The Confidence Code (8 page)

Self-efficacy’s goal-oriented nature especially appealed to the success-focused baby boomer generation. But it’s also a simple and practical quality. We can all identify specific goals we want to achieve: lose twenty pounds, learn Spanish, and get a pay raise. Bandura says the key to actually putting those aspirations into action is self-efficacy.

If you have a strong sense of self-efficacy, you will look at challenges as tasks to be conquered; you will be more deeply involved in the activities you take on, and you will recover faster from setbacks. A lack of self-efficacy leads us to avoid challenges, to believe that difficult things are beyond our capability, and to dwell on negative results. As is the case with confidence, mastery is fundamental to self-efficacy. In other words, try hard, become good at something, and develop self-efficacy—a belief that you can succeed.

Some experts told us they see self-efficacy as interchangeable with confidence. Others maintained that there are distinctions, that confidence can also be a much more generalized belief about your ability to succeed in the world. Self-efficacy also sounded, to us, a bit like Seligman’s view of learned optimism. All three are closely tied to a sense of personal power.

Whatever formal label you put on it, whether it’s a slice of self-efficacy or a component of optimism or an element of classically defined confidence, that belief that you can succeed at something, that you can make something happen, resonated right away with us. It fit with our observations about action. It seemed to be a central strand of the confidence we were after.

The Real Thing

You know that old saying, “It’s all in your head”? Well, when it comes to confidence, it’s wrong. One of the most unexpected and vital conclusions we reached is that confidence isn’t even close to all in your head. Indeed, you have to get
out of your head
to create it and to use it. Confidence occurs when the insidious self-perception that you aren’t able is trumped by the stark reality of your achievements.

Katty discovered this reality in a high-octane, underventilated White House back office. She was called to attend a briefing of Middle East experts at which she
felt
like the only unqualified person in the room. “The high-powered setting made me insecure,” she admits. “When it came to question time, I wanted to ask something, but was worried I’d sound uninformed, that I might blush or seem stupid.” It was mostly men in the room and they all sounded so sure of themselves. The easiest path was to do nothing and keep quiet; the risky thing, the confident thing to do, was to speak up. Eventually, after a ridiculous amount of internal agonizing, she did get a question out. “I realized I just had to physically force my hand up, keep it there, and get the words out. And guess what, the sky didn’t fall on my head! My question was just as smart as anyone else’s. Now, whenever I’m in that position I tell myself I
did
it once, I can
do
it again. And every time, it gets a little bit easier.”

We’d seen it in the rats, and we heard it from General Jessica Wright and the academics: Confidence is linked to doing. We were convinced that one of the essential ingredients in confidence is action, that belief that we can succeed at things, or make them happen. Confidence, we saw from the young women in Running Start at Georgetown, is not letting your doubts consume you. It is a willingness to go out of your comfort zone and do hard things. We were also sure that confidence must be about hard work. Mastery. About having resilience and not giving up. The confidence cousins can all support that goal. It’s easier to keep going if you are optimistic about the outcome. If you have self-efficacy in one area, and use it, you will create more general confidence. If you have high self-esteem, and believe you are intrinsically valuable, you won’t assume your boss thinks you’re not worthy of a raise. And, if you fail, self-compassion will give you the chance not to berate yourself, but to take your failure more lightly.

We were at last confident about the way we wanted to define confidence. We felt all the more so when one of our most stalwart guides through this tricky terrain, Richard Petty, a psychology professor at Ohio State University, who has spent decades focused on the subject, managed to put all we had learned into appealingly clear terms: “Confidence is the stuff that turns thoughts into action.”

Other factors, he explained, will of course play a role. “If the action involves something scary, then what we call
courage
might also be needed for the action to occur,” Petty explained. “Or if it’s difficult, a strong will to persist might also be needed. Anger, intelligence, creativity can play a role.” But confidence, he told us, is the most important factor. It first turns our thoughts into judgments about what we are capable of, and it then transforms those judgments into actions.

Confidence is the stuff that turns thoughts into action
. The simplicity was gorgeous and compelling. It immediately became not only our definition, but an organizing principle for the next phase of our exploration. And what was especially useful was that it somehow, naturally, effortlessly, made proper sense of the other threads we’d been gathering. The critical link between confidence and work and mastery suddenly made sense. They form points on a wonderfully virtuous circle. If confidence is a belief in your success, which then stimulates action, you will create more confidence when you take that action. And so on and so forth. It keeps accumulating, through hard work, through success, and even through failure.

Maybe Nike has it right. At some point we have to stop thinking, and just do it.

We found a striking illustration of how this might play out in the real world (or in something edging closer to the real world) in Italy, at the University of Milan. There we tracked down psychologist Zach Estes, who’s long been curious about the confidence disparity between men and women.

A few years ago, Estes did a series of tests that involved getting five hundred students to reorganize a 3-D image on a computer screen. It looked like a simplified Rubik’s cube. He was testing a few things—the idea that confidence can be manipulated and that, in some areas, women have less of it than men.

When Estes had the students, men and women, solve a series of these spatial puzzles, he found that the women scored measurably worse than the men. But when he looked back at their actual answers, he found the reason the women were doing less well was that they didn’t even attempt to answer a lot of the questions. They simply ducked out because they weren’t confident in their abilities. He then told them they had to at least
try
to solve all the puzzles. And, guess what: The women’s scores shot up, and they did as well as the men. Crazy. Maddening. Yet also hopeful.

