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

by Katty Kay

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

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

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

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.

Monique and Crystal had looked so ​. . . ​purely confident out there on the court. But after thirty minutes of talk we’d uncovered overthinking, people pleasing, and an inability to let go of defeats—three traits we had already realized belonged on a confidence blacklist.

Linda Babcock, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of Women Don’t Ask, has uncovered a similar lack of confidence among American women, with concrete consequences. She found, in studies with business school students, that men initiate salary negotiations four times as often as women, and that when women do negotiate, they ask for thirty percent less than men do.

The data confirms what we instinctively already know. Another example: We know that most women tend to talk less when we’re outnumbered. We go into a meeting, study the layout, and choose to sit at the back of the room. We often keep our thoughts, which we decide can’t be all that impressive, to ourselves. Then we get cross with ourselves when the male colleague next to us sounds smart saying the same thing that we would have said.

Brenda Major, a social psychologist at the University of California in Santa Barbara, started studying the problem of self-perception decades ago. “In my earliest days as a young professor, I was doing a lot of work on gender, and I would set up a test where I’d ask men and women how they thought they were going to do on a variety of tasks or tests.” 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.

Columbia Business School even has a term for it now. They call it “honest overconfidence” and they have found that men on average rate their performance to be 30 percent better than it is.

More disturbing for women who count on competence as the key to success is Anderson’s insistence that actual ability barely matters. “When people are confident, when they think they are good at something, regardless of how good they actually are, they display a lot of nonverbal and verbal behavior,” Anderson explained. He mentioned their expansive body language, their lower vocal tone, and a tendency to speak early and often in a calm, relaxed manner. “They do a lot of things that make them look very confident in the eyes of others,” he added. “Whether they are good or not is kind of irrelevant.”

If the gap between confidence and competence grows too large, overconfidence does become a weakness and a liability.

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.

When we aren’t confident, we don’t succeed as we should. We can’t even envision the work we could be doing, or the levels we could reach, or the satisfaction we could have.

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). We saw a hint of self-efficacy in that.

“Confidence,” said Joyce Ehrlinger, the University of Washington psychologist, sighing in sympathy, “has become a vague, almost stock term that can refer to any number of things. I can see why you’d be confused.” “General confidence is an attitude, a way you approach the world,” suggested Caroline Miller, a best-selling author and positive psychology coach. “More specifically, self-confidence is a sense that you can master something.” “One way to think about confidence,” said Brenda Major, the UC Santa Barbara social psychologist, “is how sure are you that you have the skills that you need to succeed in doing a particular thing.” “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.”

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

Nansook Park is one of the world’s leading experts on optimism and a professor at the University of Michigan. She describes confidence and optimism as closely related but with an important distinction—optimism is a more generalized outlook, and it doesn’t necessarily encourage action. Confidence does. “Optimism is the sense that everything will work out,” she says. “Confidence is, ‘I can make this thing work.’ ”

Neff patiently explained that 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.

Richard Petty, a psychology professor at Ohio State University, who has spent decades focused on the subject, managed to put all we had learned into appealingly clear terms: “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.

Plomin and his researchers also factored in reports from the teachers. Once all of the data had been cross-referenced, the research team was struck by two findings. The students’ self-perceived ability rating, or SPA, was a significant predictor of achievement, even more important than IQ. Put simply, confidence trumps IQ in predicting success. Plomin and his team had found in kids what Cameron Anderson had discovered in adults.

We were starting to see how all of these hormones lay the groundwork we need in order to experience confidence. 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.

It’s entirely too early, Champagne told us, to predict whether a woman who builds her confidence, for example, might at the same time be creating something heritable for her children, but it’s not out of the question.

Researchers at Northwestern University documented remarkable changes in the brain’s physical makeup after a short session of behavioral therapy aimed at patients battling a fear of spiders. They studied twelve adults with arachnophobia. Before therapy, the brain scans showed the regions involved in fear, especially the amygdala, had much stronger responses to spider photos. They then had a single two-hour session of behavioral therapy. In this case, the therapy involved approaching and then touching a live tarantula. (Talk about facing your fears. It’s like asking someone with a fear of public speaking to practice with a podium and an audience.) When they repeated the brain scans at the end of the treatment, the amygdala’s action was back to normal. But the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for reappraisal and for looking at things more rationally, was more active. And here’s what’s most impressive—when the subjects’ brains were scanned again six months later, the amygdala was still quiet. After just a two-hour session. Six months later, they were still able to calmly touch that tarantula.

Children have been rewarded for anything and everything, instead of for genuine accomplishment. Girls and women express more self-doubt than boys and men do, but modern parenting has created hollow confidence for both genders, as it often gives kids little responsibility, matched with a lot of praise and prizes.

Failure. There it is. It’s the most frightening, and yet most critical partner to confidence. Failure is an inevitable result of risk taking, and it’s essential for building resilience.

Of course, part of risk and failure means pushing ourselves and our children in areas in which we’re not comfortable. That’s novel for many Americans, but in Asia it’s the canon of parenting. Asians are all about grit, the hot new term in positive psychology circles for persistence and tolerance for hardship. In Japanese they even have a word for it—gaman. Roughly translated it means “keep trying,” and it gets plenty of use.

Ohio State University psychologist Jennifer Crocker has discovered that 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.

If you only remember one thing from this book, let it be this: When in doubt, act. Every piece of research we have studied, and every interview we have conducted, leads to the same conclusion: Nothing builds confidence like taking action, especially when the action involves risk and failure. Risk keeps you on life’s edge. It keeps you growing, improving, and gaining confidence.

Richard Petty’s research suggests that getting physical with your thoughts can also help kill NATs. He and his collaborators asked a group of students to write down bad thoughts about themselves; they then divided the students into three groups. One group was instructed to put what they’d written in their pockets and carry the notes around with them. The other group was told to tear up their notes and throw them in the trash, symbolically exorcising them. The third group was instructed to leave the pieces of paper on the table.

Reframe your remarks in your head. Tell yourself you are speaking on behalf of the team, or the organization, or for the benefit of others, rather than for yourself. Change some of your language if you need to. It’s a simple, practical way of moving that spotlight off yourself and onto others to give you confidence.

Stigler, now a professor of psychology at UCLA, has come to the conclusion that the profound difference in the way the West and the East view learning has a big impact on confidence. It all has to do with effort. In America, Stigler says, “We see struggle as an indicator that you’re just not very smart. People who are smart don’t struggle; they just naturally get it. In Asian cultures, they tend to see struggle more as an opportunity.”

Confidence puts meaningful tools in their hands, instead of unproven promises in their heads. It won’t guarantee success, but, more meaningfully, it lifts self-imposed limits.

Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, sounds the alarm about millennials who have been raised by parents eager to reward their child’s every move with that infuriating ubiquitous phrase “good job!” These children, says Twenge, are attention seeking, have a disproportionate focus on appearance and status, and may even have difficulty forming strong relationships.

But when we tell our kids they’re already perfect, we are encouraging them to avoid things they find hard. And how do you cope with failure as an adult when you’ve never been allowed to lose in Little League? The cycle of losing, coping with loss, and then picking yourself up to try again is an essential component of mastery, not to mention confidence.

Karen Kelser, who runs one of the top soccer programs for young girls in Washington, DC, firmly believes that playing sports provides essential training, not for scholarship purposes, or for the Olympics, but for the real world. “It mirrors life as not much else does,” she says. “There aren’t that many other opportunities for girls to work as a team, to win, to lose, and to learn to get over failure, and to help each other get over failure.”