The Confidence Code by Katty Kay & Claire Shipman

The authors of the bestselling Womenomics provide an informative and practical guide to understanding the importance of confidence—and learning how to achieve it—for women of all ages and at all stages of their career.

Working women today are better educated and better qualified than ever before. Yet men still predominate in the corporate world. In The Confidence Code, Claire Shipman and Katty Kay argue that the key reason is confidence.

Notes from “Kay, Katty; Shipman, Claire. The Confidence Code. Harper Business. Kindle Edition.”

1. It’s not enough to be good

Cameron Anderson, a psychologist who works in the business school at the University of California, Berkeley, has made a career of studying overconfidence. In 2009, he decided to conduct tests to compare the relative value of confidence and competence. He came up with a novel idea. He gave a group of 242 students a list of historical names and events, and asked them to tick off the ones they knew. Among the names were some well-disguised fakes. (pp. 21-22)

At the end of the semester, Anderson conducted a survey of the group. The students who had picked the most fakes had achieved the highest social status, which Anderson defines as the respect, prominence, and influence an individual enjoys in the eyes of others. Translated into the work environment, he says, higher status means you are more admired, listened to, and have more sway over your organization’s discussions and decisions. So despite being the less competent students, they ended up being the most respected and had the most influence with their peers. (p. 22)

More disturbing for women who count on competence as the key to success is Anderson’s insistence that actual ability barely matters. “When people are confident, when they think they are good at something, regardless of how good they actually are, they display a lot of nonverbal and verbal behavior,” Anderson explained. “The most confident people were just considered the most beloved in the group,” he said. “Their overconfidence did not come across as narcissistic.” (pp. 22-23)

Overconfidence can also be read as arrogance or bluster, but Anderson thinks the reason the more confident students didn’t alienate the others is that they, like those Columbia Business School students, weren’t faking their confidence. They genuinely believed they were good, and that self-belief was what came across. (p. 23)

2. Do more, think less

Richard Petty, a psychology professor at Ohio State University, who has spent decades focused on the subject, managed to put all we had learned into appealingly clear terms: “Confidence is the stuff that turns thoughts into action.” (p. 50)

Italy, at the University of Milan. There we tracked down psychologist Zach Estes, who’s long been curious about the confidence disparity between men and women. When Estes had the students, men and women, solve a series of these spatial puzzles, he found that the women scored measurably worse than the men. But when he looked back at their actual answers, he found the reason the women were doing less well was that they didn’t even attempt to answer a lot of the questions.

They simply ducked out because they weren’t confident in their abilities. He then told them they had to at least try to solve all the puzzles. And, guess what: The women’s scores shot up, and they did as well as the men. Crazy. Maddening. Yet also hopeful.

Estes’s work illustrates, in a broad sense, an interesting point: The natural result of under-confidence is inaction. When women don’t act, when we hesitate because we aren’t sure, even by skipping a few questions, we hold ourselves back. It matters. But when we do act, even when we’re forced to act, to answer those questions, we do just as well as men. (pp. 50-51)

Finally, Estes decided to attempt a direct confidence boost. He told some members of the group, completely at random, that they had done very well on the previous test. On the next test they took, those men and women improved their scores dramatically. It was a clear measure of what confidence can do—fuel our action, and substantially affect our performance, for better or for worse. (p. 52)

3. Wired for confidence

In terms of scale and duration, one of the most compelling studies that links genes and confidence is a project being conducted by Robert Plomin, a renowned behavioral geneticist at King’s College in London. Twenty years ago, Plomin decided to undertake an ambitious study of 15,000 sets of twins in Britain. Plomin’s findings suggest that the correlation between genes and confidence may be as high as 50 percent, and may be even more closely correlated than the link between genes and IQ. (pp. 60-62)

We should make clear that some of the experts we talked with don’t agree with Plomin’s conclusion that confidence is half genetic. They say that broader personality traits—the big five, as they have become known—are accepted to be about 50 percent genetic. Those are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. (p. 62)

Our prefrontal cortex is the command center of our brain—it’s the home of executive function, rational thought, and decision making. Think of it as our brain’s Yoda. When that part of our brain is awash in serotonin, it encourages confidence in our decision making because we feel much less stress. (p. 64)

You may have read news reports about what’s been dubbed the “cuddle hormone.” Scientists say oxytocin affects our desire to hug, to have sex with our partners, to be generous to friends, to share, to make moral decisions, and to be faithful.

