The Confidence Code (16 page)

We’d figured testosterone and estrogen were essentially the celebrity architects of gender difference. A bit showy, attention-seeking, and overexposed, they command enormous respect, and for good reason. Everyone knows they are the forces behind many of the basic, overt differences between men and women.

We didn’t think they would be significantly involved in the detail work though—the intricate creation of something as complicated as confidence. Certainly, we thought, our confidence differences can’t spring from such an elemental source. But those hormones seem to be considerable players here, too. Testosterone, especially, helps to fuel what often looks like that classic male confidence. Men have, after puberty, about ten times more testosterone pumping through their systems, and it affects everything from speed to strength to muscle size to competitive instinct. Testosterone is the hormone that encourages a focus on winning the game and demonstrating power, instead of connecting and cooperating with others.

Testosterone is also heavily correlated with risk taking. A number of recent studies have tied high testosterone to a willingness to ignore traditional cues about risk. We detailed a fascinating one in our last book, and each time we mention it in a speech we still draw nervous laughs. Scientists from Cambridge University followed seventeen male traders at the London stock exchange, all high rollers, for a week. They earned good salaries; many collected bonuses as high as $5 million. Researchers measured their testosterone levels using saliva samples, at the start and end of the day. On days when traders began with higher levels of testosterone, they made riskier trades. And, when that paid off, their testosterone levels didn’t just rise—they spiked. One trader who doubled his take saw his testosterone level almost double along with it. Testosterone fuels risk taking, and winning creates more testosterone. The dynamic, called the “winner effect,” can be dangerous. Animals can become so aggressive and overconfident after winning that they take fatal risks, like standing in open ground, prompting other animals to attack them.

Higher testosterone levels are linked to feeling powerful. When women are told to adopt classically male seating poses—taking up more space, spreading their legs and arms—our testosterone levels rise. Power poses are a popular tool for communications classes. Barbara Tannenbaum uses them in all her presentations. She’ll start the discussion by asking the men in the audience to sit like women and the women to sit like men. After years of doing this, she’s made two observations: First, the exercise always raises a laugh. Second, no one ever asks her what she means; they just know. Often the men will say it’s really uncomfortable trying to sit with their legs crossed and their bodies somehow shrinking inward. (Try doing it in Spanx and heels, she quips back.) The women, though, seem liberated by the unfamiliar pose. One day Tannenbaum did the exercise in a high school in India, and, as she spread her knees and lolled back in her chair, one young woman blurted out, “I feel like a king when I sit like this!”
The confidence of kings
—that’s what we’d like to give all our girls.

There’s a downside to testosterone, to be sure. This egocentric hormone is also associated with an inability to see others’ points of view. When you have a lot of testosterone coursing through your body, you’re less interested in connecting and cooperating. That’s not great for business in a modern world, which relies so heavily on communicating with others. The finding of one experiment suggests women can fall victim to testosterone’s perils as well. There were thirty-four women in the study, who were split into two groups and told to work in pairs to examine the clarity of some computer images. Some of the images were obviously clear; others weren’t. If the women disagreed on which image was sharper, they had to collaborate and agree upon a final answer with their partner. The first group of women was given a testosterone supplement; those in the second weren’t. Go figure—the women on testosterone were both less able to collaborate
and
wrong more often.

The main hormonal driver for women is, of course, estrogen, which promotes very different instincts from testosterone. Estrogen encourages bonding and connection; it supports the part of our brain that involves social skills and observations. It is part of what drives women to avoid conflict and risk and so it might hinder confident action at times.

But there are substantial performance upsides to estrogen as well. A testosterone-laced decision isn’t always better. The big risks that ensue often lead to spectacular failure, as the world economy has witnessed. Indeed, several studies of the strategies of female hedge fund managers show that taking the longer view and trading less can pay off. One study in particular got us thinking about how to harness our natural strengths. Researchers found that the investments run by female hedge fund managers did three times as well as those run by male managers over the past five years. And the women lost significantly less money than men in that disastrous year, 2008.

So, what are the implications of all this brain research in the search for greater confidence? Well, there’s good news and bad. Women’s hormonal tendency to avoid risk and conflict can lead to too much caution. Our laborious brain processing mechanism can become a maelstrom of overthinking and indecision.

However, the science also suggests that women have the ability to be hugely accomplished and successful. Our brain structure means we like to get stuff right, make good judgments, and hold bad impulses to a minimum. Our biological investment in emotions makes us good at perceiving problems, at understanding the issues of others, and at moving toward reconciliations and solutions. And our highly integrated brain means we can take in large amounts of data and process it quickly. Stepping back, we realized how much of this tracks with what we see in our behavior. We’d just discovered the action going on backstage.

The essential question still to be answered about all of these gender variations, however, is whether male and female brains are
programmed
to develop this way. Perhaps some of these physical differences are a result of the way we are raised. Do women end up with connective white matter because we grow up using it more? Do we have more of it because
centuries
of women have grown up using it more? Scientists aren’t close to a global explanation, although, remember, there is growing evidence in all of the work on brain plasticity that our brains certainly can change in response to the environment over the course of our lives. We uncovered one startling study that found testosterone levels in men decline when they spend more time with their children. (The implications are well worth further study.)

Whatever the cause-and-effect relationship, we found this link between brain structure and behavior incredibly useful as a visualization exercise. For us, it was a snapshot of the internal mechanism that may be at work when we see common behavioral patterns. We started to take our ruminating habits more seriously, and yet we were able to give ourselves a psychological break for them, because we knew that larger forces were probably involved.

