I read this article in my business class and thought even though it is focused on self-confidence in the business world I found a lot of it can be applied to your self-confidence and women. Give it a read, I really enjoyed this article.
All Rights Reserved, Copyright 1997 by George P. Hollenbeck.
The Case for Self Confidence
We have all seen it. Two people with comparable skill turn out very different levels of performance—one succeeds and one fails. One golf pro makes the crucial putt, one misses it. One opera singer hits the high note, the other misses it. One student makes the A, another—who knows just as much--can’t quite get it together in a convincing way. One sales person takes the chance and calls on the big account (and gets the order), another gets an order too, but chose the small account instead of the large one.
What’s the difference? One of the reasons behind such differences is self confidence, that sometimes elusive “can do” attitude that some people seem to have and some don’t, that carries some to achievement and that, when missing, causes others to fail, or even, more critically, fail to try.
Over the last twenty years, psychologists have been developing a body of knowledge about self confidence that has the potential for enormous impact in the working world. But there is good news and bad. The good news is that the findings are very encouraging. As it turns out, self confidence is something you can do something about as an adult, even if you didn’t get a large dose of it growing up. The bad news is that the theory and research findings are largely inaccessible to executives; filed under the heading of “perceived self-efficacy”, the writings are dense and abstract and difficult to read
The purpose of this paper is to provide the background understanding of self confidence for conducting the self confidence interview. Here we translate the research and theory into usable, practical applications. Our goal is to guide executives in managing their own self confidence and, in turn, enhancing their own performance. We hope to start you on a journey of seeing your own capabilities with a confident eye—a view that can pay dividends in results however you measure them.
Our key points are:
1. Self confidence is something you can do something about.
1. Self confidence is important in both getting things done yourself and in getting others to get things done.
2. Understanding what self confidence is and how it develops is the first step.
2. Self confidence has special importance for leadership, both in what leaders do and how they impact others.
3. There are a number of things that can be done to work on self confidence.
What is Self Confidence?
Self confidence is your judgment of whether or not you can do something—it’s as simple as that. We may be confident that we can find our way to work, that we can complete the project, that we can develop a mission that others will want to work toward, that we can “hang in there” to complete our MBA despite all the forces pushing against us.
Self confidence is a judgment, based on our weighing all our capabilities—our abilities, our motivation, all the resources we can muster—vs. the requirements of the task at hand. Note first that it is a judgment, the result of our thinking about and considering; like any other judgment, it can be accurate or inaccurate, influenced by how well we make judgments. Note also that it is based on our perceptions of our capabilities and our perceptions of what the task or challenge requires. It is a belief--our belief in ourselves. Gaining self confidence is a process of persuading ourselves, of influencing our judgment.
Note also that self confidence doesn’t have much meaning except in relation to some task. We sometimes say “Tom is a confident person” but, what we are really saying is that Tom displays a lot of confidence in relation to some task. And though the task may be narrow (sharpening a pencil) or broad (running a pencil factory), few of us are confident in every area of life. The athlete who demonstrates enormous confidence on the playing field may tremble at the sight of a formal dinner table.
Confusing Self Confidence and Self Esteem
Self confidence is frequently confused with a related concept, self esteem. While self confidence is how much we think we can do something, self esteem is how much we like ourselves. Self confidence is a judgment, a belief; self esteem is a feeling, an emotion. People know how hard it is to change self esteem, so in confusing these concepts, mistakenly believe that they can’t do anything about their self confidence.
Having good feelings about yourself is, of course, extremely important in life. But how much we like (how we feel about) ourselves is not the same as how much we think we can do something, our self confidence. We may have great confidence that we can perform some task (e.g., make a budget presentation) that we value very little. Most of us know stories of high confidence people who are unhappy because they lack self esteem. Our executive interviews brought the story of a highly successful commercial real estate executive in New York City, (a job that most would agree requires an unusual degree of self confidence), who was personally miserable because he did not like himself.
Self confidence and self esteem may be related where the tasks are important to the way we feel about ourselves. If school grades are important to me (typically a value learned from parents), then a person’s self esteem will depend on getting good grades--confidence in academic abilities will then be related to self esteem. But, if performance on the task doesn’t reflect on feelings about the self, confidence in this area and self esteem will not be related.
This distinction is crucial in the prescription for enhancing self confidence or self esteem. Self confidence builds up over time and can be systematically changed or enhanced. Changing one’s self esteem is much more difficult, often involving changing the values that were instilled during childhood; a recommended remedy for low self esteem is often years of psychotherapy.
