The Confidence Code (17 page)

“In the past, you would gain confidence by trial and error, and over time you begin to learn, ‘I’m generally right, I can do things,’
 
” says psychologist Richard Petty. Today, children get praise from parents who think they are boosting self-confidence but who are actually just indulging kids who have done little to deserve it because those very same parents have prevented their precious offspring from losing and failing and risking. At some point, usually after the children leave the confines of that overly protective nest and encounter the big, cold world of work, reality intervenes. “Things get objective, and people tell you when you’ve made a mistake. It isn’t all just roses,” says Petty.

Hard Knocks and
Gaman

So, what’s the magic formula? For once, we found surprising clarity and consensus. Confidence, at least the part that’s not in our genes, requires hard work, substantial risk, determined persistence, and sometimes bitter failure. Building it demands regular exposure to all of these things. You don’t get to experience how far you can go in life—at work and everywhere else—without pushing yourself, and, equally important, without being pushed along by others. Gaining confidence means getting outside your comfort zone, experiencing setbacks, and, with determination, picking yourself up again.

Maybe we’ve all grown a bit soft in the postwar, baby boomer years, and it’s time to toughen up, to develop a thicker skin and more resilience, because our investigation showed us clearly that enduring a few hard knocks, ideally early in life, is the fastest, most effective route to confidence.

Nansook Park, the University of Michigan psychologist who is an expert on optimism, says that, in general, the proper way to build confidence in children is to offer them graduated exposure to risk. Trauma is not the goal. “They should be introduced to risk taking, but carefully. Don’t just drop them in the middle of the lake. Teach them how to do things, and then give them opportunities, and be there when they need guidance. When they succeed, celebrate together, and talk about what worked. And if they fail, talk about what they did well, and the action should be the emphasis, but also what they can learn, and how to make it better the next time.”

Failure.
There it is. It’s the most frightening, and yet most critical partner to confidence. Failure is an inevitable result of risk taking, and it’s essential for building resilience. Petty says there’s not enough of it. “Just watch
American Idol
. There are kids who can’t sing but think they can, probably because everyone always told them, ‘Oh, you’re great. I like you.’
 
”

We’ve learned that the secret to success may in fact be failure. By failing a lot, and when we’re young, we inoculate ourselves against it and are better equipped to think about the big, bold risks later.

Failure, though, has to be handled in a constructive fashion, Chris Peterson, Park’s former colleague at the University of Michigan, explained to us. “One of our students told us about a colleague who was teaching in a tough inner-city high school and bragging about the fact that he’d told his class, ‘You’re dumber than a bunch of five-year-olds.’ And I’m thinking, what a terrible message. You’re not only saying you are not doing well, but also you can never do well. A better message is: ‘Okay, you made a mistake. You didn’t succeed. Here’s why. Maybe you can try a different strategy.’ That’s where confidence comes from.”

Of course, part of risk and failure means pushing ourselves and our children in areas in which we’re not comfortable. That’s novel for many Americans, but in Asia it’s the canon of parenting. Asians are all about grit, the hot new term in positive psychology circles for persistence and tolerance for hardship. In Japanese they even have a word for it—
gaman
. Roughly translated it means “keep trying,” and it gets plenty of use.

Elaine Chao, the former labor secretary whose family moved to the United States from Taiwan when she was a child, believes the concept of embracing adversity is something the West would do well to learn from the East. “Americans play to their strengths; maybe it’s part of their Christianity that says ‘God has given you certain talents and you must go and develop them to your full potential.’ You talk to an American and they say, ‘I’m awful at math, so I’m not going to do math, I’m going to do writing.’ But the Chinese proclivities are very different. The parents try to shore up their child’s weaknesses. If a child is bad at math, the prevailing wisdom is to focus on improving that subject.”

