The Confidence Code (18 page)

She’s comfortable with being unique, although Hudson says we should not mistake that for a suggestion that her path has been easy. She’s felt more than her share of isolation in the most masculine of masculine industries. After all, as she quipped, with her characteristic bluntness, “We make munitions and tanks and things like that.”

Being different is part of the story of every highly successful woman, just by virtue of the fact that there are so few women at the top. We can resent it, let it undermine us or limit us, or we can embrace our uniqueness and choose to wear it as a badge of honor. The earlier you learn to take the risk of standing out, the easier it will be to stand up for yourself in a tense negotiation, demand the high-profile assignment that your male colleague will otherwise grab, or do all the other things that don’t fit with the stereotype of a docile, good girl.

Caroline Miller, the author and psychologist who specializes in confidence and optimism, says a willingness to be different is critical to confidence. “It’s more than just risk and failure, though those are essential,” she says. “Confidence comes from stepping out of your comfort zone and working toward goals that come from
your own values and needs
, goals that aren’t determined by society.” That realization changed the course of Miller’s life. As a young woman, she struggled with bulimia. A top student at Harvard, who then went on to a lucrative job on Wall Street, she kept her secret well-hidden. Finally, in crisis, she got help, and later went public with her first book,
My Name is Caroline
, a hard, honest account of her illness. Soon thereafter, Miller got a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center and started a new career.

It’s a sense of self, rather than just a sense of achievement, that we can teach early. If Linda Hudson’s parents wanted a traditional, girly girl, they didn’t get one, and, more critically, they didn’t try to create one. She describes herself as a street fighter who grew up preferring basketball with the boys to ballet with the girls. Her favorite subject was math. She says she never felt pressured by her parents to try to be anything other than what she wanted to be. Hudson says she’s never been interested in being liked. She wants to be respected. She thanks her parents for that, too. Her parents were teachers; they didn’t have much money, but instilled in their willing daughter the value of learning and the confidence to dream big. More important, when she faced a setback, they were the ones who would send her back into the world.

You don’t need to be a roaring Tiger Mom to push your child to work hard and take risks. Hudson’s parents did it with love and open minds. As Hudson carved a couple of hours out of her tight schedule to talk to us about her career of firsts, what emerged was a picture more complex than the simple stereotype of a tough woman in a man’s world. She is disarmingly frank, both about her successes and her weaknesses. She has no trouble saying that she’s competent at what she does and is equally happy to talk about where she needs to improve. (“Listen more, talk less.”) She’s even open about some personal regrets.

Hudson takes pride in being different, and the one time she succumbed to pressure to fit in, it didn’t work out. “I got married right out of college and I would say it was largely because it was expected that I got married. I changed my name, largely because it was expected that I would change my name.” After twenty-five years of marriage, she and her husband divorced. She said wistfully, “I’d love to have my name back.” However, by then she’d also spent twenty-five years building a career. “I have a professional reputation tied to the name I have now. So, it was just too hard to change it back, and for what point?”

Just as we found with other senior women we interviewed, Hudson’s very openness added to her aura of confidence. It occurred to us that genuinely confident women, perhaps genuinely confident people, don’t feel that they have to hide anything. They are who they are, warts and all, and if you don’t like it, or think it is weak to show vulnerability, too bad for you. These ambitious women have taken a risk in exposing their weaknesses, but it definitely hasn’t kept them from succeeding; indeed it may well be part of the reason for their success: They are brave enough to be not only different, but to be themselves.

Suppress the Siren Call of Praise

Think about how terrific it feels when you get a compliment on your work, your clothes, your hair. Often, there’s an immediate lift, and then we relive those moments later to rekindle that buzz. It turns out that flattery and praise are as lethal as sugar. A little bit is fine, but much more than that and we’re unhealthily addicted. Ohio State University psychologist Jennifer Crocker has discovered that people who base their self-worth and self-confidence on what others think of them don’t just pay a mental price; they pay a physical price, too. Crocker’s study of six hundred college students showed that those who depended on others for approval—of their appearance, grades, choices, you name it—reported more stress and had higher levels of drug abuse and eating disorders. The students who based their self-esteem and confidence on internal sources, such as being virtuous or having a strong moral code, did better than the others in exams and had lower levels of drug and alcohol abuse. Other studies suggest that men rely less on praise than women do to feel confident.