And so the good news--even if you did not emerge from childhood with large doses of self confidence, you can change that without lengthy sessions of talking therapy. There is lots that can be done to strengthen confidence, starting from where a person is today.
How Self Confidence Impacts Performance
Most of us would agree, “yes, self confidence affects our performance,” but research has identified some surprising ways it has those effects. It impacts our motivation, our perceptions, and our thought patterns.
Motivation
Those with higher self confidence work harder in approaching a task, and exert more effort; they will keep at the task longer without feedback and will stick to it longer in the face of problems and difficulties. This motivational impact is especially important for executives because of the nature of executive work—it often requires lots of effort over long periods of time with little indication at the end of the day of whether we have done a good job or a poor one. Almost any lengthy, complex project is fraught with challenges and difficulties; the persistence to keep at it is frequently at least half the battle. In leadership, there is seldom one right answer; many different approaches may succeed, given the motivation to keep at it.
In the ambiguous life of the executive, a lot depends on how much and how long we are willing to work at the task; the greater motivation that accompanies higher self confidence will result in better performance.
Perceptions
Executive work can be risky (to our pocket books and our egos, if not physically risky), with ample opportunity for threats and fears to hamper our work. But, threat is always in the eye of the beholder--what may be threatening to you may not cause me to blink an eye, or vice versa. Research finds that executives with higher self confidence are less likely to see situations as threatening. But more important than not being afraid or threatened (everybody is afraid from time to time) is the confident belief that when threats arise we will be able to cope with them.
Thought Patterns.
The research has shown a number of ways in which highly confident people think differently. One of the very important findings is that they are better at analytical problems solving; they are more creative and come up with better solutions. They set higher goals than do the less self confident, and those goals, in turn, spur them to better performance. In addition, they make different choices about what they do—often selecting the choice that provides better experience. Impact on these thought patterns is one of the major ways that self confidence influences executive performance.
Taken together, the fact that self confidence impacts our motivation, our perceptions, and our thought patterns makes a strong case for spending the time and effort to understand it better.
How Self confidence is Developed
Self confidence judgments are not idle hopes—wishing we could do something doesn’t make it true. Instead, we base our self confidence judgments on four sources of data:
4. Our own experiences, what we will call Actual Experience, the things we have done;
1. The experiences of others, or what we call “modeling”;
2. Social Persuasion, the process of convincing someone else; and
3. Emotional arousal, how we feel about events around us.
The first source, our actual experience, has the most impact on our self confidence, but each of these sources of data can be important in influencing our confidence judgment in different situations.
Actual Experience.
“What made you confident that you could do that?” we asked the executive. She replied: “I had done something very similar before that worked out very well. I knew that if I could do it there, I could do it here.”
Having done it before and succeeding is the most powerful way to build self confidence. Time and again in our interviews with executives, we have found them describing the powerful impact on their self confidence of successful experience. And one doesn’t have to stop and think about it, it just happens. The role of actual experience is so powerful we call it “mainlining self confidence.”
The old adage “There is no substitute for experience” usually refers to the knowledge and skill that one gains from having done something. But not only is experience a good teacher of how to do the task (and in turn causes us to realistically judge our capabilities to be greater), successful experience also gives us confidence. Getting success experiences that build confidence is critical in the life and career of the developing leader. One prescription for gaining self confidence, even if sometimes easier said than done, is to “get some experience.”
What experience? Not all experiences are equal. The experience we need is the one that is challenging, that is more difficult than we have undertaken before, that causes us to “stretch”, while still providing us a reasonable chance of success. The same experience over and over (or success that is too easy) will gives us little new data, producing little learning or increase in confidence.
Life, and developing our leadership abilities, is a game of finding and succeeding at tasks that are challenging but doable, where the odds of success make them worthwhile. If we choose (or are assigned) tasks that are too easy, we don’t develop; but if we choose (or are placed in) those that are too difficult, we will likely crash and burn. Although success at an exceedingly difficult task can dramatically boost our self confidence, the dangers of likely failure (getting fired, e.g.) may not be worth the risk. And, although failure is an important source of personal learning (namely, humility), we don’t prescribe intentional failure as a personal development strategy.
Even when we don’t have specific actual experience, when we haven’t “..done it before,” many times we have done “more of it” than at first glance we realize. Another prescription, then, is to re-evaluate our capabilities, examining relevant abilities that may have been applied in a different setting or task. We may, then, be able to cobble together “successful experience” from the diverse background that we bring to the task, enhancing our self confidence and encouraging us to give our best performance. We observed this most strikingly over the last couple of decades with women entering the workforce after years of spending their time in the home—their confidence was often raised (and their resumes enhanced) by re-interpreting many of the tasks they had done.
