The Confidence Code (23 page)

Remember, you never know how powerful that independent behavior will turn out to be. Listen to former Washington, DC, schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, a woman who single-handedly tried to reform one of the worst school districts in the country. She battled the unions, pissed off parents, and never seemed to care. That gave her considerable power. “I don’t give a crap if people like me or not, and apparently I never have,” says Rhee, laughing. During the height of the DC public schools upheaval that Rhee oversaw, when she was getting hammered in the press day after day, her mother came to stay with her. One day her mom turned on the television and saw footage of people screaming at her daughter during a school board meeting. She turned that off and opened the
Washington Post,
only to find a two-page spread with more of the same vitriol from parents and teachers. When her daughter got home that night, her anxious mother found her in the kitchen making a peanut butter sandwich. “She comes into the kitchen and whispers, ‘Are you okay?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m fine,’” Rhee recalls. “And Mom said, ‘You know when you were young you never used to care what people thought about you.’ She said, ‘I always thought you were going to grow up to be antisocial, but now I see that it’s serving you well.’ ”

We’ve also come to realize that confidence won’t look the same in every child. Katty has two daughters, Maya and Poppy, who are living proof that self-assurance can express itself in very different ways.

Maya, a teenager, is amenable and helpful, but she’s also really determined, even quite stubborn. She’s definitely a leader who, in her own nonconfrontational way, won’t be swayed by her peers or her parents. Whether it’s dating or drugs, she’s very sure about what she wants for herself and feels no need to go along with the group. Maya’s confidence is quiet but solid. Poppy, her younger sister, is confident in a completely different way—much more in-your-face. “I’d never had a child who said
no
with such determination until Poppy was born,” says Katty. “My other three were all fairly easygoing. But Poppy doesn’t care what people think of her—not me, not her teachers, not her older brothers and sister. She isn’t interested in pleasing anyone. If she’s mad at you, she’ll say it. If she doesn’t like someone, she won’t hide it. If you suggest a plan she doesn’t like, she’ll just say no. She has zero problems expressing all her emotions, all the time. It’s sometimes exhausting and it’s certainly demanding, but it’s undoubtedly confident.”

Discourage Pointless Perfection

Striving to grab the good-girl ring as a child sows the seeds of trying to be perfect as a woman. Girls internalize the lesson that they need to get everything right to reach the top of the class, which leads to perfectionism. But this ends up smothering true achievement. Perfection is the enemy of the good. It’s also the enemy of confidence.

The danger is particularly acute for all those high-achieving girls. In her book
Supergirls Speak Out: Inside the Secret Crisis of Overachieving Girls
, Liz Funk describes how many girls now take the challenge of being extraordinary so far that they push themselves to the breaking point.

Overachieving girls might think they are hitting all their marks by working all hours, but they’re actually not doing as well as they could if they just eased off a bit. When they move on to the workplace, these girls are the ones who will take on too many projects, because they believe they’re the only ones capable of doing them well. They become so focused on getting the day-to-day tasks exactly right that they don’t take time to lift their eyes and look at the big picture. Convinced of their path, they often become impossible to challenge, and eventually alienate their peers, all the while, failing to progress. That isn’t confidence; it’s a myopic and isolating self-righteousness.

Here are some ideas for discouraging perfectionism in your daughter:

•  Praise her moderately, not excessively. Saying “Well done for working so hard on this” is much better than “You are the best student ever.”

•  Help your daughter feel satisfied when she’s done her best, regardless of whether she’s done better or worse than others.

•  Show your daughter you aren’t perfect, either. When you make a mistake, don’t hide it. Then show her the world didn’t end just because you messed up.

•  Humor always helps. Laughing at your own mistakes will encourage your daughter to see that it’s okay to laugh at hers. A bit of humor and perspective helps puncture the perfectionist urge.

•  Look back together at failures that no longer sting, or obstacles she’s overcome. It’s a useful way to encourage perspective and resilience.