Shelley Taylor, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies oxytocin and has found it to be heavily tied to optimism, suggests that it’s also a crucial part of confidence. She believes that by encouraging more social interaction, and fewer negative thoughts about others and the world, oxytocin paves the way for people to act and to take risks. When you’re optimistic, doing things just seems easier. (pp. 64-65)

Dopamine inspires doing and exploring; it is associated with curiosity and risk-taking. An absence of dopamine has been linked to passivity, boredom, and depression. (pp. 65-66)

When dopamine, which gets us moving, is commingled with serotonin, which induces calm thought, and oxytocin, which generates warm and positive attitudes toward others, confidence can much more easily take hold. (p. 67)

4. “Dumb Ugly Bitches” and other reasons women have less confidence

The young men at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, have a name for female students. They call them DUBs—dumb ugly bitches. (p. 85)

Research shows that when a boy fails, he takes it in stride, believing it’s due to a lack of effort. When a girl makes a similar mistake she sees herself as sloppy and comes to believe that it reflects a lack of skill. (p. 88)

“Girls still don’t play enough competitive sports, where we train them to know what it’s like to compete and win,” says Susannah Wellford Shakow, cofounder of Running Start, the group that prepares women to run for political office. (p. 90)

Academics confirm what we know from our own experience as teenagers: girls suffer a larger drop in self-esteem during adolescence than boys, and it takes them longer to get over those demoralizing years. The drop in confidence makes them more likely to quit team sports because their self-confidence isn’t robust enough to handle losing. What a vicious circle: They lose confidence so they quit competing, thereby depriving themselves of one of the best ways to regain it. (p. 91)

A host of troubling studies now show that we pay a heavy social and even professional penalty when we act as aggressively as men do. If we walk into our boss’s office with unsolicited opinions, speak up first at meetings, and give business advice above our pay grade, we are either disliked or—let’s not beat around the bush—labeled “a bitch.” (p. 95)

Back at the Yale School of Management, Victoria Brescoll has tested the thesis that the more senior a woman is, the more she makes a conscious effort to play down her volubility.

Both male and female participants rated a hypothetical woman CEO who talked more than other people. The result: Both sexes viewed this made-up woman as significantly less competent and less suited to leadership than a male CEO who talked for the same amount of time. When the fictitious female CEO was described as talking less than others, her perceived competency shot up.

Not only do we dislike women who talk a lot, we actively expect men to take the floor and dominate conversations; we punish them if they don’t. And remember, Brescoll’s female participants were just as prejudiced against women as the men. (p. 96)

5. The new nuture

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. (p. 122)

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.” (p. 123)

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.” (p. 128)

The key to creating a growth mindset 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 mindset. If, however, you say, “You’ve worked so hard at tennis, especially your backhand,” you are encouraging a growth mindset. (p. 129)

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. (p. 133)

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. (p. 137)

6. Failing fast and other confidence boosting habits

One of our good friends (a male, an Internet genius, and start-up wizard) threw two words our way when we asked what he thought women should do to build confidence: Fail fast.