Other’s Experience.
People are quite adept at learning from the experiences of others—they don’t have to do everything in order to learn. Learning from others, vicariously, is what psychologists call “modeling.” And a part of this is comparing ourselves to others, or “social comparison.”
Modeling--watching others—provides new skills and strategies. Models show us what works and what doesn’t and we integrate those learnings into our own toolkits. Models are especially important in learning interpersonal skills—how to work with others. Most confident people can tell us about learning how to deal with others by watching the successes and failures of someone else.
Fortunately, executives don’t have to wait until they see a model doing something well in order to learn something. Perhaps we should not be surprised that executives tell us of so few examples of effective people management. Often they learn what not to do. And these learnings then provide the base of information which enables us to say, “I can do better than that.”
We also gain inspiration from watching others. They provide “models” of the way we want to be and the standards we want to meet. Without even realizing it, we learn dress codes, mannerisms, and a wide range of behaviors from observing.
One way people judge their capabilities is by comparing themselves to others, or social comparison. Education and training settings lend themselves especially well to comparing ourselves to others. Surrounded by our peers in a training class, most of us are first surprised by the range of their achievements, but then impressed that most are no more capable than we are—if they can do it, why not me? (Not to be minimized as another addition to the self confidence larder is, of course, the new knowledge and skills gained in the school).
Social Persuasion.
A third source of data for self-confidence judgments is what others tell us--persuasion. We see the inspirational speaker who can fire up the sales force to get out there and make the calls; most of us can identify some boss or associate who believed in us when we ourselves were not so sure.
Although criticized as a short-term influence, that “you can do it” urging may be the spark that starts someone on the road to success. One of our executives told it this way: As a new professional, he was just finding his way in a new job when his boss assigned him a more important and more complex project than he had ever done before. He had real doubts about his ability to do the work, but his boss, a manager wise in the ways of motivating “green” employees expressed great confidence in his ability to do the work. Our executive, thirty five years later, still remembers how important was that persuasion from his boss in getting him started and keeping him going in what turned out to be a key learning experience in his career.
Good motivators and confidence builders do more than just tell us how good we are. Often they also guide our efforts in ways that bring success and that avoid the premature failure that would undermine our confidence judgments. A good coach, whether of an executive or of an athlete, guides successful performance and encourages the new leader to measure success in terms of self-improvement rather than vis a vis others.
Emotional Arousal.
In assessing their self confidence, people also rely partly on how their minds and bodies react when they perform or anticipate performing:
--If we feel anxious and threatened, we conclude that we lack ability;
--if we feel tired and exhausted after a series of negotiations, we may judge that we lack what it takes to be a negotiator as a full time occupation.
In the heyday of Harold Geneen at ITT, the story was that very senior executives waiting in the anteroom about to be grilled on their monthly results would frequently become physically ill. No wonder that they might interpret their feelings as indicating a lack of confidence. Fortunately, social comparison operated here to boost their confidence back up—“everybody else does it too” or “Joe got sick too, and got through it.”
Because we use these reactions in deciding how confident we are, it is especially important not to let our fears keep us from trying. Social comparisons are especially important in helping us realize that nearly everyone—show it or not—has a queasy stomach at one time or another, and yet they (and we too) can go on to good performance. Even Luciano Pavarotti, a recent interview showed, gets nervous, but it doesn’t keep him from singing.
In summary, these are the four primary sources for the information we use to make our self confidence judgments—actual experience, others’ experience, social persuasion and emotional arousal. Actual experience is the most powerful source, leading us to call gaining self confidence via that route as “mainlining.” Others’ experience is especially important in complex and dangerous endeavors where getting actual experience is very difficult or risky, and where there are ample opportunities for social comparison. Social persuasion can be a great starter, but may not last. And emotional arousal is most important where signals from our body are directly important, e.g. recovering from heart surgery or conquering a phobia or fear.
As you conduct your self confidence interview, look for examples of all of these types of data.
The Special Case of Leadership
Leadership requires inspiring others to follow one’s lead. As illustrated in the biblical quote, “who shall follow an uncertain trumpet?”, our belief that we can do something is a critical part of convincing others and instilling trust in them. Research on charisma finds that an important part of what causes us to describe a person as having charisma is their certainty about what they believe.
