The Confidence Code (3 page)

“There’s probably a distinction between being tough on themselves and too judgmental,” he said. “The best male players I’ve coached, whether it’s Jordan or people like that, they are tough on themselves. They push themselves. But they also have an ability to get restarted more quickly. They don’t let setbacks linger as long. And the women can.”

“It’s very hard for me because sometimes I kind of hold on to things longer than I should,” agreed Mo. “I can get down on myself about missing a shot, even though I know I worked for it—it’s still an adjustment to say, ‘All right, just let the play go—move on to the next play.’ Even at thirty, and after eight seasons at WNBA, that’s something that I still have to work on.”

“I feel like with women, you still want to please people,” sighed Crystal. “I feel like that’s what happened to me last year, in my playing. That’s my problem, sometimes I just want to please people.”

Mo shrugged. “If you have a male attitude and that type of swagger and confidence in yourself, you play better.”

Honestly, none of this was what we had been expecting or hoping to hear. How . . . 
messy
, that even in our perfectly imagined habitat of female basketball stars, the essence of confidence was still elusive—or at least still battered by the same familiar forces. 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.

If clean confidence couldn’t be found in professional sports, where was it? We decided to explore a realm in which women are routinely pushed well beyond their comfort zones, in direct competition with men.

Officer Michaela Bilotta had just graduated with honors from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis and was one of fourteen members of her class chosen to join the prestigious Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team. The EOD is responsible for dealing with and deactivating chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons in areas of conflict, and its members routinely deploy with Special Operations Forces. To be chosen, you have to be the best. When we congratulated Bilotta on her new post she immediately deflected our praise, calling it “part chance.” We pointed out how she had just, unwittingly, refused to own her achievement. She offered a half smile.

“I think it definitely took me longer than it would have for some other people to admit that I was worthy of it,” Bilotta confessed. “Even though from the outside, I can look in and think, you did all the work and you earned your spot.” She paused. We were sitting with her in her parents’ basement, which, we noticed, was overflowing with sports gear, trophies, and academic plaques—the souvenirs of raising five determined girls. No clues that would have suggested a childhood that didn’t nurture self-belief. “I just doubted it,” she said, shaking her head. “I wondered, ‘how did this happen? I got so lucky.’
 
”

Luck. What could be more divorced from luck than passing all of the clearly defined, objectively measured physical and mental and intellectual hurdles that the military neatly lays out for someone like Michaela Bilotta? How was it that she couldn’t see that what she had accomplished wasn’t just a fluke?

Of course, we know exactly how she feels. We too have been masters at attributing our successes to the vagaries of fate. Katty still entertains the notion that her public profile in America is thanks to her English accent, which must, she suspects, give her a few extra IQ points every time she opens her mouth. Claire spent years telling people she was “just lucky”—in the right place at the right time—when asked how she became a CNN correspondent covering the collapse of communism in Moscow when she was still in her twenties.

“For years I really believed that it
was
all luck. Even as I write this I have to fight that urge. What I’ve realized only recently is that by refusing to take credit for what I had achieved, I wasn’t nurturing the confidence I needed for my
next
career steps,” she admits. “I was literally quaking when it came time for me to go back to Washington and cover the White House. At the time, I thought to myself, ‘I’ll never learn to report on politics. I don’t know anything about it.’
 
” Preoccupied and insecure about whether she would measure up, she should have relied on what she had already achieved to give her a psychological boost.

The more we surveyed the landscape looking for pockets of flourishing confidence, the more we uncovered evidence of a shortage. The confidence gap is a chasm, stretching across professions, income levels, and generations, showing up in many guises, and in places where you least expect it.

At a conference we moderated at the State Department, former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton spoke openly about the fear she felt when she decided to run for the Senate in 2000, after eight years as First Lady, decades as a political spouse, and a successful legal career. “It’s hard to face public failure. I realized I was scared to lose,” she told us. That caught us off guard. “I was finally pushed,” she said, “by a high school women’s basketball coach, who told me, ‘Sure, you might lose. So what? Dare to compete, Mrs. Clinton. Dare to compete.’
 
”

Elaine Chao dared to compete. She was the country’s first Chinese-American cabinet secretary. For eight years, she served President George W. Bush as labor secretary, the only cabinet member to stay with the president through his entire administration. There wasn’t much in her background to predict such lofty heights. Chao was born in Taiwan; she came to the United States on a freight ship at the age of eight, after her father finally managed to get together enough money to pay the fare. Her rise reads like a classic tale of hard work, risk, and ironclad confidence.

But when we asked Chao if she ever doubted her abilities during those years in office, she was wonderfully candid, and funny. “Constantly,” she replied. “I’m Asian American, are you kidding? My fear was that the newspapers would have blaring headlines like: ‘Elaine Chao Failed, Disgraced Whole Family.’
 
”

We’d figured, and hoped, that the younger generation might have markedly different tales to tell. But their stories are eerily similar. It is hard to imagine a more successful Gen-Y’er than Clara Shih, for example. The thirty-one-year-old tech entrepreneur founded the successful social media company Hearsay Social in 2010. She joined the board of Starbucks at the tender age of twenty-nine. She’s one of the few female CEOs in the still techno-macho world of Silicon Valley. Although she hasn’t let the confidence gap stop her from racking up a string of impressive achievements, even she admits that it has tripped her up. “At Stanford, I found the computer science major very difficult. I really had to work hard, especially in the upper-level courses,” Shih told us. “Yet, somehow, I was convinced that others found it easy. At times I felt like an imposter.” Shih even considered dropping out and switching to an easier major. On graduation day, she was astonished to learn she’d finished first in her class.

