The Confidence Code (7 page)

Glass’s observation helped us to understand why confidence can seem like such a fleeting quality. In some circumstances, we have it; in others, we don’t. It explains how Andre Agassi, for example, could be so incredibly confident about his tennis but so riddled with self-doubt in the rest of his life. It explains why so many women might feel confident in their personal lives but not at work, and it explains why Claire can be confident in her people skills but not as self-assured when it comes to making decisions. She doesn’t overthink when she’s helping other people solve problems, but has trouble solving her own.

Caroline Miller’s mention of mastery also got our attention. Initially, we were wary, and somewhat suspicious of the term. It sounded undeniably masculine and evoked images of paternalistic gentry lording over their subjects. It also seemed like something we might need power tools for, not to mention a high school shop course. Our real fear, though, was that mastery would just turn out to be a recipe for the endless pursuit of perfection—something to which women are far too susceptible already.

But Miller explained that mastery is none of that. Mastery isn’t about being the best tennis player or the best mom. The resonance of mastery is in the
process
and
progress.
It is about work, and learning to develop an appetite for challenge. Mastery inevitably means encountering hurdles; you won’t always overcome them, but you won’t let them stop you from trying. You may never become a world-class swimmer, but you will learn to swim across the lake. And the unexpected by-product of all of that hard work you put in to mastering things? Confidence. Not only did you learn to do something well, but you got a freebie.

This next point is invaluable. The confidence you get from mastery is contagious. It spreads. It doesn’t even really matter what you master: For a child, it can be as simple as tying a shoe. What matters is that mastering one thing gives you the confidence to try something else.

When Katty turned forty, for example, in defiance (or perhaps denial) of middle age, she made the decision to learn to kiteboard. She needed a challenge, and had a naïve fantasy that if she could crack this, she’d soon be a cool (young) surfer chick doing acrobatic jumps high above the waves. She didn’t, however, anticipate how often she’d get dragged down a beach attached to a powerful thirty-foot kite, or fall from her board into the saltwater, or the tears and frustration and loud cursing. After the first couple of summers, she was prepared to give up; it was too humiliating and she was too sore. But she stuck with it and, while youth and coolness remain slightly beyond her grasp, she can now kitesurf. Her children, who started long after her, are naturally already ten times better, but that’s not the point. Having mastered (sort of) one extreme sport, Katty’s now looking around for another to help face down the next decade.

Meet the Confidence Cousins

Confidence was starting to come into focus. We were growing convinced that it involves action—doing, mastering, maybe even deciding, but we still had a jumble of other terms fighting for our attention. (For a while, we even made the rookie mistake of using “confidence” and “self-esteem” interchangeably.) Our experts set us straight. The confidence cousins are all worth having as well, but there are some critical differences between confidence and the other positive attributes that many of us tend to lump together: self-esteem, optimism, self-compassion, and self-efficacy.

Some of these extended family members have been pored over and heavily researched. Others are new to the scene. They each have their detractors and supporters. Some people will tell you that optimism is the key to life; others are equally adamant that, without self-esteem, you will never be happy. What they do have in common is that each allows us to improve the richness of our life, to function at maximum capacity, to enhance our professional performance, and to deepen our personal relationships. In an ideal world we’d all have all of them in abundance.

Self-Esteem

“
I am a valuable person and I feel good about myself.” Agree with that and chances are you have pretty high self-esteem. This is a value judgment on your overall character. It’s an attitude: “I like myself,” or “I hate myself,” or more typically something between the two extremes. Self-esteem is what allows us to believe that we are lovable, that we have value as human beings. It’s not related to wealth: You can be the richest, most successful CEO in your industry and have low self-worth, and you can be a cashier at a drugstore and have plenty of self-esteem.

In the mid-1960s, sociologist Morris Rosenberg came up with a basic self-esteem scale that is still the worldwide standard. It’s a simple list of questions: “I feel I do not have much to be proud of,” “I feel that I have a number of good qualities.” Answer those, and eight others, and you can quickly measure your self-worth. We’ve put the scale in the notes, if you are curious about how you stack up.

Self-esteem is essential for emotional well-being, but it is distinct from confidence because confidence is typically tied to feelings about what we can achieve: “I am confident that I can run this race and get to the end.” Self-esteem tends to be more stable and more pervasive than confidence. If you have an overall good feeling about your position in the universe, chances are you’ll have that for life and it will color much of what you do. It’s an invaluable buffer for withstanding setbacks.

There is considerable overlap with confidence, to be sure. A person with high self-esteem will tend to have confidence, and vice versa. There’s a particularly close relationship if high self-esteem is based on talents or abilities. “I think I’m a valuable person because I am smart, fast, efficient, and successful in my field.” If, however, you don’t really care about talents or skills or intelligence or achievements but you care about being a good person, perhaps about being devout, or living up to a moral code, then your self-esteem and your confidence will have looser ties.

It is worth noting that there’s been a self-esteem backlash lately; the concept has developed a bad name in the minds of psychologists (not to mention employers, teachers, parents, and, even some of its former promoters) after a decades-long push into schools, homes, and even workplaces. That’s because the product being pushed was unrealistic self-esteem. The emphasis was on simply telling children, and sometimes adults, they were all winners, all fabulous, and all perfect. After observing a generation of self-esteem-swaddled kids turn into rudderless adults, the experts realized none of that actually gives children any concrete basis for believing they can do anything, or even make decisions on their own.