But its effect on others is not the only way self confidence impacts leadership. In teaching leadership to MBAs, we have often been struck by how timid are their decisions. Asked “how many would be willing to accept a transfer to Hong Kong?”, only a sprinkling of our early 30s students, mostly managers and engineers said they would go—this despite the fact that we had spent the previous class discussing the benefits that accrue from international experience. For these students, the risk was simply not worth the reward, even if the risk was mitigated by a company-provided safety net—even though taking calculated risks is a foundation of leadership.
Leadership requires not only convincing communication, it also requires setting the direction or strategy. We saw above the advantages of the self-confident problem solver—working harder, examining more alternatives, finding better solutions. And the greater the stakes, the greater the confident advantage. A small business owner described to us the implications of her decisions—“Seventeen families depend on me.” Her self confidence did not keep her from occasional bouts with sheer terror ( “sometimes I come home on Friday night and cry with fear,”), but her resilience had her back at work the next morning.
Working the Confidence Equation
Thinking of self confidence as a function of perceived capabilities (PC) minus perceived task requirements (PTR ) is a very useful tool in analyzing ours or others sources of confidence. Think of it this way:
Self Confidence = PC - PTR
The formula is a short-hand way to keep us thinking: if we can increase our PC or decrease our PTR (or both), our self confidence will increase.
Both our capabilities and the task requirements are perceptions and, as such, depend on how we define and view the data. A conscious process of breaking down the task requirements into simpler components and re-evaluating our capabilities against those more manageable tasks is an important confidence builder.
An executive gave us the example of buying the building where his company had rented space. At first thought, as the “CFO-grown from an accountant” of a small company the thought of purchasing the building in the big city real estate market seemed well beyond his reach. How could he possibly do that—his only previous purchase had been his house, hardly a lead-in to buying an eleven story building in midtown Manhattan. But what would the task require? As he began to break the task down into “piece parts”, (e.g., work out the financials at different prices, get information on building sales in the neighborhood, convince the CEO and the board), and as he weighed these subtasks vs. his capabilities, he realized that there was nothing here that he couldn’t do. He had also talked with the CFO of another company who had engineered the purchase of their building and he realized (social comparison) that “I am as capable as that guy; if he can do it, I can do it.” And he did!
What did he do? Our CFO worked the formula to re-evaluate his capabilities and the task requirement, resulting in his having the self confidence to begin the project. He first broke the formidable project into manageable segments; then he judged his capabilities against each segment, based on what he had done before and what he saw that someone else could do.
In working the formula, most people are surprised at how much relevant experience they have for a broad array of tasks that make up projects outside their usual scope. When they add up their capabilities vs. the tasks, they are encouraged at what they can do. Given that encouragement, they begin the project that they would not have begun otherwise.
Working the formula is useful as a leadership tool as well as a tool for self-management. The effective leader can help others gain confidence by combining working the formula with social persuasion that they can do the job.
The Confident Look
Our actions tell others how certain is our trumpet. We have our impact on others through our actions—what they see. Research confirms what experience tells us—the mere sight of a confident opponent can cause us to lose confidence in ourselves. Thus, looking confident is more than just impression management—it is an important part of the leadership role.
In our executive interviews we have asked executives “what it is that a confident person does? What do they do? How do they behave?” Here are some of these descriptions:
takes the initiative; has direction; comfortable in their body suit; expresses themselves well; maintains eye contact; has a confident posture; will take risks by expressing disagreement; can ask for help; has a positive outlook on life; relaxed, not rattled by anything; has a sense of security; energetic; enthusiastic; well defined goals; can ignore or shrug off difficulties; optimistic; focused; not concerned about appearances; a listener as well as talker; willing to expose personal thinking to the outside; takes a longer term perspective; can think on their feet; full of energy; non-judgmental in criticism; the way they carry themselves; don’t have to be in control; open; willing to decide; don’t worry about things once decided; not threatened by disagreement; don’t get side tracked when something goes wrong; able to change their minds when they are wrong; appears relaxed, don’t fidget; don’t talk something to death.
We also asked for the opposite, “how do you know when a person is not self confident?”
Always have to keep up a front; no vision or direction; timid; unsure; always hedging; nervous; a hunched over posture; no eye contact; can’t focus; fidgety; too loud laughter and exaggerated movements; doesn’t speak up; unable to recognize own weaknesses; easily swayed; no clear, crisp decisions; CYA; seeks approval; takes things personally; they wait, don’t initiate; don’t trust themselves; can’t deal with ambiguity; suck up to bosses; too concerned about themselves; work an issue 18 times before deciding; unwilling to take risks; voice cracks.