Estes’s work illustrates, in a broad sense, an interesting point: The natural result of under-confidence is inaction. When women don’t act, when we hesitate because we aren’t sure, even by skipping a few questions, we hold ourselves back. It matters. But when we do act, even when we’re forced to act, to answer those questions, we do just as well as men. The women in Estes’s experiment skipped questions because they didn’t want to try something at which they thought they might fail. In truth, they had no need to worry. They were just as good at manipulating those computer images as the men. But fear of failure led to inaction, thus guaranteeing failure.

Using a different test, Estes simply asked everyone to answer every question. Both men and women got 80 percent right, suggesting identical ability. He then tested them again and asked them, after each question, to report their confidence in their answer. Just having to think about whether they felt certain of their answer changed their ability to do well. Women’s scores dipped to 75, while the men’s
shot up
to 93! Are women really that susceptible to seizing any chance to think badly of themselves? One little nudge asking us how sure we are about something rattles our world, while with men, it seems to just remind them that they’re terrific.

Finally, Estes decided to attempt a direct confidence boost. He told some members of the group, completely at random, that they had done very well on the previous test. On the next test they took, those men and women improved their scores dramatically. It was a clear measure of what confidence can do—fuel our action, and substantially affect our performance, for better or for worse. And we can all imagine, without much trouble, what this suggests about women and confidence in our everyday lives.

Life’s Enabler

Think about it. We are all capable of imagining how great it would be to write that novel, apply for that new position, or just introduce ourselves to that interesting stranger. But how many of us actually do it?

Confidence is life’s enabler—professionally, intellectually, athletically, socially, and even amorously. The man you met at a conference is cute; you’d like to call him and arrange a date. But what if he thinks you’re boring, unattractive, or too forward? All normal worries and, if you lack confidence, they’re paralyzing. You will sit home, nursing a desire to act/call, but not doing anything about it. Confidence propels you to pick up the phone.

Other traits encourage action, as Richard Petty noted. Ambition, for example, which drives us to pursue measurable success, can work in tandem with confidence toward a goal. Courage routinely compels action, is very much inclined to push for action, and early on we almost thought of courage as another confidence cousin. But confidence provides the basic groundwork for action based on a belief in one’s ability to do something or succeed, and courage advocates for action with little regard for risk or success, springing from a very different place—a kind of moral center. Courage though, can be a critical partner to confidence, especially in situations where we are operating without the benefit of a confidence reserve, and we need to take those first, terrifying steps in order to start building it.

And sure, other factors can limit us too. Lack of motivation might stop us from applying for that promotion. Procrastination could stop our training for that marathon. But if we assume the desire is there, the only real inhibitor is a lack of belief in our ability to succeed. And, let’s be honest, neither the beckoning of a comfortable couch nor a lack of motivation is likely to be what stops us from speaking out at confrontational moments or from cold-calling a potential client to pitch a sale. Confidence is all that matters there.

A couple of questions had been nagging at us, though, since our intense conversations with Cameron Anderson about the merits of overconfidence. What is the optimum amount of confidence? Is that even knowable? With a clear definition of confidence in hand, this seemed easier to address. We had firm agreement from the social scientists and hard scientists on this one—a slight tilt toward overconfidence is optimal. Adam Kepecs, our rat expert, believes it’s fundamentally, biologically, useful. “It is adaptive to have appropriate levels of confidence so one makes the right bets in life,” he told us. “And, in fact, it is actually adaptive to have a little extra confidence for good measure in the face of uncertainty.” In other words—better to believe a bit too much in your capabilities than is called for, because then you lean toward
doing
things instead of just
thinking about
doing them.

You probably have a good gut sense of your confidence level already, especially if you’ve recognized any of the behavior we’ve been describing. But there are formal measures. We’ve put two of the most trusted confidence scales in the notes at the end of the book. One was recently created by Richard Petty and his collaborator Kenneth DeMarree of the University of Buffalo. The other is a thirty-year-old survey still in heavy use. They don’t take long, if you want to put some numbers on your current state of assurance.

Confidence, we believe, is our missing link. It’s what can propel us out of our overworked minds toward the liberating terrain of action. Confident action can take many forms—it is not always as overt as turning in a job application, or learning to skydive. A decision, a conversation, an opinion formed—those are all driven by confidence.

Confidence, ultimately, is the characteristic that distinguishes those who imagine from those who do. It’s the stuff that seems to naturally inhabit the minds of the Susan B. Anthonys and the Malala Yousafzais. But we were also coming to see confidence as something we might
all
create. We recognized an encouraging power in the concept of confidence as action, which, when taken, sows and reaps more of the same. Action, we reasoned, is something we are all free to choose. Might it be that acquisition of confidence is basically our choice? Confirming that appealing notion required answering another question first.

3

WIRED FOR CONFIDENCE

The drive from Washington, DC, to western Maryland brought us to bucolic, red-barn country within an hour. Horses gazed up halfheartedly at our passing car, clearly oblivious to the great experiment going on just down the road. A tribe of three hundred rhesus monkeys, whose original members came from the mountains of Sri Lanka, has made its home in Poolesville. They’re here to help humans figure out why we behave the way we do.

We’d come to see the monkeys, and also the man who has been watching them for more than forty years, neuropsychologist Steve Suomi of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He is a leading explorer of the tangled, centuries-old, nature versus nurture terrain, and he commands a small empire of warehouse labs in this countryside outpost, the centerpiece of which is a five-acre playground for his subjects. The day was gloriously sunny, and many of the monkeys were scampering and swinging on equipment that looked like, well, monkey bars.

“There are truly interesting personality differences in monkeys,” Suomi told us. “You see everything from healthy, well-adjusted individuals to monkeys prone to anxiety or depression or even autism. Where do those traits come from?”