We were also able to face the fact that men and women act in curiously different ways with somewhat more equanimity, and a good bit less emotion. We thought, for example, that all of this research might explain why the men we know seem to be able to shrug off disagreements with people so much more easily than we do. We both see it in our own husbands. They have a fight with a friend and, poof, a few minutes later the tension has disappeared. Where we waste weeks with worrying and hurt feelings, they come out of a blazing argument and a day or two later can barely remember it happened.

We came away from our look at the brain biology feeling surprisingly empowered. The way we often think and behave isn’t wrong, but rather, understandable. At least, that’s how we decided to regard it—using self-compassion. All we need to do is get our natural instincts to work more in our favor.

We also felt thoroughly versed in our challenges. We had a gratifying sense of mastery, you might even say, of the societal issues, the science, and the behavioral patterns affecting confidence. Fully armed, we were ready to move on to confidence creation.

5

THE NEW NURTURE

Jane’s mother walked her to school for the first day of class; around Jane’s neck, tied to a string, was the key to their front door. Jane knew that at the end of the day she would have to retrace those steps all alone, let herself into the apartment, and wait an hour and a half before her big sister got back home. She was terrified and remembers crying at the prospect of something going wrong. But she made it, and after the first day she did that solo journey again and again. She was four and a half years old.

“By six, I was in Girl Scouts and I knew I’d be a leader because I’d already done the tough stuff,” she says now. “My mother didn’t show me any fear, she just said she knew I could do it and find the way home by myself. It was doing hundreds of those small things that built my confidence as an adult. You’re not born with it. You build and you build. I built that confidence myself.”

When we first heard that story, we were taken aback, to say the least. Alone! At four and a half! Anything could have happened! What kind of parenting is that? Maybe the right kind. We were coming to understand that the acquisition of real confidence requires a radically new kind of nurturing, of ourselves and of our children. It demands more than just praise and love and hugs and making things easy on them (and on ourselves). It demands more than just the pursuit of good grades and perfection. None of that is working, and certainly not for women and girls. The conclusion of Jane’s story suggests that her mother may have done her a big favor.

Jane Wurwand, all grown up now, is the founder of the skin care company Dermalogica. She’s a Brit who has made it big in America, with a little help and a lot of determination, and now lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two teenage daughters. Twenty years ago, her confidence enabled her to take a substantial risk. Turned down for multiple loans, she put her own life’s savings of $14,000 into the company that would become a global brand and multimillion-dollar business, with more than fifty offices around the globe. As Wurwand says, with a smile, “Not bad for a girl with only a beauty school diploma from a small town in England.”

Little Christine was presented with much the same challenge and even more responsibility. At the age of four, she was expected to babysit for her younger brothers. If her parents had plans out in Le Havre, where they lived in northern France, they’d simply say, “We’re going out, look after the others.” She tells the story of one particular evening when her parents went to a concert, leaving her in charge. They said they’d be back at eleven. The appointed hour came and went, and still no parents. She turned on all the lights in the house to keep from getting scared and went upstairs to check on the baby. Finally her parents got home and found her curled up, reading a storybook in her brother’s bedroom. There was no reason for panic, the parents felt; they’d simply decided to go out for a bit after the concert, and why not? All four-year-old Christine said was, “Well, you’re a bit late.”

Today, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde laughs at the absurdity of her parents leaving such a young girl to babysit. But there is little question that parents of a different generation, and perhaps from different cultures, have offered a hands-off approach that in many ways served kids better than our modern American meddling. Lagarde says, with total conviction, that in doing so her parents were creating a cycle of trial, responsibility, and success that helped build the confidence she wields today on a world stage. It didn’t end with the babysitting. When Christine was sixteen, her mother dropped her by the side of the highway to hitchhike down to Lyon, six hours away, to visit some friends. At twenty, Christine was sent off to America alone, armed only with a plane ticket and Greyhound bus fare. “She equipped me with that sort of sense of ‘you can do it.’
 
” And do it she did.

We are not advocating a new home-alone policy for toddlers, and truth be told, we ourselves don’t embrace the notion of leaving four-year-olds in charge of younger siblings, as much confidence as it might create. But you get the point. We share these eyebrow-raising stories to give you a jolt as we explain the new nurture. Because nurture, in order to create enduring confidence, needs to toughen up, to shake off that warm and fuzzy image.

Think of it this way: Much of what parents have been told to emphasize for the past twenty years, based on the self-esteem movement, is misguided, and it’s generated a glut of flimsy self-esteem and flimsy confidence. Children have been rewarded for anything and everything, instead of for genuine accomplishment. Girls and women express more self-doubt than boys and men do, but modern parenting has created hollow confidence for both genders, as it often gives kids little responsibility, matched with a lot of praise and prizes. They’re deprived of adversity and the chance to fail. It’s the opposite of the type of parenting that accomplished women such as Lagarde and Wurwand received.

In some ways, false confidence is even more damaging than hollow self-esteem, since confidence is about ability and mastery. If you believe you can do something, and you truly can’t, and you are no longer an overprotected child, that clash with reality will be painful. This is not akin to wielding the bit of overconfidence Cameron Anderson says can be useful. We’re talking about a yawning gap that can cause real problems.

Scores of employers report that many of today’s college graduates, for example, seem to think they can run the world straight out of college and that they
deserve
every job they apply for and every perk they can get their hands on. Dig a little deeper, and you’ll find that their confidence is actually very fragile, because it has so little foundation in experience or reality. They may sound like know-it-alls, but push today’s youth, and they crumble fast. And their parents bear a lot of responsibility.