Although the ways self confidence is displayed depends to some extent on the context, certain behaviors stood out as indicating executive self confidence. And, most of these are things we can do once we decide we want to look self confident.
Leaders talk about two reasons for looking self confident: first, how the leader looks impacts followers—indeed, who will follow an uncertain trumpet? The leaders confidence rubs off on the followers; and, second, our own attitudes often follow our behaviors. The song from The King and I , expresses both these reasons: “Whenever I feel afraid, I whistle a happy tune, I hold my head erect, and no one will suspect, I’m afraid.” Etc. and then I don’t feel so afraid. The point is this: all executive leaders sometimes feel afraid, but effective performance requires that they look self confident.
Make your own list: What are your self confidence behaviors? What do you do that shows a lack of self confidence?
The Confidence Prescriptions
How you can use all this information? What are the takeaways? First, executives can use the self confidence information to enhance their own performance and to plan their development; second, they can use their self confidence knowledge to help them lead others to be more self confident. We have found that most people are able to use the self confidence concept, once they think through what it means and its implications—that self confidence is not some magical quality bestowed at birth, but something that you can do something about. So, understanding self confidence—the self confidence insight-- is one of the most important takeaways. Given that action steps come easily. We will list some, and leave others to your creativity.
Your own Performance
1. Place yourself in situations that stretch your capabilities. If you are to develop, you must take risks. Remember, the threat is in the eye of the beholder—what may look like a big risk to you, others may see as a “chip shot.” Check out your risk assessment—are you being too cautious?
2. Work the Confidence Formula—when faced with a new situation that you are unsure about, break down the situation into tasks that you have done before. Analyze your capabilities vs. those tasks to get a better sense of what you have done before that you can apply here. Find where you need new knowledge or skills and look for ways to get them.
3. Look for confidence in others. What do they do? How do they act that shows confidence? Then look in the mirror? How confident do you look? What can you do to look more confident?
4. The self confidence interview is an example of talking to others about how they developed confidence. Are there things that you should be doing? Are there experiences that you should re-evaluate that added to your capabilities without your ever realizing it?
5. Do a Self Confidence Inventory. Where do you have lots of confidence? where do you have less? What sources of information have you been using to build confidence? What do you have available that you haven’t used?
6. Review your Self Confidence experiences? As you look back over your life to date, what are the sources of self confidence that have impacted you? Experiences? Models? People who believed in you? Situations that surrounded you with a confident feeling? What did you learn and how do you use it as you meet new situations today?
Leading Others to be More Self Confident.
Instilling confidence in others is one of the key tasks of the leader, yet one most of us have never specifically considered. Here are some actions you can take:
7. Express your confidence in other individuals—use social persuasion. Stop to think of it—how often have you had someone express their total confidence that you could do something? Surprisingly, most of us have seldom felt that confidence of a significant other? Think of how important it has been to you when you got it. Then take that and give it to others—give them your wholehearted, enthusiastic support; persuade them they can do. (Try this with a spouse or significant other—it can have dramatic effects.)
8. Seek out assignments that will build others confidence. Know your people well enough to find work that will stretch their capabilities, where they will learn new things, develop and build confidence. In making assignments, specifically consider “will this be a challenge?”
9. Encourage others to use the Confidence Formula to broaden their horizons. Show them how to analyze their capabilities and the task requirements to find similarities between new challenges and where they have succeeded in the past. Where they lack specific skills, encourage them to take the steps to get them.
These are, of course, just a few of the actions that can be taken to enhance one’s own self confidence and the confidence of others. The first step is to take away an understanding of self confidence and how it impacts performance. That is the purpose of this paper. The next step is up to you—to apply the self confidence insight in your own life and in the lives of those you lead.
All Rights Reserved, Copyright 1997 by George P. Hollenbeck.
The Case for Self Confidence
We have all seen it. Two people with comparable skill turn out very different levels of performance—one succeeds and one fails. One golf pro makes the crucial putt, one misses it. One opera singer hits the high note, the other misses it. One student makes the A, another—who knows just as much--can’t quite get it together in a convincing way. One sales person takes the chance and calls on the big account (and gets the order), another gets an order too, but chose the small account instead of the large one.
What’s the difference? One of the reasons behind such differences is self confidence, that sometimes elusive “can do” attitude that some people seem to have and some don’t, that carries some to achievement and that, when missing, causes others to fail, or even, more critically, fail to try.