Optimism

Optimism has muscled self-esteem aside and is the hotter commodity these days. In Latin, the word optimum means most favorable. So an optimistic person is one who expects the most favorable outcome from any given situation. Optimism is a question of interpretation, and that basic glass half-full, half-empty measure still works well. We can experience the same facts—the glass has the same amount of water—but how we interpret those facts depends on our optimistic or pessimistic attitude. Winston Churchill put the difference memorably: “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” Another hallmark of optimism is gratitude. If you are an optimist, you notice that good things happen to you, and you feel grateful for them. If you’re a pessimist, you probably don’t pay attention to positive things as often, and when they do happen, you believe them to be chance occurrences. Psychologists suggest this simple test: Open a door for an optimist, and the chances are she will thank you. A pessimist is much less likely to even notice the door being held for her and, if she does, she will assume it was merely being opened for someone else.

You can be optimistic about a specific event: The marathon will be fun, or the test will be easy for me. Or you could have a general view that things will work out positively. Unlike self-esteem, optimism isn’t a judgment on your inner self-worth; it’s an attitude you have that is based on your view of the outside world. You’re not optimistic because of your talents or your innate goodness; you are optimistic because you interpret the world positively.

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.’
 
”

One of the most influential voices in psychology today is that of Martin Seligman, one of the founders of the positive psychology movement. He’s redefined optimism as something more robust, with a sense of action, tugging it closer to confidence. In his best-selling book
Learned Optimism
, he contends that optimism, like other skills, can be cultivated through, among other things, mastery and hard knocks, which help to develop a sense of personal agency. Optimistic people, in Seligman’s view, have a sense that they can effect change. Therefore the world does not appear as bleak.

Self-Compassion

Self-compassion is the newest, edgiest member of the extended confidence family and, at first introduction, can seem reminiscent of the groovy, hippie 1960s. The concept springs from the Buddhist theory of loving-kindness and the work of Sharon Salzberg, but was recently pioneered as an academic pursuit by Kristin Neff, a professor in the educational psychology department at the University of Texas. The central precept is that we should all be kinder to ourselves because doing so makes us healthier, more fulfilled, and more successful in the pursuits we choose.

Self-compassion dictates that we treat ourselves as we treat our friends. If your friend comes to you and says, “I just failed. I blew it,” what do you do? You’re kind, you’re supportive, you’re understanding, and you give your friend a hug. Or if it’s a guy, you give your friend a slap on the back. You try to pick the other person up. But, Neff told us, all too often we don’t do that for ourselves: “Indeed, often the people who are most compassionate toward others are the least forgiving to themselves.”

The second key to self-compassion is that it places our individual experiences in the framework of a shared human experience. It takes our imperfections and sufferings and puts them in the context of simply being human. In our success-oriented world, we tend to think of failure as abnormal. We get a low grade, get turned down for a promotion, lose our job, or get dumped by our boyfriend, and our instinct is to say, “This shouldn’t be happening.” But, of course, these setbacks are just part of being human and if you never had them, you’d be a robot. Putting our disappointments in that context makes them less frightening and less isolating.

So how does self-compassion fit into the confidence clan? At first glance, self-compassion and confidence seemed an ill-suited pair. Confidence, we were now fairly certain, involves action. Self-compassion says, “Don’t beat yourself up; put yourself in the broader human condition, and accept some failure.” We wondered why self-compassion doesn’t just encourage us to accept all our flaws so thoroughly that we become comatose. Why not just stay on the couch and surf the shopping channels? “I was mean to my friend, failed to make dinner, didn’t talk to that lonely-looking person, didn’t do my homework, didn’t go to the gym, didn’t finish my project at work, didn’t take the tough college course. Oh well, I’m only human. Where’s the remote?”

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.

“Most people believe that they need to criticize themselves in order to find motivation to reach their goals. In fact, when you constantly criticize yourself, you become depressed, and depression is not a motivational mind-set,” Neff said.

Having overcome our initial, overachiever reservations, there’s something else appealing about self-compassion. It is the acceptance that it’s okay to be average sometimes. Many of us spend our lives trying to be the best at everything, whether it’s winning soccer games at age five or making partner by age thirty-five. We live in a culture where being anything other than the winner is frowned upon.

“If I were to tell you that your work as a journalist is average, you’d be devastated, right?” Neff said. “Being called average is considered an insult. We all have to be above average. It sets up a very comparative mind-set. But the math doesn’t work. It isn’t possible for us all to be above average, even though many studies show most Americans think they are.”

We live in a world of constant comparisons that extend well beyond the workplace. She’s thinner, richer, and more successful than we are. She’s a better mom, has a better marriage. But constantly defining yourself through other people’s achievements is chasing fool’s gold. There is always someone doing it better. Sometimes you fare well by comparison; sometimes not.

Self-compassion recognizes the folly of this. To take risks, we have to know that we won’t always win. Otherwise, we’ll either refuse to act or be devastated. Self-compassion isn’t an excuse for inaction—it supports action, and it connects us to other people, to being human, with all the strengths and the weaknesses that implies.

Self-Efficacy

If self-compassion is the kind, gentle cousin, self-efficacy is the tough, just-get-it-done member of the family.

In 1977, psychologist Albert Bandura’s article “Self-Efficacy: Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change” was published. In the sedate world of academic psychology, this work, with its arcane title, sent tremors throughout the field. For the next thirty years, self-efficacy was one of the most studied topics in psychology.
Self-efficacy
is defined as a belief in your ability to succeed at something. Bandura’s central premise was that those beliefs, our sense of self-efficacy, can change the broader way we think, behave, and feel. Self-efficacy, much like mastery, creates spillover effects.