Push Out Pink

Lego, the famous toy maker, had a breakthrough idea in 2011: Bring out a line of pink blocks and sell them in princess sets. It was a move that both pandered to stereotypes and was brilliant business. The company tripled the number of little girls buying their blocks and significantly closed the Lego gender gap.

When you’re up against billions of pastel dollars that color girls into a separate box, not to mention your own unconscious prejudices, reversing these cultural currents can be all the more challenging. But if girls are going to get the confidence their boy playmates seem to come by so handily, we need to break the stereotype and show our daughters they can just as well be engineers, tech whizzes, and financial geniuses.

Take the example of science and math. A 2009 report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the club of most developed countries in the world, showed that less than 5 percent of girls expect to work in engineering and computer science when they grow up. The figure for boys is 18 percent. Since both of these fields rely on strong math skills, the assumption might be that girls aren’t doing so well in math. But that’s not so. The report confirms that in problem solving there’s almost no difference between the grades of boys and girls. Indeed, in some countries (Iceland, Norway, and Sweden), girls did better than boys, and only in Macau, the administrative region of China, did boys do better. Girls are perfectly capable at math—they just think they aren’t. Indeed, the OECD report confirms everything we’ve found out about girls and competence and confidence. “Females tended to report lower mathematics-related self-efficacy than males in almost all countries,” the report said, “while males tended to have a more positive view of their abilities than females. Females experienced significantly more feelings of anxiety, helplessness and stress in mathematics classes than males in 32 out of the 40 countries.”

Even if your daughter likes the pink Legos or lacey ballerina dress, there’s no reason you can’t steer her toward math and science at the same time. We just need to change the way girls relate to them.

A few tips:

•  Create an ongoing narrative for your daughter that places her in a scientific world. The weather, climate change, our food, how we travel, illnesses and allergies, the computer she Facebooks on, are all areas of science that can fire her imagination. Teachers have found that when girls get to middle school they’re much more receptive to studying science when they see it presented as social studies than when they see it as a stand-alone subject.

•  Don’t fall into the trap of putting down your own math ability, even as a joke. How many women do you hear say, “Oh, I’m useless at math”? That self-assessment plays right into the false stereotype that girls are good at writing and boys are good at math. Instead, build up how helpful and cool you find math to be, in bite-sized ways. You are her most powerful role model.

And let your daughters get physical, even if it doesn’t seem to be their natural instinct. Sports are a vital way for girls to learn how to openly compete. Karen Kelser, who runs one of the top soccer programs for young girls in Washington, DC, firmly believes that playing sports provides essential training, not for scholarship purposes, or for the Olympics, but for the real world. “It mirrors life as not much else does,” she says. “There aren’t that many other opportunities for girls to work as a team, to win, to lose, and to learn to get over failure, and to help each other get over failure.”

She focuses the girls in her league on mastering skills rather than racking up quick wins, and though that might occasionally frustrate competitive parents, Kelser thinks loss is healthy. Moreover, she says that helping the girls build solid skills over a longer time gives them more lasting confidence.

She worries that by high school many girls stop playing competitive sports because the intense focus on winning over longer-term development pushes potential players away.

•  If your daughters play a sport, don’t let them quit when it gets hard—no one in sports is perfect.

•  Start them young if you can. It’s easier to get used to knocking into other people when you are four than it is at ten and, for girls, that can be even harder to get used to.

•  Even if your daughter isn’t inclined to be part of the rough-and-tumble world of soccer or basketball, think about swimming or karate or track. The daughter of a friend of ours doesn’t like team sports, but just started squash at twelve and loves it. Let them excel and fail at something besides their homework or an exam.

And pointing out role models in all of these fields, whether it’s science, business, politics, the arts, or competitive sports, is essential. Role models open up a window onto the possible and encourage our daughters to push themselves to reach a tangible goal represented by a human, female face, rather than aspire to a dubious fantasy, embodied by a satin-draped, tiara-crowned piece of plastic.