Confidence that is dependent on other people’s praise is a lot more vulnerable than confidence built from our own achievements. Even the most accomplished, beautiful, and celebrated human beings you know don’t get a nonstop stream of compliments and positive feedback.

Of course it’s unrealistic to think that concert pianists won’t compare themselves to their peers, but if your confidence comes solely from your rankings, the press reviews of your last concert, and the adoration of your fans, what happens when those dwindle? Better to have developed the solid, internal confidence that comes from knowing you worked hard to earn a seat in a revered orchestra and play alongside the best in the world.

For the rest of us, we naturally like the satisfaction of good grades, a nice salary, a wonderful email from a boss, but we have to remain connected to our own pleasure at a job well done. When our confidence is based on external measures, the biggest risk is that we won’t act. We are more likely to avoid risk if we think we might feel a dip in approval. Chasing permanent praise can lead to self-sabotage. Raising our children to constantly seek our approval, instead of helping them to develop their own code, will be debilitating for them later.

Katty, for example, used to worry that Maya, her eldest daughter, was too much of a people pleaser, too much of a good girl. She was so responsible that everyone in the family relied on her to babysit, cook, help out, and be polite and diligent, and Maya never complained. Sometime in her teens, she blossomed and became much more sure of what she wanted, but it took Katty awhile to see that as a good thing. She developed a healthy, though often infuriating, stubborn streak. “Take this summer, when I was pushing her to start a college application essay that was due mid-October. Over the family vacation she could have consulted a cousin who had done the same course at the same college, her parents and aunt and uncle could have all pitched in with ideas while we were relaxed and had time. But Maya was adamant that she wasn’t going to start the essay until mid-September. She had her own timetable in her head and she wouldn’t be swayed. I was frustrated. Why wouldn’t she just do what we all suggested? But, sure enough, when mid-September came Maya started the essay and got it finished exactly on schedule. She knew what she wanted and four adults badgering her to do something different hadn’t changed her mind.” Katty now sees it as a strength that Maya didn’t need to please the adults around her, even when they were annoyed with her. She had developed the confidence to listen to her own opinion.

The marble halls of the United States Senate sound different these days. Increasingly, the polished floors echo with the sharp tap of high heels. The arrival of a record number of women senators, twenty at the moment, means this bastion of shuffling, gray-haired men is slowly being feminized. In office 478, at the end of a long corridor in the Russell Building, we met one of the newer members, Kirsten Gillibrand, the junior senator from New York.

Everything about Senator Gillibrand smacks of confidence. She is impeccably groomed with a sleek, serious, Manhattan polish: Even her blond hair seems trained both to look stylish and to stay put. She already has her name on high-profile bills and her face on high-profile TV shows. Those in the know say she has presidential potential. The forty-eight-year-old mother of two is a Democratic star. In the calm of her pale blue office, Gillibrand, who first ran for the House when she was thirty-eight, confessed that she wasn’t always like this.

“I didn’t have the confidence to run for office until I volunteered on other people’s campaigns for about ten years,” she said with a laugh. What held her back was what she describes as those self-doubt questions familiar to so many women: “Am I good enough? Am I tough enough? Am I strong enough? Am I smart enough? Am I qualified?”

It’s hard to believe that this woman, who has engaged in legislative battle with the military brass and taken on the gun lobby, ever felt she lacked grit or smarts. But then Gillibrand goes on to list all the effort she put into building her confidence for a congressional run: the years of unpaid volunteering, the night and weekend classes, and the voice coaching. Soon it became clear that she had made a deliberate choice to face off against her self-doubt.

