What is confidence?
Optimism, hope and self-esteem can be confused with confidence. They differ in one fundamental way, confidence empowers action. The future in uncertain. Confidence is a mental stance towards the future that defies the uncertainty by betting on success.
4 types of confidence: can’t do/can’t happen; can do/can’t happen; can’t do/can happen; can do/can happen.
How Confidence Works
Lack of confidence often arises because goals are not clear and attention is not sharply focused on them.
One study. Two groups. The first one was asked to say out loud, ‘I feel anxious’, and the seconf one was asked to say ‘I feel excited’ - regardless of how they were actually feeling. The individuals who told themselves that they felt excited performed tge arithmetic better than those who interpreted their pounding hearts and twisting stomachs as anxiety.
Confidence, then, is the words you say to yourself, in part. And given that we can choose what we say to ourselves, we can, to some extent, control our level of confidence.
As Woody says, “Showing up is 80 per cent of life.” Sometimes it’s easier to hide home in bed. I’ve done both. […] People like Jo, who experience a lot of anxiety, generally do less stuff in their lives. They have fewer opportunities to experience the mood-elevating, anxiety-reducing and confidence-building of mastering challenges because they take less action.
How Confidence Declines
When the African American students were told that their intellectual abilities were being tested, they scored 8 out od 33 on the exam. In comparison, Caucasian students scored 12. […] When the African Amercan students were given a different rationale about this - namely that it was to explre how people solved problems, they scored 12 - the same as the Caucasian students. Simply thinking that their IQ was being tested, sapped the other group’s mental performance by a third.
These findings also apply to gender. Woneb are commonly thought to perform less well on visuospatial tasks. […] And yes, on averagem women do perform worse than men at this test. Yet if female participants are ‘primed’ beforehand, by reading an article saying that women are better at this type of exercise than men, they perform just as well on this supposedly gender-sensitive task.
Although I was wrong in that particular case, the confidence heuristin is not a bad general rule of choosing between different sources of information. The confidence = knowledge heuristic is widely held, and it has the notable effect of making confident-sounding people more persuasive. Confidence, in other words, makes you an influencer and a salesman.
What makes us confident?
Children who are born into families higher up the socioeconomic ladder have greater confidence in their abilities than the less priviledged, no matter their underlying abilities.
On Eastern Eurpean countries […] If your freedom of choice has been restriced throughout your life by an excessively controlling state, then there is a predictability to life that cab be comforting and reassuring, even if it doesn’t make you happy. Without the experience of exercising choice, suddenly having ‘freedom’ can be exceptionally anxiety-provoking. //[Quinn notes] Same for a 9-5 job, leaving universty etc
Scroll to a photograph of someone close to you who warms your heart. Notice how you feel, be aware of that glow of pleasure. That sensation arises deep in your brain in a network of areas around a part called the ventral striatum. The well-known neurotransmitter dopamine is the essential ‘fuel’ in this emotional circuit, Its release is both a cause and an effect of the pleasure you geel while looking at that photograph.
Could these fluctuations in the activity of this feel-good network merely be the transient marker if momentary pleasure rather than having any link to out longer-term happines and wellbeing? No, the greater yoyr wellbeing and happiness, the higher the level of dopamine activity in this circuit.
Dopamine-driven pleasurable activity dramatically reduces the amount of the stress hormone cortisol that your body makes. And, as we saw earlier, happiness breeds confidence, and vice versa.
Feeling in control means that you believe you can act and that there will be consequences of that action. That is confidence.
Your happiness predicts your personal wealth independently of your socioeconomic status.
Silver medal winner are less happy on average than gold medalist. They are also less happy than bronze-medal competitors. This happens because your happiness depends upon who you compare yourself with.
So far, we discovered that confidence arises from success, higher socioeconomic status and happiness. Having a sense of control and feeling advantaged in comparison to others also have important effects in how these big variables play out in our lives. There are yet other factors at play.
Failing confidently
If we have a fixed idea about our personality, intelligence or emotional state, than these seem unchangeable.
Having a fixed theory about yourself can help if you have a history of success. However, it is a fragile confidence because setback or gailures can seem evidence that your fixed idea is wrong.
With a growth midset, on the other hand, failure is just a part of the complex, multi-stranded nature of the learning. It is not a threat to your views of your abilities because they can be changed.[…] The more attractive a face was, the more competent the person was judged to be.
Should I change my job? Should I move to a new house? Take a few minutes to think through the pro and cons. This puts you in a ** deliberative ** mindset where you are weighting options and not fixated on a clear course of action.
Now bring to mind the most important personal goal you intend to achieve in the next few months - for example, I plan to find a new apartment. This will put you in an implemental mindset. You made a decision, you know what you are doing and are moving forward towards a clear goal.
An implemental mindset boost confidence.
The Gender Gap
Girls don’t make nearly as many self-congratulatory comments as the opposite sex.
[…] This means that boys and girls are essentially playing by different rules in a world in which projecting a self-enhancing view of one’s ability actually works in making you more successful in certain ways, for all the reasons outlined in Chapter 2.
Learning to be confident
It is easier to act yourself into a new way of feeling that to feel yourself into a new way of acting. - Harry Stack Sullivan
Research shows that, at best, people’s intentions transkate into concrete behaviour only 20-30% of the time. This means that most people, most of the time, are deprived of the confidence-building benefits of taking action.
Smart teams have their own intelligence separate from the averaged IQ of each individual member. The smartest groups were not those with highest IQ members. Instead, the individuals in the clever groups were adept at reading other people’s facial expressions and took turns in discussions.
Personality characteristics that made people less overconfident about their intelligence: sensitivity to people criticism, nervousness, proness to guilty feelings, sensitive and worry prone vulnerability.
Overconfidence
Their peers saw them as more competent if they talked more and used a factual, confident tone. […] And how many more - women more than men- have been rejected because they didn’t bullshit at the interview?
the mere capacity to appear bullishly confident garners status and the illusion of competence
And this is why overconfidence is a lucrative pattern of behaviour. It pays off in spades because it tricks people into giving you status. One you have it, it is near-indelible, even when your incompetence becomes evident.
The confident economy
- Healthy overconfidence propels individuals to take risks ans start new projects rather than sticking with old ones, which, in a changing world, can pay off.