“I realized I had deserved to be there all along and that some of the geeky guys who talked a big game weren’t necessarily smarter.”

Tia Cudahy, a Washington, DC, lawyer who always appears calm, upbeat, and utterly in charge, told us that she’d recently formed a partnership with a colleague to do some outside consulting, something she’d long wanted to try. Lo and behold, they got a contract right away. “In my mind, though, I immediately jumped to what I couldn’t do—what parts of the job I didn’t feel qualified for,” she told us. She almost turned down the contract but managed to battle her doubts.

We were talking to Tia over drinks, thankfully, because we could at least laugh—after we had sighed in recognition. It’s all such a waste of time and energy, these bouts of self-doubt we all engage in. Why do we do it?

Confidence Served with Crème Brûlée

The six-foot-tall, silver-haired woman headed toward us in a Washington, DC, restaurant, wearing a refined dark tweed dress, radiated self-assurance with a distinct flair. As she walked through the chic restaurant, heads swiveled as diners recognized one of the most powerful women in the world. Christine Lagarde runs the International Monetary Fund, the 188-country organization whose mission is to stabilize the world’s financial systems, loan money to selected countries, and force reform on those that need it. Suffice it to say, she’d been busy.

Since we conceived of this project, we imagined Lagarde as one of the best possible guides through this confidence thicket. She claims a powerful position in the almost all-male club of global finance titans and she uses her formidable profile to pressure companies and heads of state to get women to the top—not because it’s politically correct but because, she believes, it is good for the health of the world economy. She makes the same arguments we did in
Womenomics
—diversity helps the bottom line.

Fittingly, perhaps, she got her current job because, as she was helping to stave off the global financial meltdown from her post as the French finance minister, her IMF predecessor Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was also on the short list to run for president of France, was discovered to have been routinely cheating on his glamorous and successful wife. One might think such a résumé should make him even
more
qualified to be a French president. But the womanizing included allegations that he had sexually assaulted a hotel maid and a journalist. The case involving the maid was eventually dropped, but the scandal was a front-page story in the United States, and it eventually caught on across the Atlantic. It turns out that there is a line you can cross in France on the issue of sex.

Lagarde was deemed the best person to set things right. Her weapons—a rational, conciliatory style and straightforward smarts—helped to calm the testosterone-fueled international economic crisis and quell internal politics at the IMF.

When we met Lagarde in person, we were struck by her regal bearing and the chic, thick white hair framing her face in a feminine but not fussy way. (Her only flourish was a subtly patterned silk scarf, draped around her neck in an elegant style neither of us had ever seen, and certainly could never master. Infuriatingly French.) She introduced herself with a friendly, piercing look, and then smiled. She was charming and open as she told us about her two grown-up sons, her preference for biking rather than driving around Washington, and her long-distance French boyfriend.

Raised and educated in France, she spent a year after high school as an intern at the U.S. Capitol. After law school in Paris, she decided to return to the States after a boss at a French law firm told her that, as a woman, she would never make partner there. In fifteen years, she’d not only become a partner at Baker & McKenzie, a top Chicago-based international law firm, but also its first female chairman.

Over grilled trout and wilted spinach, she recalled plenty of self-doubt as she worked her way up the ladder. “I would often get nervous about presentations or speaking, and there were moments when I had to screw up my courage to raise my hand or make a point, rather than hanging back.”

And what’s more, this woman who sits down in meetings next to some of the most powerful men in the world and proceeds to tell them they need to change their ways and run their economies differently
still
worries about being caught off guard. “There are moments where I have to sort of go deep inside myself and pull my strength, confidence, background, history, experience and all the rest of it, to assert a particular point.”

To compensate, we learned over the course of the meal, Lagarde zealously overprepares for everything. And with whom does she commiserate about how difficult that is? One of the few women at her altitude—the German chancellor.

“Angela Merkel and I have talked about it,” she confided. “We have discovered that we both have the same habit. When we work on a particular matter, we will work the file inside, outside, sideways, backwards, historically, genetically and geographically. We want to be completely on top of everything and we want to understand it all and we don’t want to be fooled by somebody else.”

We pushed aside the crème brûlée we’d been enjoying and paused, taking in the image of
two
of the most powerful women in the world huddling someplace to compare notes about their mutual need to overprepare. Lagarde then volunteered something most men never would: “We assume, somehow, that we don’t have the level of expertise to be able to grasp the whole thing.”

“Of course it is part of the confidence issue,” she concluded, shrugging, “to be overly prepared and to be rehearsed, and to make sure that you are going to get it all and not make a mistake.” Is it a problem? we asked. “Well,” she joked, “it’s very time consuming!”

Perfectionism was very much on our growing list of confidence killers and so our role model had impressed us with her self-assurance, yet also managed to make a compelling case for the depth of the problem. (Like misery, we found ourselves perversely comforted to have more company. If Amazonian athletes, hard-charging military graduates, and global financiers are susceptible to self-doubt, no wonder we mere mortals have issues.) In all though, despite her vulnerabilities, Lagarde came across as confident, and confident in a way we’d like to be, and we would think about that contradiction for months.

The evening we had dinner with her, she was just back from the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, and laughingly recalled a panel about women’s economic progress on which she had participated with other female luminaries, including her friend Sheryl Sandberg.

“So there we were, with just one token man right in the middle, poor guy. He struggled quite a bit, trying to be pushy. We were trying to listen to the moderator, or signal to her when we wanted to join the debate. He couldn’t care less. He ignored her and talked when he liked. And in that setting, he came across as quite rude.”