As an immigrant, Chao had a bumpy childhood; one that we might have thought, before our research, would be scarring rather than enriching. She is the oldest of six girls. Her father escaped a small village in China when the communists took over and the family moved to Taiwan, where he won a scholarship to come to America. It was three long years before he could save enough to bring his young family over to join him. During that time, her mother was effectively a single parent and Elaine stepped in to help. “I think birth order is critical. I was the eldest child. When we first came to America, we went through some very tough circumstances,” she told us. “My parents were depending on me. My sisters were depending on me. There was no choice but to put on a brave face and get things done.”

When Elaine arrived in Queens at the age of eight, speaking not a word of English, she entered third grade at the local school. It was total immersion into a set of unsympathetic classmates. “It was 1961 and America was not as diverse as it is now. It was basically black and white.” As a non-English-speaking Chinese girl, she was a tantalizing target to tease. To this day, she remembers the boy who caused her difficulties. “There was a boy named Eli who was the bane of my existence because I didn’t understand English, so I couldn’t differentiate clearly between ‘Elaine’ and ‘Eli.’ I couldn’t hear the difference. So whenever his name was called, I would get up and everybody laughed at me.”

She couldn’t figure out how to fit in at school, and at home, things were tough. There was little money and there were no other relatives; the family lived a very isolated life. As the oldest, Elaine was expected to work hard not just for herself but also to help lift up her five sisters. She credits those days for the confidence she has now. “I’m not sure a nurturing environment is always good. Some adversity, if it doesn’t break you, does make you stronger.”

This all sounded right, all of the advice about risk and failure and grit and embracing the pain of life in order to learn. With our brains, we believed it. Our hearts, however, refused to cooperate. Despite all the evidence we’d amassed, we struggled, and still do, with actually dealing out the tough-love version of nurture. Often our maternal hearts triumph, and we instinctively, physically, can’t stop ourselves from intervening to make the world smooth again for our kids. You might think we parents would be more protective of girls than boys, right? But the evidence suggests that boys, and firstborn boys in particular, also suffer from what Katty’s father likes to call “an insufficient lack of neglect,” or too much cosseting.

Claire’s been forced to embrace the beauty of failure as the mother of two kids who love sports. Given that she had no athletic experience to speak of growing up, and didn’t much like to fail, it’s been rough. Her son Hugo has become a baseball player, and in the early years, she found each at-bat excruciating. She would experience his emotions more keenly than he felt them, almost unable to watch. And then, ironically, she became her daughter’s soccer coach when nobody more qualified could do it. “We were already doing the research for this book, and Della is so athletic; I knew she and the girls needed a team. But it was surprisingly stressful. I’d worry about Della when she got mad at herself for letting a goal in, then I’d worry on behalf of the whole team if they lost. I just couldn’t let go of the failures, and I barely saw the successes.” Finally, another coach suggested she just embrace the whole experience, losses, struggles, and all. “In team meetings I started pointing out even the small successes each girl had, which they loved, and which helped me, too. By the end of the year, they were ferocious out there.” She watched her son put in extra work for months on his batting, and then try out and make the team he wanted to be on. “I’m learning as much about failure and struggle and mastery as the kids are, and I clearly needed to.”

Patti Solis Doyle learned that the benefits of risks and failure extend well beyond childhood. Seven years ago she gambled big. She had worked for Hillary Clinton for years, and she said yes to running her presidential campaign. She knew it would be tough, potentially thankless, and maybe disastrous, as is often the case with political campaigns. Moreover, she would be one of a very few female campaign managers, and the first Hispanic woman to run a presidential bid. No small stakes.

A year later, with poll numbers less than ideal, she was fired. She took the dismissal hard and felt badly bruised. For months, she was convinced she’d never work again, but she slowly started to embrace what had happened.

“In retrospect, I’m so glad I took that risk,” she told us. And then she laughs, shaking her head at the memories. “Now—there’s no way I would have said that right after I lost my job, not at all.” Solis Doyle echoes Elaine Chao: “I’ve come to see that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I’ve learned so much. I’ve learned how to deal with negative stories; I’ve learned that we can lose and move on.”

