The Confidence Code (20 page)

Katty, during one evening:

I really need to ask for a pay raise, but will that make them mad? I don’t want to seem too arrogant.

Why did the BBC call during dinner? With the book deadline I bet they think I’m not working enough. I should have called back.

I shouldn’t have spent so much money getting the back of our house painted. No one can really see it.

Maya seems stressed by college applications, but if I hassle her she’ll think I don’t trust her.

Should I eat more, or less?

I’m going to be gone so much over the next three weeks. Is that too much strain on the house? I might need another sitter.

Claire, in the predawn hours:

Why do they let the planes circle above our house at 5:30 in the morning before landing? I really should call the community association and complain.

School—did the kids get their homework in their bags? I don’t think I saw Hugo put his in.

How is there not enough time to get things done? I’m only working part-time right now for ABC—I should have more than enough time to handle the kids, and a book. I’m just not efficient. What is wrong with me?

I should really start getting up at 4:30 to write.

Are my arms flabby again?

I wonder when my husband is going to finally leave his high-stress job. That would sure help. He’s just going to have to take charge of our vacation plane tickets. I won’t have time.

I loved that picture of Della playing soccer. She’s so strong. But is she practicing enough?

I think we are out of Rice Krispies.

(We laughed as we compared our notes, half-mortified. Our musings seemed just too embarrassing to share. Ultimately, we decided we’d be doing a public service.)

The best way to kill a NAT isn’t to beat yourself up for having it. That simply leads to more anxiety. The most effective and surprisingly easy fix is to look for an alternative point of view. Just one different interpretation, perhaps a positive, or even neutral, reframing, can open the door for confidence. So, since we are offering ourselves as guinea pigs, here are a few of our own attempts.

“I’m just not efficient, what’s wrong with me,” becomes “Maybe I am doing a good job balancing so much, actually.”

“Why are the bosses calling now?” becomes “Maybe they want me on television more, and that’s a good thing.”

“Did I spend too much on getting the house painted?” becomes “We had water damage and this should help, that’s why I did it, after all.”

The second thought doesn’t even have to prove the first wrong. It’s the mental exercise of taking the time to create another explanation that can lessen the potency of the first thought. Eventually, reframing becomes a habit. And if you’re struggling to come up with positive alternatives by yourself, imagine what you would tell a friend who confessed to having that same negative thought. This is putting self-compassion into action. You’ll be surprised how quickly you can trim those debilitating feelings down to size. It’s easy to do for others, yet we let them roam freely in our own brains.

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.

“It turns out this symbolic interaction with your thoughts affected how correct you thought those thoughts were,” says Petty. The people who carried the paper around with them grew more concerned about the negative thoughts, as if they had some value. The people who threw the notes away started questioning the validity of their negative thoughts, and soon their thoughts didn’t bother them. And the people who left them on the table were somewhere in between.

These strategies help build firewalls that keep toxic thoughts in check. If you are rejected for something, it doesn’t mean you’ll never be successful. If you get negative feedback on a piece of work or task you did, it doesn’t mean you can’t improve the next time. If you are nervous about a big interview, don’t dwell on the possible outcome and leap to the conclusion you may never work again in the industry if you don’t get the job. Attack the concepts with your new tools. Counter them with facts—and then toss those negative thoughts aside—even if it sometimes means you have to throw that notebook we told you to keep in the trash.

Our attention is a powerful force, and it actually is not hard to use it to our advantage, it turns out. Sarah Shomstein, a neuroscientist at George Washington University, told us researchers are coming to see that the simple act of thinking, of
focusing
, on almost anything—the new car you want, exercising, your project—means you are likely to take action in that direction. We need to make our thoughts an ally.

From Me to We

You might think that focusing more on yourself would be the natural stepping-stone to confidence. Don’t we need to make it all about ourselves to feel good, to succeed? Actually, the opposite is true, especially for women. For most of us, thinking about our feelings and abilities, judging ourselves, and making ourselves the stars of our own melodrama, tend to inhibit and paralyze us. Imagine this, and you’ll see what we mean. How might you behave in an emergency, pressed to save a child? There’d be no time to be nervous or to second-guess your actions. You wouldn’t stop to ask whether you were qualified or whether you should perhaps take another course in CPR before you jump out into the street. Your attention would be placed entirely on averting a crisis, and you would excel without a moment of doubt.

Now, apply that same thinking to your own challenges. If you have a big event approaching, for example, at first it may seem natural, and even helpful, to think and think and think about it, to examine the situation from every potential angle and to prepare for every possible scenario: what it might mean for you in the long run, how you will look, what you should say, what you should wear depending on the weather, how you will handle every possible contingency that could arise. That’s not the way to do your best work. Instead, do the prep, and then turn your attention to how much it will help the team or the company. That will liberate you to be bold and assertive and to redirect the spotlight.