Over the last twenty years, psychologists have been developing a body of knowledge about self confidence that has the potential for enormous impact in the working world. But there is good news and bad. The good news is that the findings are very encouraging. As it turns out, self confidence is something you can do something about as an adult, even if you didn’t get a large dose of it growing up. The bad news is that the theory and research findings are largely inaccessible to executives; filed under the heading of “perceived self-efficacy”, the writings are dense and abstract and difficult to read
The purpose of this paper is to provide the background understanding of self confidence for conducting the self confidence interview. Here we translate the research and theory into usable, practical applications. Our goal is to guide executives in managing their own self confidence and, in turn, enhancing their own performance. We hope to start you on a journey of seeing your own capabilities with a confident eye—a view that can pay dividends in results however you measure them.
Our key points are:
1. Self confidence is something you can do something about.
1. Self confidence is important in both getting things done yourself and in getting others to get things done.
2. Understanding what self confidence is and how it develops is the first step.
2. Self confidence has special importance for leadership, both in what leaders do and how they impact others.
3. There are a number of things that can be done to work on self confidence.
What is Self Confidence?
Self confidence is your judgment of whether or not you can do something—it’s as simple as that. We may be confident that we can find our way to work, that we can complete the project, that we can develop a mission that others will want to work toward, that we can “hang in there” to complete our MBA despite all the forces pushing against us.
Self confidence is a judgment, based on our weighing all our capabilities—our abilities, our motivation, all the resources we can muster—vs. the requirements of the task at hand. Note first that it is a judgment, the result of our thinking about and considering; like any other judgment, it can be accurate or inaccurate, influenced by how well we make judgments. Note also that it is based on our perceptions of our capabilities and our perceptions of what the task or challenge requires. It is a belief--our belief in ourselves. Gaining self confidence is a process of persuading ourselves, of influencing our judgment.
Note also that self confidence doesn’t have much meaning except in relation to some task. We sometimes say “Tom is a confident person” but, what we are really saying is that Tom displays a lot of confidence in relation to some task. And though the task may be narrow (sharpening a pencil) or broad (running a pencil factory), few of us are confident in every area of life. The athlete who demonstrates enormous confidence on the playing field may tremble at the sight of a formal dinner table.
Confusing Self Confidence and Self Esteem
Self confidence is frequently confused with a related concept, self esteem. While self confidence is how much we think we can do something, self esteem is how much we like ourselves. Self confidence is a judgment, a belief; self esteem is a feeling, an emotion. People know how hard it is to change self esteem, so in confusing these concepts, mistakenly believe that they can’t do anything about their self confidence.
Having good feelings about yourself is, of course, extremely important in life. But how much we like (how we feel about) ourselves is not the same as how much we think we can do something, our self confidence. We may have great confidence that we can perform some task (e.g., make a budget presentation) that we value very little. Most of us know stories of high confidence people who are unhappy because they lack self esteem. Our executive interviews brought the story of a highly successful commercial real estate executive in New York City, (a job that most would agree requires an unusual degree of self confidence), who was personally miserable because he did not like himself.
Self confidence and self esteem may be related where the tasks are important to the way we feel about ourselves. If school grades are important to me (typically a value learned from parents), then a person’s self esteem will depend on getting good grades--confidence in academic abilities will then be related to self esteem. But, if performance on the task doesn’t reflect on feelings about the self, confidence in this area and self esteem will not be related.
This distinction is crucial in the prescription for enhancing self confidence or self esteem. Self confidence builds up over time and can be systematically changed or enhanced. Changing one’s self esteem is much more difficult, often involving changing the values that were instilled during childhood; a recommended remedy for low self esteem is often years of psychotherapy.
And so the good news--even if you did not emerge from childhood with large doses of self confidence, you can change that without lengthy sessions of talking therapy. There is lots that can be done to strengthen confidence, starting from where a person is today.
How Self Confidence Impacts Performance
Most of us would agree, “yes, self confidence affects our performance,” but research has identified some surprising ways it has those effects. It impacts our motivation, our perceptions, and our thought patterns.
Motivation
Those with higher self confidence work harder in approaching a task, and exert more effort; they will keep at the task longer without feedback and will stick to it longer in the face of problems and difficulties. This motivational impact is especially important for executives because of the nature of executive work—it often requires lots of effort over long periods of time with little indication at the end of the day of whether we have done a good job or a poor one. Almost any lengthy, complex project is fraught with challenges and difficulties; the persistence to keep at it is frequently at least half the battle. In leadership, there is seldom one right answer; many different approaches may succeed, given the motivation to keep at it.