She’s since mended political fences and has launched a financial start-up that buys debt from state governments. It’s not an area in which she felt she had any previous experience, but she decided to try it, she says, because she knew she could handle failure as well as success. She recently sold the company to a huge corporation for a hefty profit.

The Talent Myth

The starting point for risk, failure, perseverance, and, ultimately, confidence, is a way of thinking, one brilliantly defined by Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck as a “growth mind-set.” Make an effort to read anything she’s written. She’s found that the most successful and fulfilled people in life always believe they can improve, that they can still learn things. Let’s go back to the example of how women and men approach their math skills. Most women think their abilities are fixed, Dweck told us. They’re either good at math or bad at math. The same goes for a host of other challenges that women tend to take on less often than men do: leadership, entrepreneurship, public speaking, asking for raises, financial investment, even parking the car. Many women think, in these areas, that their talents are determined, finite, and immutable. Men, says Dweck, think that they can learn almost anything.

Confidence requires a growth mind-set because
believing
that skills can be learned leads to
doing
new things. It encourages risk, and it supports resilience when we fail. Dweck has found that a growth mind-set especially correlates with higher levels of confidence for adolescent girls.

The growth mind-set can help us recast failures as critical learning experiences. Katty immediately saw that Dweck’s way of thinking had been a missing ingredient for her. “I’ve always assumed there were things I was good at (languages, child rearing) and things I wasn’t good at (business, athletics, management, anything involving a ball, musical instruments, computers—the list is long). The one that causes me most regret is being entrepreneurial. I’ve always admired people who set up businesses and would have loved to build one myself, but I’ve never had the confidence to try. It’s not that I assume I wouldn’t be good at it—I assume I’d be terrible at it, that I’m not a natural businessperson. Reading the news, live, to millions of people every night, I feel quite confident, but setting up a business—total panic. I realize now from all the research we’ve done that the only way to get the confidence I need would be to give it a try. And Dweck’s work allows me to see this as a skill set to develop rather than one I innately have or don’t have.”

The key to creating a growth mind-set is to start small. Think about what you praise in yourself or your kids. If you praise ability by saying, “You’re so smart” or “You’re so good at tennis; you’re a natural athlete,” you are instilling a fixed mind-set. If, however, you say, “You’ve worked so hard at tennis, especially your backhand,” you are encouraging a growth mind-set.

Making a distinction between talent and effort is critical. If we believe that somehow we’re given talents at birth that we can’t control, then we’re unlikely to believe we can really improve on areas in which we’re weak. But when success is measured by effort and improvement, then it becomes something we can control, something we can choose to improve upon. It encourages mastery. And it’s a part of the Asian
gaman
approach, in fact. Chao admits it can be tough on kids forced to work hard at something at which they will never excel, but it does allow you to take control of your self-belief. Confidence becomes less about what you were born with, and more about what you make of yourself.

For Chao, in the workplace, that means encouraging people, particularly women, to push themselves, to take on tasks that they think are beyond their reach, like leadership. Claiming a top position always seems daunting, but coasting at the same level doesn’t increase our confidence. The trick is to recognize that the next level up might be hard, that you might be nervous, but not to let those nerves stop you from acting. “Every leadership position is a stretch,” Chao says, speaking of her own experience. “No one ever thinks they’re born a leader, that this or that leadership position is perfect for them. It is always a stretch. We should just encourage young women to stretch more.”

The Softer Side of Munitions

“There was just always something different about me,” said the petite blond woman sitting in front of us, dressed in pastel and grinning broadly. Her office upholstery is soft and floral, but her artwork, we notice on closer inspection, is made from bits of weaponry. Linda Hudson has plenty of experience breaking molds. She’s the first woman to head a major defense company. Before becoming CEO of BAE Systems, she was the first female company president in the history of General Dynamics. She was also the first woman vice president of Martin Marietta, and the first female manager at Ford Aerospace. At the University of Florida School of Engineering she was one of only two women in her class. No surprise, then, that in high school Hudson was the first girl to take the engineering drawing course.