The Confidence Code (2 page)

The data is pretty grim. Compared with men, we don’t consider ourselves ready for promotions, we predict we’ll do worse on tests, we flat out tell researchers in big numbers that we just don’t feel confident at our jobs.

Part of the problem is we can’t make sense of the rules. Women have long believed that if we just work harder and don’t cause any bother, our natural talents will shine through and be rewarded. But then we have watched as the men around us get promoted over us and paid more, too. We know, deep down, they are no more capable than we are; indeed, often they are less so, but they project a level of comfort with themselves that gets them noticed and rewarded. That comfort, that self-assurance—it’s confidence, or at least their version of it.

More often than not, the way confidence manifests itself in men is wholly unappealing and downright foreign to women. Most women aren’t comfortable dominating conversations, throwing their weight around in a conference room, interrupting others, or touting their achievements. Some of us have tried these tactics over the years, only to find that it just isn’t our style.

We should pause and say that we know when we talk about women en masse we are oversimplifying. Some women have already cracked this code and others, of course, won’t always recognize themselves in these pages. We are far from monolithic as a gender. The subject is important enough to most women—women of every personality type, ethnic and religious background and income level, that we hope you will forgive our choice to occasionally generalize rather than constantly qualify. We’re determined to cast deep and wide, because the subject merits it.

The stakes are too high to give up on finding confidence just because the prevailing masculine model might not fit, or the reality looks foreboding. There are too many opportunities we are missing out on. As we dissected academic papers and reviewed interview transcripts we decided that what we need is a blueprint for confidence, a confidence code, if you will, that will get women headed in the right direction.

Consider women like our friend Vanessa, who is a very successful fundraiser for a nonprofit organization. Recently, she was called in by the president of her organization for an annual review. She’d raised a lot of money for the group and assumed she was heading in for a serious pat on the back. Instead, he gave her a reality check. Yes, she’d done well bringing in funds, but if she ever wanted to be a senior leader in the organization, she needed to start making decisions. “It doesn’t matter if they’re right,” he told her. “Your team just needs to know you can make a call and stick to it.” Vanessa couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
It doesn’t matter if they’re right?
That was simply anathema to her.

Yet Vanessa recognized the truth in what her boss had said. She was so focused on being perfect, and absolutely right, that she held back from making decisions, particularly decisions that needed to be made fast. Like so many women, Vanessa is a perfectionist, but that quest for perfection and those fourteen-hour workdays weren’t what her group really needed. And moreover, her habits stopped her from taking the decisive action that was required.

If you ask scientists and academics, as we did, how optimism is defined, you’ll get a fairly consistent answer. The same goes for happiness and many other basic psychological qualities; they’ve been dissected and examined so often and for so long that we now have a wealth of practical advice about cultivating these attributes in ourselves and in others. But the same doesn’t hold, we discovered, for confidence. It is altogether a more enigmatic quality, and what we learned about it is not at all what we expected when we set out to discover its nature.

For one thing, there’s a difference between bravado and confidence. We also came to see that confidence isn’t all in your mind, and it isn’t generated by exercises to boost self-esteem, either. Perhaps most striking of all, we found that success correlates more closely with confidence than it does with competence. Yes, there is evidence that confidence is
more important
than ability when it comes to getting ahead. This came as particularly unsettling news to us, having spent our own lives striving toward competence.

Another disturbing finding is that some of us are simply born with more confidence than others. It is, it turns out, partly genetic. We did our own genetic tests to see how we stack up. We’ll share them with you later, but suffice it to say that we were surprised by the results. And we discovered that male and female brains do indeed work differently in ways that affect our self-assurance. Yes, that fact is controversial. Yes, it’s also true.

Confidence is only part science, however. The other part is art. And how people live their lives ends up having a surprisingly big impact on their original confidence framework. The newest research shows that we can literally change our brains in ways that affect our thoughts and behavior at any age. And so, fortunately, a substantial part of the confidence code is what psychologists call
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.

What the scientists call
plasticity
, we call
hope
. If you work at it, you can indeed make your brain structure more confidence-prone. One thing we know about women is that we’re never afraid of hard work.

As reporters, we’ve been lucky enough to explore the power corridors of the world looking for stories, and we’ve seen the possibilities that confidence gives a person. We notice how some people aim high, simply assuming they will succeed, while others spend the same time and energy thinking of dozens of reasons why they can’t. As mothers, we’ve watched the impact confidence has on our children. We see the kids who are liberated to say and do and risk, learning as they go, and stockpiling lessons for the future. And we see the youngsters who hold themselves back, fearful of some unformed, undeserved consequence.

And as women, particularly thanks to this project, we have both
felt
the life-changing impact of confidence, in our professional and our personal lives. Indeed we’ve discovered that accomplishment is not its most meaningful measure. There’s a singular sense of fulfillment you get from simply having it and putting it to good use. One scientist we interviewed described her occasional brushes with confidence in particularly resonant terms: “I feel a spectacular kind of lock-and-key relationship with the world,” she told us. “I can achieve. And I’m connected.” Life on confidence can be a remarkable thing.

1

IT’S NOT ENOUGH TO BE GOOD

Even before we found the door, we could hear, and feel, the pounding and thumping and barked direction echoing down the halls. We had come to the bowels of Washington, DC’s massive sports complex, the Verizon Center, on a hunt for raw confidence. We wanted to see it in action, to watch it on the basketball court, where, we surmised, confidence must be impervious to the turbulence of ordinary life, untroubled by gender battles, and stripped down to its essence. We were looking for that “aha” moment, a depiction of confidence so clear and compelling that it would shake up our female psychological GPS and shout, “
This way. This is what your destination looks like. This is where you go.”

