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

by Katty Kay

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

Why do men usually just assume they’re so great? Why do mistakes and backhanded comments just seem to slide off them?

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,

“The best male players I’ve coached, whether it’s Jordan or people like that, they are tough on themselves. They push themselves. But they also have an ability to get restarted more quickly. They don’t let setbacks linger as long. And the women can.”

WNBA, that’s something that I still have to work on.” “I feel like with women, you still want to please people,”

Luck. What could be more divorced from luck than passing all of the clearly defined, objectively measured physical and mental and intellectual hurdles that the military neatly lays out for someone like Michaela Bilotta? How was it that she couldn’t see that what she had accomplished wasn’t just a fluke? Of

On graduation day, she was astonished to learn she’d finished first in her class. “I realized I had deserved to be there all along and that some of the geeky guys who talked a big game weren’t necessarily smarter.”

On average, she says, the men think they deserve $80,000 a year and the women $64,000—a $16,000 difference.

She found that the men consistently overestimated their abilities and subsequent performance, and that the women routinely underestimated both. The actual performances did not differ in quality.

Do men doubt themselves sometimes? Of course. But they don’t examine those doubts in such excruciating detail, and they certainly don’t let those doubts stop them as often as women do.

behavior, or an endless focus on feeling good about oneself. A rat’s confidence might be broadly described as a belief that it can create a successful outcome (drops of water) through its action (waiting).

Our real fear, though, was that mastery would just turn out to be a recipe for the endless pursuit of perfection—something to which women are far too susceptible already.

And the unexpected by-product of all of that hard work you put in to mastering things? Confidence. Not only did you learn to do something well, but you got a freebie.

“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.

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. The

But fear of failure led to inaction, thus guaranteeing failure.

One little nudge asking us how sure we are about something rattles our world, while with men, it seems to just remind them that they’re terrific.

Confidence is life’s enabler—professionally, intellectually, athletically, socially, and even amorously.

“And, in fact, it is actually adaptive to have a little extra confidence for good measure in the face of uncertainty.” In other words—better to believe a bit too much in your capabilities than is called for, because then you lean toward doing things instead of just thinking about doing them.

in some monkeys, anxiety and lack of confidence manifest themselves as hyperactivity and aggression.

the worrier gene variation leaving dopamine in our brains longer, leads to higher IQs.

it overwhelms our brains, causing a sort of stress shutdown. Suddenly, the tables are turned. The genetic variation that removes the dopamine the most slowly, in that moment, the worrier variation, is not a good thing, because it contributes to that shutdown.

Suomi has come to see the monkeys with the anxious gene as sponges, absorbing the worst, but also the best, of what they experience.

We intuitively understood how this might affect confident action. Our memories, conscious or not, are informing what we decide to do next. A memory of a negative comment from a colleague in a meeting four years ago may still be contributing to our tendency to keep quiet. Conversely, a few successful speeches in college, even though we may no longer remember those experiences, may be giving us the confidence to speak at the company’s annual meeting.

ourselves. I suppose I am quite confident, actually, that once we start to nudge our hands skyward, we will find our wisdom to be easily unleashed.”

Studies evaluating the impact of the 1972 Title IX legislation, which made it illegal for U.S. public schools to spend more on boys’ athletics than on girls’, have found that girls who play team sports are more likely to graduate from college, find a job, and be employed in male-dominated industries. There’s even a direct link between playing sports in high school and earning a higher salary in later life. Learning to own victory and defeat in sports is a useful lesson for owning triumphs and setbacks at work.

girls suffer a larger drop in self-esteem during adolescence than boys, and it takes them longer to get over those demoralizing years. The drop in confidence makes them more likely to quit team sports because their self-confidence isn’t robust enough

Faced with these corporate realities, sometimes we women give up altogether, deciding we don’t fit in this world and can’t be bothered to put up with it when the toll on our psyches and our families is so high.

Every morning we have to drag on our office armor, trying to win a game we don’t really understand or like.

the more senior a woman is, the more she makes a conscious effort to play down her volubility. It’s the reverse of how most men would handle their power.

we dislike women who talk

Obese boys go on to college just as much as other boys do, but obese girls are less likely to go to college than other girls. It sets up heavy girls for a long-term struggle.

Overweight men can even benefit from the Tony Soprano effect. They can be seen as powerful, savvy, competitive, and intelligent. Yet if a woman is overweight, her size is seen as a negative reflection not just of her physical attractiveness but also of her intellectual capability. She is deemed less organized, less competent, and lacking in self-control.

Have you ever noticed that women tend to be really good at taking the blame for things gone bad, and crediting fate, or other people, or anything but themselves, for successes?

The women will tell themselves there’s no point in trying because their past failure proves they themselves aren’t good enough. The men will shrug that failure off as an inevitable consequence of external forces, which have nothing to do with their ability. The result is that their confidence remains intact.

When women get the short straw, or the short strands, they are more likely to be prone to anxious behavior than men are.

Go figure—the women on testosterone were both less able

Researchers found that the investments run by female hedge fund managers did three times as well as those run by male managers over the past five years. And the women lost significantly less money than men in that disastrous year, 2008.

We’ve learned that 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.

the most successful and fulfilled people in life always believe they can improve, that they can still learn things. Let’s

Many women think, in these areas, that their talents are determined, finite, and immutable. Men, says Dweck, think that they can learn almost anything.

Katty now sees it as a strength that Maya didn’t need to please the adults around her, even when they were annoyed with her. She had developed the confidence to listen to her own opinion.

We need to fail again and again, so that it becomes part of our DNA. If

Missteps really do provide accelerated opportunity for growth, as well as a chance to tap into that other internal resource we mentioned: self-compassion.

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.”

“As soon as a candidate realizes it’s not about self-aggrandizement, particularly a female candidate, they become stronger and they become more purpose-driven,” she says.

‘It’s not that I can’t do this job because I don’t have the skill. It’s that the resources I need to do this job have been denied to me.

now her go-to confidence boosters in the games. “When you work on things you think: ‘I know I can do this. I worked on it. I did it in practice.’ It gives me confidence.” Another reminder that the people who succeed aren’t always naturals. They are doers.

When men are in the majority, women speak 75 percent less.

The ability to advocate for ourselves in smaller office settings or around dinner tables prepares us for those critical moments when we need to speak to a huge crowd, or maybe just to an important audience of one, asking for a better deal.