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March 14 - March 25, 2014
Confidence helps people take control of circumstances rather than be dragged along by them.
On the way up, success creates positive momentum. People who believe they are likely to win are also likely to put in the extra effort at difficult moments to ensure that victory.
Growth cycles produce optimism, decline cycles produce pessimism.
confidence grows in winning streaks and helps propel a tradition of success. Confidence erodes in losing streaks, and its absence makes it hard to stop losing.
Confidence consists of positive expectations for favorable outcomes.
Confidence is a sweet spot between arrogance and despair. Arrogance involves the failure to see any flaws or weaknesses, despair the failure to acknowledge any strengths.
underconfidence is just as bad, and perhaps worse. It leads people to underinvest, to under-innovate, and to assume that everything is stacked against them, so there’s no point in trying.
Failure and success are not episodes, they are trajectories. They are tendencies, directions, pathways.
History and context shape interpretations and expectations.
Success provides the resources, the pride, the enthusiasm that make it easier to succeed the next time—that build confidence.
To shift a cycle from decline to success, leaders must restore people’s confidence in the system, in the organization, in the group, and in themselves.
a culture of pride differs from a culture of mediocrity in encouraging or stifling innovation;
People are caught in cycles, and they interpret events based on what they see happening, on how they are treated by others around them.
Winning begets winning, because it produces confidence at four levels. Self-confidence: an emotional climate of high expectations
Confidence in one another: positive, supportive, team-oriented behavior
Confidence in the system: organizational structures and routines reinforcing accountability, collaboration, and innovation
External confidence: a network to provide resources
People who believe in themselves are likely to try harder and longer, thus increasing their chances of eventual success.
if teachers think students are in a top group (even if they were put there randomly), and thus treat them like high achievers, their performance improves—a self-fulfilling prophecy known as the Pygmalion Effect.
The best pep talks include evidence.
Two beliefs shape a positive emotional climate in the workplace: first, that it is possible to meet high standards, and second, that there is a purpose worth achieving.
In the midst of winning cycles, people naturally gravitate toward behaving in ways that support confidence. • Accountability. People want to share information and take responsibility; they have nothing to hide. They seek feedback and self-improvement. Because they feel committed, they communicate more often and make higher-quality decisions. They set high aspirations and respect each other for meeting high standards. They avoid excuses and try self-scrutiny before blaming others. • Collaboration. People want to work together. Mutual attraction is high, interpersonal bonds are strong, and
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infants who feel more secure engage in more exploratory behavior.
Psychologists argue that people who learn to win, who expect to win, tend to be more internally directed and intrinsically motivated anyway.
A loss is a crossroads, not a cliff.
How problems are dealt with shapes whether they are just an interruption or a sign of impending doom, whether winners are resilient or are stuck in increasingly ineffective behavior.
What helps a team win repeatedly, what helps a company succeed even in tough times, is the capacity to solve problems, to put troubles in perspective and deal with them.
winners get in trouble when confidence turns into complacency and arrogance, when water walkers forget that there are stones holding them up beneath the water and let those underpinnings of confidence crumble.
Cognitive psychologists have defined “overconfidence” as a person’s certainty that his or her predictions are correct, exceeding the accuracy of those predictions.
People can become so good at one way of doing things that they cannot switch to any other mode—the paradox of “trained incapacity.”
People can get caught in “competence traps,” continuing courses of action that have been successful in the past, because they are comforting in their familiarity.
See No Trouble, Hear No Trouble, and Speak No Trouble are the three monkeys of denial. Some people don’t even know there’s a problem, others don’t want to hear about it, and a third group refuses to talk about it,
Winners who continue to reinforce accountability, collaboration, and initiative are better equipped to both see and want to see mistakes and changes, because they have confidence in their ability to do something about the situation.
Confidence is not just putting your best foot forward, it comes from having something solid to stand on.
“learned helplessness,” a state identified by psychologist Martin Seligman, in which repeated failures to get out of a difficult situation teach people not even to try.
Decline generally does not stem from a single factor, but from an accumulation of decisions, actions, and commitments that become entangled in self-perpetuating system dynamics.
Losers, compared with winners, are nearly four times as likely to keep information in the hands of a small group that operates in secrecy behind closed doors, shutting everyone else out.
Social psychologists distinguish between informational feedback, which can be constructive and useful, and controlling feedback, which is often perceived as punitive and destructive of self-esteem.
A culture of mediocrity suppresses innovation.
For people accustomed to losing, it is too risky to aim higher—to even venture out onto the water, let alone try to walk on it. They do not want to take any risks—and no one associated with them believes that they are capable of success if they do take risks.
They are physically present but mentally absent—a state now labeled “presenteeism” to distinguish it from “absenteeism.” The body is there, but the spirit is gone.
Because hopelessness, amplified by helplessness, can make people feel that there is no point in trying to improve the situation because there’s not much they can do about it, initiative decreases, and hopelessness becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Destroying confidence can take minutes, while restoring confidence can take millennia (or
People become more accountable when they feel responsible to others, when they know how to connect their own and others’ contributions to produce a victory for the team.
foster the language of contribution rather than blame, insisting that people seek solutions and value one another’s potential to contribute,
Teams that produce innovations encourage people to speak up but to express their concerns without rancor or contentiousness.
Resources must be shifted to support small wins that build confidence and then join with other wins to produce major victories.
Believe in people and their power to make a difference. Show them they are worth it by investing in things that matter to them.
Start with small wins—things that people can control. Let them taste victory, and further victory will be in their sights.
That is the ultimate sign of confidence: a virtually self-organizing system in which people feel empowered to seize initiative, to solve problems, and to seed innovations without even being told to do it. They just do it.