Jane Wurwand, Christine Lagarde, and Elaine Chao started their self-assurance lessons young, from parents who unwittingly placed confidence-inducing responsibility on their small shoulders. But it’s never too late to find it for yourself. Like Patti Solis Doyle, Caroline Miller, and so many of the women we talked with, Gillibrand proves that. She used the same menu we’ve been detailing—she took risks, she was persistent, she worked hard, and even failed. And it worked. Whatever she hadn’t inherited, or soaked up as a child, she created.

There were a host of revelations for us as we researched this book. We didn’t expect to uncover a clear genetic link to confidence. We didn’t think the confidence gap would be as big as it is, or that female brains might work a bit differently, physiologically. One thing we had felt fairly sure about—that confidence is something largely acquired in childhood—turned out to be wrong. It never crossed our minds that we could feel distinctly mean as we tried to get better at “nurturing” some of it into our kids.

Our biggest and perhaps most encouraging discovery has been that confidence is something we can, to a significant extent, control. We can all make a decision, at any point in our lives, to create more of it, as Senator Gillibrand did. The science on how new behavior and new thinking affects, and literally changes, our brain is remarkable. Laura-Ann Petitto described the bridges and byways we can construct around the immovable concrete highway of our genetic code, and those extra lanes our upbringing puts down.

Caroline Miller and other psychologists contend that the volitional contribution to a trait like confidence may be as high as 50 percent. That means we ourselves, as adults, can make a decision to be confident, do the work, and see a result.

This idea of confidence as a choice opens doors in every direction. The temptation to say “I’m not good enough; I can’t do it,” exists for everyone at some point, in some circumstance. We’ve all heard “My mother didn’t praise me enough,” or “No one in my family is very confident.” But when we write off confidence as purely a twist of genetic or environmental fate, we’re shutting off possibilities that could change our lives. We don’t need to be stuck in that pattern of self-doubt. It’s a matter of pushing yourself to action over inaction, even in a man’s world.

But here is where the path turns rigorous. You don’t get to “choose confidence” and then stop thinking about it as your life miraculously changes around you. It’s certainly not as simple as clicking a box to add self-confidence to your list of attributes. There’s no glossy or beguilingly easy confidence prescription. When we say confidence is a choice, we mean it’s a choice we can make to
act
, or to
do
, or to
decide
. If you’ve read only this chapter, you know that confidence is work, hard and deliberative, though we have no doubt that it is doable. And if you ease up? If you choose not to fully exert yourself to expand your confidence? That always-elusive image of ourselves in the mirror, the mirror that so easily shows men whatever they want to see, may never come into focus.

Consider, one more time, the work of Zachary Estes, the psychologist who conducted those computerized spatial tests on men and women. His results could not be any more straightforward, or any more relevant, for this issue. What held the women back was not their actual ability to complete the tests. They were as able as the men were. What held them back was the choice they made not to try. When the questions were difficult and the women doubted themselves, they held back. The men didn’t have those internal brakes; they just went ahead and answered the questions as best they could.

If you choose not to act, you have little chance of success. What’s more, when you choose to act, you’re able to succeed more frequently than you think. How often in life do we avoid doing something because we think we’ll fail? Is failure really worse than doing nothing? And how often might we actually have triumphed if we had just decided to give it a try?

Look around you. It’s not usually a genuine lack of competence that holds most of us back from making that choice; the hurdle is a skewed perception of our abilities. It’s as though we’re wielding Adam Kepecs’s forecasting tool, but one that isn’t calibrated, that isn’t giving us accurate readings, and is, therefore, dangerous. When we give in to negative beliefs about what we can and can’t do, we don’t seize the challenges we could easily handle and learn from. We aren’t doing the basic stuff that would soon make confidence-creation almost automatic. But we have the power to recalibrate our confidence compass, and with it, our perceptions and our appetite for risk.