In the ambiguous life of the executive, a lot depends on how much and how long we are willing to work at the task; the greater motivation that accompanies higher self confidence will result in better performance.
Perceptions
Executive work can be risky (to our pocket books and our egos, if not physically risky), with ample opportunity for threats and fears to hamper our work. But, threat is always in the eye of the beholder--what may be threatening to you may not cause me to blink an eye, or vice versa. Research finds that executives with higher self confidence are less likely to see situations as threatening. But more important than not being afraid or threatened (everybody is afraid from time to time) is the confident belief that when threats arise we will be able to cope with them.
Thought Patterns.
The research has shown a number of ways in which highly confident people think differently. One of the very important findings is that they are better at analytical problems solving; they are more creative and come up with better solutions. They set higher goals than do the less self confident, and those goals, in turn, spur them to better performance. In addition, they make different choices about what they do—often selecting the choice that provides better experience. Impact on these thought patterns is one of the major ways that self confidence influences executive performance.
Taken together, the fact that self confidence impacts our motivation, our perceptions, and our thought patterns makes a strong case for spending the time and effort to understand it better.
How Self confidence is Developed
Self confidence judgments are not idle hopes—wishing we could do something doesn’t make it true. Instead, we base our self confidence judgments on four sources of data:
4. Our own experiences, what we will call Actual Experience, the things we have done;
1. The experiences of others, or what we call “modeling”;
2. Social Persuasion, the process of convincing someone else; and
3. Emotional arousal, how we feel about events around us.
The first source, our actual experience, has the most impact on our self confidence, but each of these sources of data can be important in influencing our confidence judgment in different situations.
Actual Experience.
“What made you confident that you could do that?” we asked the executive. She replied: “I had done something very similar before that worked out very well. I knew that if I could do it there, I could do it here.”
Having done it before and succeeding is the most powerful way to build self confidence. Time and again in our interviews with executives, we have found them describing the powerful impact on their self confidence of successful experience. And one doesn’t have to stop and think about it, it just happens. The role of actual experience is so powerful we call it “mainlining self confidence.”
The old adage “There is no substitute for experience” usually refers to the knowledge and skill that one gains from having done something. But not only is experience a good teacher of how to do the task (and in turn causes us to realistically judge our capabilities to be greater), successful experience also gives us confidence. Getting success experiences that build confidence is critical in the life and career of the developing leader. One prescription for gaining self confidence, even if sometimes easier said than done, is to “get some experience.”
What experience? Not all experiences are equal. The experience we need is the one that is challenging, that is more difficult than we have undertaken before, that causes us to “stretch”, while still providing us a reasonable chance of success. The same experience over and over (or success that is too easy) will gives us little new data, producing little learning or increase in confidence.
Life, and developing our leadership abilities, is a game of finding and succeeding at tasks that are challenging but doable, where the odds of success make them worthwhile. If we choose (or are assigned) tasks that are too easy, we don’t develop; but if we choose (or are placed in) those that are too difficult, we will likely crash and burn. Although success at an exceedingly difficult task can dramatically boost our self confidence, the dangers of likely failure (getting fired, e.g.) may not be worth the risk. And, although failure is an important source of personal learning (namely, humility), we don’t prescribe intentional failure as a personal development strategy.
Even when we don’t have specific actual experience, when we haven’t “..done it before,” many times we have done “more of it” than at first glance we realize. Another prescription, then, is to re-evaluate our capabilities, examining relevant abilities that may have been applied in a different setting or task. We may, then, be able to cobble together “successful experience” from the diverse background that we bring to the task, enhancing our self confidence and encouraging us to give our best performance. We observed this most strikingly over the last couple of decades with women entering the workforce after years of spending their time in the home—their confidence was often raised (and their resumes enhanced) by re-interpreting many of the tasks they had done.
Other’s Experience.
People are quite adept at learning from the experiences of others—they don’t have to do everything in order to learn. Learning from others, vicariously, is what psychologists call “modeling.” And a part of this is comparing ourselves to others, or “social comparison.”
Modeling--watching others—provides new skills and strategies. Models show us what works and what doesn’t and we integrate those learnings into our own toolkits. Models are especially important in learning interpersonal skills—how to work with others. Most confident people can tell us about learning how to deal with others by watching the successes and failures of someone else.
Fortunately, executives don’t have to wait until they see a model doing something well in order to learn something. Perhaps we should not be surprised that executives tell us of so few examples of effective people management. Often they learn what not to do. And these learnings then provide the base of information which enables us to say, “I can do better than that.”