It was the opening practice of the Washington Mystics’ 2013 season, and the first thing we noticed, as we stepped inside the gritty, basement practice court, was the towering physique of the women. It wasn’t simply that they soared, on average, to above six feet tall and possessed muscled arms we could only dream of. There was an air of command about them that came from having mastered one of the most aggressive and challenging professional sports that women can play.

Tracking down unadulturated confidence isn’t easy. We’d seen plenty of stuff like it demonstrated in boardrooms, in political offices, and on factory floors. But often that confidence seemed fleeting, or warped by social dictates. Sometimes it just felt phony; a well-crafted performance hiding deep wells of self-doubt. We’d figured that sports would be somehow different. You can’t fake confidence on the 94-by-50-foot polished floors of a professional basketball court. To win here you have to believe in yourself. No doubting, no debating, no dithering. As with all top athletic pursuits, excellence is precisely measured, chronicled, and judged. And, assuming the basic physical tools are there, the central ingredient for success in competitive sports is confidence. Legions of sports psychologists have testified to its elemental importance to the game. If it weren’t so, and its deficit weren’t a problem, there wouldn’t be sports psychologists in the first place, right?

That’s why we knew women’s basketball would be a rich laboratory for us. Moreover, this particular petri dish is one of the few in which grown women can be observed working together mostly in isolation from men, which takes away a major confidence inhibitor.

There was plenty of action and intensity on the court that morning. The Mystics were trying to fight their way back from the worst two seasons in the WNBA’s seventeen-year history. We were watching two players in particular. Monique Currie, or Mo, as her teammates call her, is a DC native—a prep school, and then Duke, basketball phenom. She’s a star forward for the team, and the toughest player we saw. Her shoulders are strikingly broad, even for her six-foot frame, and they took on a determined curve as she attacked the basket again and again.

Crystal Langhorne, at six feet two inches, is a power forward. When she was in high school, her devout father had to be persuaded to let her play ball on Sundays. As a pro, she’s gone from mediocre rookie to all-star player, with a lucrative Under Armour endorsement deal. A white headband held back her long dark hair as she glided toward the basket, shooting with Zen-like ease.

We’d only been there a few moments when an intense scrimmage started and there it was: a performance so fierce it fueled a dazzling blur of perfectly timed passing, artful fakes, and three-point shots. It was a startling show of agility and power.

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.

After practice, though, we found something else. When we sat down to talk with Monique and Crystal, our perfect snapshot blurred with a multitude of doubts and contradictions. Not even here, in the WNBA, had they quite broken the confidence barrier.

Without the court as a backdrop and out of their sleek athletic gear, Monique and Crystal looked somewhat less intimidating. Now they were just exceptionally tall, attractive young women, who, visibly drained, sank with relief into plush armchairs in the VIP room. Monique, who’d changed into a slim jean jacket and T-shirt, immediately became intense and engaged on the subject of confidence. We got the sense it came up a lot.

“Sometimes as players you can kind of struggle with your confidence,” said Monique, “because things might not be going well, because you think you’re not playing as well as you can. But to be playing at this level you have to believe in what you can do and you have to believe in your ability.”

Crystal nodded, her face partially obscured by a Yankees cap. Then she joined in, noting that there’s plenty that messes with female players’ confidence that doesn’t seem to affect the men. “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.”

What was striking in talking to Crystal and Monique was that with every answer a comparison to the guys popped up, even before we asked about it. And the Mystics don’t even compete directly with men. Indeed, the frustrations sounded so familiar that we could have been having this conversation with a group of women in our line of work. Why do men usually just assume they’re so great? Why do mistakes and backhanded comments just seem to slide off them?

“On the court, it’s kind of hard to say certain things or play rough,” Crystal said, “because women get hurt feelings. Our assistant coach says guys just curse each other out and then forget about it.”

“Not me,” noted Monique, with a wry grin. “I’m a mean player.”

“Mo is different—she is more like a male athlete,” Crystal said, laughing in agreement. “You could say something to Mo and she would brush it off. She can yell. I’ve played with Mo for a while, so I know how she is.”

Still, even Monique rolled her eyes when asked whether her wellspring of confidence is really as deep as that of the men. “For guys,” said Monique, in the slightly mystified, irritated tone that we’d come to recognize, “I think they have maybe thirteen- or fifteen-player rosters, but all the way down to the last player on the bench, who doesn’t get to play a single minute, I feel like his confidence and his ego is just as big as the player’s who is the superstar of the team.” She smiled, shook her head, and went on. “For women it’s not like that. If you’re not playing, or if you’re not considered one of the better players on the team, I think it really messes with our confidence.”

We wondered what the Mystics coach, whom we’d noticed during practice, thought about all of this. A half foot shorter and twice the age of most of the players, Mike Thibault, clad in a navy team polo, was one of the few men on the court. A legendary WNBA coach who brought years of victories to the rival Connecticut Sun, he’d just arrived in Washington with the mission of helping to turn the Mystics’ fortunes around. He was in a unique position to talk about the subject of confidence in male and female athletes, having trained both. As an NBA scout, Thibault helped to recruit Michael Jordan. He became an assistant coach for the Los Angeles Lakers and has spent the last ten years coaching women. 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.