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. That’s how one of our experts defines it. And that’s what we’d just seen on the court, we thought in triumph.

“Let’s say I have a bad game,” she suggested. “I’ll think, ‘Oh my gosh, we lost’ and I’ll feel like I really wanted to help the team win, and win for the fans. With guys, if they had a bad game, they’re thinking, ‘I had a bad game.’ They shrug off the loss more quickly.”

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.

“I feel like with women, you still want to please people,”

“We assume, somehow, that we don’t have the level of expertise to be able to grasp the whole thing.”

“To the extent that it is more interesting to be female than male, why would we have to repress that rather than be ourselves with strength and worthiness? I’ve always said that we should not try to imitate the boys in everything they do.”

He tells himself he’s going to ace the presentation, be witty, and impress his bosses. “I just get up there and perform,” he said. “The trick is not to overthink it.” And if things do go wrong, he shrugs them off. “I don’t dwell on stuff; when it’s done, it’s done.”

both in our statistical confidence (measured by how long we took to rate our confidence in each answer)

“Running for office means we have to self-aggrandize. That’s hard because people might think we’re pushy.”

“I internalize setbacks. The other day a professor criticized my research paper. The guy I’d worked on it with just brushed it off. It didn’t seem to bother him. It took me weeks to get over it.”

“If a woman is assertive and ambitious, she’s seen as a bitch. But for a guy, hey, those are normal qualities.”

She told us that good leadership means being an efficient decision maker, and she doesn’t tolerate indecision in others.

In our notebooks, in addition to having drawn big bold circles around her Sergeant Minski quote, which we were eager to appropriate, we’d jotted down—action and bold and makes decisions. But we’d also written honest and feminine. And also this: comfortable.

“It’s a belief that you can accomplish the task you want to accomplish,” Utah State University’s Christy Glass told us. “It’s specific to a domain. I could be a confident public speaker, but not a confident writer, for example.”

The resonance of mastery is in the process and progress.

Winston Churchill put the difference memorably: “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”

“Optimism is the sense that everything will work out,” she says. “Confidence is, ‘I can make this thing work.’

But, of course, these setbacks are just part of being human and if you never had them, you’d be a robot. Putting our disappointments in that context makes them less frightening and less isolating.

Having overcome our initial, overachiever reservations, there’s something else appealing about self-compassion. It is the acceptance that it’s okay to be average sometimes.

Self-compassion isn’t an excuse for inaction—it supports action, and it connects us to other people, to being human, with all the strengths and the weaknesses that implies.

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

Confidence, we saw from the young women in Running Start at Georgetown, is not letting your doubts consume you. It is a willingness to go out of your comfort zone and do hard things.

Confidence is the stuff that turns thoughts into action.

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

So, life choices do matter, as much as, if not more than, what we’re born with.

A number of studies, conducted with MRIs (magnetic resonance imaging) before and after a period of meditation, showed less activity in the amygdala, the fear center, after an average of eight weeks of meditation.

Women earn on average 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man. Four percent of CEOs in the Fortune 500 are women. Twenty of the 100 United States senators are women, and even that is celebrated as a record high.

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.

“If life were one long grade school, women would be the undisputed rulers of the world.”

With all their focus on getting high academic scores, too many girls are ignoring the really valuable lessons that wait outside of school.

Professional success demands political savvy, a certain amount of scheming and jockeying, a flair for self-promotion and not letting a no stop you. Women often aren’t very comfortable with that.

Valerie Jarrett

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

The United States is one of only three of the 190 countries in the entire world with no national policy providing a paid maternity leave.

We do a lot more ruminating than men, and we have to get out of our heads if we want to build confidence.

Nolen-Hoeksema wrote in her book Women Who Think Too Much.

We are suffering from an epidemic of overthinking.”

Managers say this tendency for women to overthink is a real hurdle.

“Men tend to let things go, slide off their backs. Women tend to be more self-reflective: ‘What did I do wrong?’ as opposed to thinking it’s just a bad set of circumstances and so let’s move on.”

The stories we tell ourselves about the roots of our success and our failure are the foundation of self-assurance.

“Wow, this is a tough course.” That’s what’s known as external attribution, and it’s usually a healthy sign of resilience. The women in the course tend to respond differently. When the course gets hard for them, their reaction is, “You see, I knew I wasn’t good enough.” That’s internal attribution, and with failure, it can be debilitating. The story becomes one about their intelligence, not about the course itself, or even how hard they worked, says Dunning.

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 irony is that perfectionism actually inhibits achievement.

that if she just puts her work out there, without obsessive thought, things happen. Either it’s accepted, or, if not, she’s learned to value the feedback that comes with rejection. It lets her make corrections, and then try again. That’s the cycle that breeds excellence and mastery, allows us to stretch our limits, and creates self-assurance.

There’s a little part of our brains called the cingulate gyrus. It helps us weigh options and recognize errors—some people call it the worrywart center.

Power poses are a popular tool for communications classes.

Barbara Tannenbaum uses them in all her presentations. She’ll start the discussion by asking the men in the audience to sit like women and the women to sit like men. After years of doing this, she’s made two observations: First, the exercise always raises a laugh. Second, no one ever asks her what she means; they just know.

Estrogen encourages bonding and connection; it supports the part of our brain that involves social skills and observations.

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