He wasn’t joking. Fail fast, as it happens, is a techie buzz phrase, and more importantly, a hot business strategy. It’s based on the principle that it’s better to throw together a bunch of prototypes, roll them out quickly, see which one sticks, and toss the rest. (p. 139)

If you only remember one thing from this book, let it be this: When in doubt, act. Every piece of research we have studied, and every interview we have conducted, leads to the same conclusion: Nothing builds confidence like taking action, especially when the action involves risk and failure. (p. 141)

Remember, the female brain works differently from the male brain; we really do have more going on, we are more keenly aware of everything happening around us, and that all becomes part of our cognitive stew. Ruminating drains the confidence from us… We have got to stop ruminating. (pp. 144-145)

Here’s one do-it-yourself exercise to help you become more aware of the link between thoughts and actions: Think about a terrible scenario you imagine happening at work. Dwell on it. Perhaps you’re giving a presentation, and you see coworkers rolling their eyes. Notice how you start to feel. Anxious. Stressed. Angry. Not great, right? Now, do the opposite. Envision something terrific happening at the office. An unexpected bonus. Nailing that presentation. Notice the feelings that wash over you now. What we think directly affects how we feel. Even when nothing actually happened. Our minds did the work. (p. 146)

NATs man the front lines in the assault on confidence, and they are every bit as annoying and insidious as their phonetic twin. We’re talking about negative automatic thoughts. (p. 146)

The best way to kill a NAT isn’t to beat yourself up for having it. That simply leads to more anxiety. The most effective and surprisingly easy fix is to look for an alternative point of view. Just one different interpretation, perhaps a positive, or even neutral, reframing, can open the door for confidence. (p. 149)

OSU psychologist Jenny Crocker has found that women thrive on we. When young female college graduates, whose confidence is wobbly, stop thinking about how they can prove themselves and move instead toward doing things for colleagues or the enterprise, Crocker found they get a surprising boost of confidence. (pp. 151-152)

Even if we’re simply trying to downplay achievements in front of others, we are essentially telling ourselves a damaging story—that we don’t really deserve our accomplishments. We have to find ways to take in compliments and own our accomplishments rather than relying on dismissals and assertions of luck and self-deprecation. Keep it simple if you must. When praised, reply, “Thank you. I appreciate that.” Use it. It’s surprising how odd, and how powerful, saying those five words will feel. (p. 156)

7. Now, Pass it on

Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, sounds the alarm about millennials who have been raised by parents eager to reward their child’s every move with that infuriating ubiquitous phrase “good job!” These children, says Twenge, are attention-seeking, have a disproportionate focus on appearance and status, and may even have difficulty forming strong relationships. (p. 169)

That doesn’t mean all praise is bad. Psychologist Nansook Park says parents should simply make the praise specific to a task and as precise as possible, especially with younger children. For example, imagine asking your four-year-old to help set the table. When he follows your instructions to put out the spoons, Park suggests that saying, “Oh, you are the best son in the world” is too generic. “You have to help them to own what they did,” says Park. “So, say something like, ‘Oh, I like the way you have put the spoons on the table.’ ” And if he gets the spoons mixed up with the forks and knives, who really cares. The important thing is that he tried. (p. 170)

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.

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. (p. 178)

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. “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. (p. 180)

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. (pp. 182-183)

8. The science and the art

To put it plainly, we’d finally resolved the frustrating conundrum we’d been dragging around with us for more than a year: Do you have to be a jerk to be confident? No, thankfully. Our research and conversations with dozens of high-powered, confident women point in another direction, one that feels a lot more natural and authentic. It’s an approach altogether different. The ingredients are the same, but in the end, the product can be unique. (p. 194)

We don’t always have to speak first; we can listen, and incorporate what others say, and perhaps even rely on colleagues to help make our point. We can pass credit around, and we can avoid alienating potential enemies. We can speak calmly but carry a smart message. One that will be heard. Confidence, for many of us, can even be quiet. Any of that might be the way confident behavior looks for women. (p. 195)

A recent Stanford Business School study shows that women who can combine male and female qualities do better than everyone else, even the men. How do they define the male qualities? Aggression, assertiveness, and confidence. The feminine qualities? Collaboration, process orientation, persuasion, humility. (p. 197)

Macho does not have to be our mantra. U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is adamant on this point. “You don’t want to turn women into men. You want to make women celebrate their own strong points. They just need to recognize they are not deficient in any way. They just need to know what it takes to be successful and define that in a way they fully understand.” (p. 198)