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Mastering The Confidence Code: Confidence 101, with Claire Shipman, Journalist and Co-author, The Confidence Code
Defining Confidence
Defining confidence was one of the trickiest parts of this book. My co-author and I spent a lot of time talking to academics, talking to people all around the world, talking to people in a lot of different professions. Confidence is something that you think you know when you see it, but as it turns out we had the definition completely wrong. I thought for a long time that confidence was what self-esteem is, which is that confidence is the thing that makes you feel good about yourself. Turns out, no, that is actually self-esteem. The best definition we got for confidence came from a professor at Ohio State University, who said to us, confidence is the stuff that turns your thoughts into action. And that was really interesting to us because we never thought about the action component to confidence, and understanding that is especially important because confidence greases the wheels for action, but it’s also a virtuous circle in the end because the confidence that we can create for ourselves comes from taking action and taking risks and failing, and ultimately mastering. But doing is incredibly important to confidence.
Accumulating Confidence
Confidence accumulates in ways that were unexpected to me. I had imagined when I set out doing research that confidence was largely something that parents instill – that you have a good childhood and your parents make you think you can do everything, and by the time you’re 9 or 10 you either are confident or you aren’t. It turns out, first of all, we all get a big dose of confidence at birth. A big dose of confidence, I should say, that we’re either going to have or we’re not going to have. A lot of experts now believe that confidence is anywhere from 25-50% genetic. You really can be, to some extent, born confident or born with a natural inclination toward confidence. And the genes that affect our confidence are the genes that affect things like oxytocin and serotonin and dopamine in our brains. But that other confidence we have, the other 50-75%, accumulates through life experience. And it’s not the life experience of a coach handing you a medal, or your mom telling you you’re great and you can do anything. It’s the nitty gritty experience of life, and especially of moments in life that are difficult – moments when we have to use our grit or determination or overcome things.
Confidence involves this concept of mastery, which is the process of learning something – but learning something that’s hard. Along the way, necessarily, there are some failures and hardships and setbacks, and ultimately you’ve accomplished something. All of that stuff, that life experience, is what becomes our stronghold of confidence, then, to allow us to do future things. That was a surprise to me, that it’s really something that we can create for ourselves even if we haven’t had the best childhood or the best genetics. It’s something we can come up with ourselves.
Calibrating Your Confidence
There’s so many reasons why confidence is important. Most of the time, people tend to think confidence is important because it helps us with success, and that is certainly true. We’ve seen that confidence is critical for success. I think, though, one of the most profound things we learned in our research for this book is that confidence is a wonderful thing for all of our lives – not just our professional lives. One of the most interesting women we talked to is a Buddha scholar, Sharon Salzberg, and she described confidence to us as a kind of energy. She said it’s an ability to move toward challenges wholeheartedly without holding back. That stuck with me, first of all because I thought, do I ever do that? Do I ever move toward anything wholeheartedly without holding back? And how wonderful that sounds in all parts of your life. So I think there’s a case to be made for women because we are often holding a little something back almost everywhere. We’re thinking about this person and that person, we’re worried about this and thinking about that. We always have a little bit of caution and I think the ability to be able to just take that risk and jump into things, and benefit from what it feels like to leave your comfort zone and do something and learn, I think that’s incredibly important for women.
Another interesting person we talked to, who’s not a Buddha scholar but he studies confidence in rats, he’s a scientist at Cold Spring Harbor. He explained to us that he sees confidence as a barometer for our lives. It’s a tool that, if you have it and it’s working right, should help you make the best decisions all the time – the most accurate decisions. The problem is if it’s not calibrated in the right way, it’s not a very useful tool. What we have found is that for most women, our confidence is not calibrated in the right way. We consistently underestimate what we’re capable of. And that leads to some consequences that you can imagine and are obvious, but it leads to missed opportunities in many cases that we can’t even imagine…because we are holding back and we tend to say, “I’m not ready for this. I’m not ready to turn in that assignment. That paper’s not ready. I’m not qualified for this.” It’s kind of mind-boggling when you think about the compounded missed opportunities over the course of a lifetime if you really don’t get your confidence in working order.