OSU psychologist Jenny Crocker has found that women thrive on
we
. When young female college graduates, whose confidence is wobbly, stop thinking about how they can prove themselves and move instead toward doing things for colleagues or the enterprise, Crocker found they get a surprising boost of confidence. She’s used that research to develop a great tip for nervous public speakers: 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.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand uses similar principles to persuade women to run for Congress. She reminds them that this is much more about helping those who need protecting than it is about them. “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 Personal

It’s a whole lot easier to move from
me
to
we
when you realize other people aren’t actually thinking about you all the time. Out of some misguided narcissism, it’s all too easy to think that whatever you have done—whether it’s a triumph or a failure—is the focus of everyone else’s attention. It isn’t. Most people are too busy getting on with their own lives to worry about what you’re up to. Imagining that you’re the center of everyone else’s universe is silly, and it kills confidence. When you didn’t get elected class president, or when you made a mistake in a client meeting, don’t think anyone is gossiping behind your back for weeks on end. They aren’t—they moved on a long time ago.

When you do face a problem at work, remind yourself that it’s about the work, not about you. If your boss tells you a project you’ve been working on needs to be improved, resist the temptation to see it as a personal attack. When your colleague asks how your weekend was, without a smile, realize it isn’t a jab implying you should have been in the office. Really, it’s the ultimate in egotism when we think like this:

“I’m sure she’s angry because I didn’t add that point she suggested.”

“I know he must think I’m an idiot because I still haven’t set up that meeting.”

Put that alternative thinking to work:

“On the other hand, she’s/he’s got four meetings today. I doubt it’s an issue.”

In some cases, comments and critiques are meant to be personal. And in some professions, the judgment is constant. Performers, for example, live with a different level of scrutiny.

“In theater you are criticized from head to toe, from your eyebrows to your earlobes, from costumes to makeup—you can go crazy,” says Chrissellene Petropoulos, an opera singer and voice coach. “You’re never being told wonderful things; you’re always told terrible things, and I used to choke and fall apart because I was personalizing everything. The conductor would come up and say, ‘You don’t know how to sing,’ and ‘You look like an elephant,’ and I was like . . . ahhhhhhhh!”

Petropoulos realized that the way she was experiencing the feedback was destroying her performance skills. She started to study the impact that stress has on vocal cords and was stunned. She learned to interpret criticism as something directed at her skills, not her value as a person.

Today, she’s in huge demand as a teacher, and her lessons focus on confidence as much as on voice skills. She rehearses long lists of rote responses with her students, many of them children, so that they are ready to handle and process critiques.

Critique:  Your hair looks horrible today.

Reply:     Thank you for saying that. Or, thank you for noticing.

Critique:  You’re singing through your nose again. Stop it. It sounds terrible.

Reply:     Thank you for telling me that. I’ll try to do better.

Critique:  That outfit isn’t going to work.

Reply:     What would you like me to wear, or how do you think I should change it?

Petropoulos says her young students may giggle about the way those comebacks sound, but in the long run, they become more mindful about how they receive and internally process negative information. Claire has found thinking
thank you
before making any retort when she feels criticized has helped her fight personalizing tendencies. You can come up with your own response list appropriate for your needs:
Thanks for the feedback. I appreciate that thought.

If you just can’t break your personalizing habit, a big dose of reality always helps. Remember that a lot of other people face exactly the same hurdles that you do, and that for all women, many forces beyond our control will affect our careers. “It was really enlightening for me in terms of my confidence when I finally realized, ‘Okay, here’s a lens to help me understand some of these obstacles that I’ve experienced,’
 
” says Christy Glass. “It was a language for saying, ‘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. It’s not always that I’m just not aggressive enough, or that it’s an individual failure.’
 
”

She says just being aware that there are indeed workplace biases is a powerful antidote to self-doubt, especially for young women who might not remember
Ms.
magazine. So, the next time you walk in to give a presentation to an executive board and see fourteen men and two women around the table, as Katty recently did, realize that a slump in your confidence is to be expected, based on larger forces. Even that recognition can help you move on and not beat yourself up for feeling a bit nervous. It doesn’t mean you need to dwell on the unfairness, and you certainly shouldn’t give up, or complain incessantly, but understanding context and institutional dynamics can help you keep disappointments and challenges in perspective.

When We
Should
Star in Our Own Production

Often, women just seem to have the spotlight thing
backward
. We want to shine a bright light on our faults, insecurities, and the outlandish reasons we will surely fail, but when it comes to taking credit or enjoying our triumphs, we step into the shadows, looking askance at our accomplishments as though we’ve never seen them before. There are plenty of times when the focus
should
be on us, when we need to move from we back to I. You do need to develop a sense of your own, well-deserved value to the enterprise and, yes, sometimes you even need to toot your own horn. It can help your case at the office, but also just the simple act of doing it, of hearing ourselves recognize our accomplishments, bolsters confidence.

For most of us, being self-deprecating seems far more appealing than boasting, but that can backfire on multiple levels. Even if we’re simply trying to downplay achievements in front of others, we are essentially telling ourselves a damaging story—that we don’t really deserve our accomplishments. That affects not only how we see ourselves, but also how others see us. Remember, our bosses want winners working for them. They like to hear about what we’ve done well. Moreover, if we devalue, to ourselves, what we’ve already achieved, it makes it less likely that we’ll attempt to clear future hurdles.

We have to find ways to take in compliments and own our accomplishments rather than relying on dismissals and assertions of luck and self-deprecation. Keep it simple if you must. When praised, reply, “Thank you. I appreciate that.” Use it. It’s surprising how odd, and how powerful, saying those five words will feel.