Claire felt the power of role models in a profound fashion when we were researching this book. She took Della along with her to watch the Mystics basketball team practice. Della is an avid basketball player, and she was dressed accordingly, even carting her own ball. She’d seen grown-up women basketball players only on television, and when she saw the Mystics in person she was stunned into silence by all that female agility and muscle and height out on the floor. A while later, Claire and Della went to the restroom. Della usually doesn’t have much use for mirrors, but she stopped in front of one for a full-length gaze such as Claire had never seen. “She was evaluating herself—turning a bit—dribbling her basketball—clearly contemplating what it takes, based on what she’d just watched,” Claire remembers. “
Half an hour
of exposure to those players may have opened up a mental door. With a nod at whatever it was she saw, she turned and said, ‘Come on, Mom. Let’s get back there.’ ”

Be Kind, Honest, and Firm

Many of the lessons we can pass on to our daughters apply to the other women in our lives as well. Sometimes it’s enough to tell someone that confidence is a choice you can make. Just being aware of that will spur some of the women you know to grow their confidence reserves. Often, they’ll need more concrete advice. So how do you get all of those friends, colleagues, and younger women who are really talented but unable to believe in themselves to trust that they can succeed?

A solid first step is to encourage other women to recognize and talk more about their successes. Research shows that not only does that help us to reframe our thinking, but it also leads directly to more workplace successes.

A 2011 Catalyst survey of three thousand MBA graduates looked at what happened when women employed the nine strategies of a mythical ideal worker—making their career goals clear, requesting high-profile assignments, and putting time into cultivating bosses, for example. Eight made no difference at all. One worked very well, though: making their achievements known to their superiors. According to Catalyst, the women who employed that strategy “advanced further, were more satisfied with their careers, and had greater compensation growth than women who were less focused on calling attention to their successes.”

There’s no reason young women should feel apologetic about flagging their successes. The guys at the office do it all the time. A man is usually comfortable going to his boss with a big smile, a high five and a loud boast about his awesome triumph. Let your friends or mentees know they need to tout accomplishments, and that employers want to know. They can broadcast accomplishments without sounding like self-important braggarts: “Did you hear we won the award for creative direction? I’m so proud of my team.”

Former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright has a saying that there is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women. Fortunately, many women in senior positions are doing all they can to bring up those who follow in their wake. They realize their own success will be measured by the talent legacy they leave.

IMF chief Christine Lagarde takes obvious pride in the confidence she’s in a position to help build. “We are in a leadership position; it’s our duty to the community to go and seek the contribution of women.” She describes how in meetings or news conferences she will actively seek out the woman who is afraid to raise her hand. “The body language and the eye contact tells you a woman is prepared, but she just doesn’t cross the line of raising her hand or making a contribution.” And that’s where Lagarde will jump in and call on that woman. “ ‘You, in the back, you want to say something? Come on, join in.’ And then it’s beautiful,” Lagarde says, with her characteristic open smile.

Lagarde has also become fed up with men telling her how much they’d like to promote women but just can’t think of any who are qualified for that top post. So she’s developed the List. In her purse, she carries the names of well-qualified women who she believes would be an asset to any organization. When a man tells her he just can’t find a top woman candidate, out comes The List.

Empowering endorsements from prominent women are terrific, but a more practical way to build everyday confidence is to push those around you to try something new or to aim a bit higher. Sometimes, we let our desire to be kind and supportive get in the way of being honest.

Claire has a friend who is enormously talented and who keeps talking about setting up her own business, but she never actually does. Instead, she keeps identifying hurdles: a business partner wasn’t quite right, her clients would be in Europe, she doesn’t want to take out the loan she’d need to get started. For several years, Claire responded with gentle sympathies, and then one day she was blunt, telling her friend that she couldn’t listen to any more excuses. Claire was worried her friend would never speak to her again, but that candor turned out to be the catalyst that got her going.