were one long grade school, women would be the undisputed rulers of the world.”

“Girls still don’t play enough competitive sports, where we train them to know what it’s like to compete and win,” says Susannah Wellford Shakow, cofounder of Running Start, the group that prepares women to run for political office.

When a young man applies for a position and doesn’t get it, she says, his reaction is to blame the process: “They didn’t review my application fairly,” or “This is a really tough season for job hunting.” The woman’s automatic reaction is personal: “Oh, no, they found me out, I wasn’t up to it.” In both these cases, who’s more likely to try again?

But, 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.

you will inevitably and routinely feel inadequate.

perfectionism keeps us from action. We don’t answer questions until we are totally sure of the answer, we don’t submit a report until we’ve line edited it ad nauseam,

we hold back until we believe we’re perfectly ready and perfectly qualified.