We also gain inspiration from watching others. They provide “models” of the way we want to be and the standards we want to meet. Without even realizing it, we learn dress codes, mannerisms, and a wide range of behaviors from observing.
One way people judge their capabilities is by comparing themselves to others, or social comparison. Education and training settings lend themselves especially well to comparing ourselves to others. Surrounded by our peers in a training class, most of us are first surprised by the range of their achievements, but then impressed that most are no more capable than we are—if they can do it, why not me? (Not to be minimized as another addition to the self confidence larder is, of course, the new knowledge and skills gained in the school).
Social Persuasion.
A third source of data for self-confidence judgments is what others tell us--persuasion. We see the inspirational speaker who can fire up the sales force to get out there and make the calls; most of us can identify some boss or associate who believed in us when we ourselves were not so sure.
Although criticized as a short-term influence, that “you can do it” urging may be the spark that starts someone on the road to success. One of our executives told it this way: As a new professional, he was just finding his way in a new job when his boss assigned him a more important and more complex project than he had ever done before. He had real doubts about his ability to do the work, but his boss, a manager wise in the ways of motivating “green” employees expressed great confidence in his ability to do the work. Our executive, thirty five years later, still remembers how important was that persuasion from his boss in getting him started and keeping him going in what turned out to be a key learning experience in his career.
Good motivators and confidence builders do more than just tell us how good we are. Often they also guide our efforts in ways that bring success and that avoid the premature failure that would undermine our confidence judgments. A good coach, whether of an executive or of an athlete, guides successful performance and encourages the new leader to measure success in terms of self-improvement rather than vis a vis others.
Emotional Arousal.
In assessing their self confidence, people also rely partly on how their minds and bodies react when they perform or anticipate performing:
--If we feel anxious and threatened, we conclude that we lack ability;
--if we feel tired and exhausted after a series of negotiations, we may judge that we lack what it takes to be a negotiator as a full time occupation.
In the heyday of Harold Geneen at ITT, the story was that very senior executives waiting in the anteroom about to be grilled on their monthly results would frequently become physically ill. No wonder that they might interpret their feelings as indicating a lack of confidence. Fortunately, social comparison operated here to boost their confidence back up—“everybody else does it too” or “Joe got sick too, and got through it.”
Because we use these reactions in deciding how confident we are, it is especially important not to let our fears keep us from trying. Social comparisons are especially important in helping us realize that nearly everyone—show it or not—has a queasy stomach at one time or another, and yet they (and we too) can go on to good performance. Even Luciano Pavarotti, a recent interview showed, gets nervous, but it doesn’t keep him from singing.
In summary, these are the four primary sources for the information we use to make our self confidence judgments—actual experience, others’ experience, social persuasion and emotional arousal. Actual experience is the most powerful source, leading us to call gaining self confidence via that route as “mainlining.” Others’ experience is especially important in complex and dangerous endeavors where getting actual experience is very difficult or risky, and where there are ample opportunities for social comparison. Social persuasion can be a great starter, but may not last. And emotional arousal is most important where signals from our body are directly important, e.g. recovering from heart surgery or conquering a phobia or fear.
As you conduct your self confidence interview, look for examples of all of these types of data.
The Special Case of Leadership
Leadership requires inspiring others to follow one’s lead. As illustrated in the biblical quote, “who shall follow an uncertain trumpet?”, our belief that we can do something is a critical part of convincing others and instilling trust in them. Research on charisma finds that an important part of what causes us to describe a person as having charisma is their certainty about what they believe.
But its effect on others is not the only way self confidence impacts leadership. In teaching leadership to MBAs, we have often been struck by how timid are their decisions. Asked “how many would be willing to accept a transfer to Hong Kong?”, only a sprinkling of our early 30s students, mostly managers and engineers said they would go—this despite the fact that we had spent the previous class discussing the benefits that accrue from international experience. For these students, the risk was simply not worth the reward, even if the risk was mitigated by a company-provided safety net—even though taking calculated risks is a foundation of leadership.
Leadership requires not only convincing communication, it also requires setting the direction or strategy. We saw above the advantages of the self-confident problem solver—working harder, examining more alternatives, finding better solutions. And the greater the stakes, the greater the confident advantage. A small business owner described to us the implications of her decisions—“Seventeen families depend on me.” Her self confidence did not keep her from occasional bouts with sheer terror ( “sometimes I come home on Friday night and cry with fear,”), but her resilience had her back at work the next morning.
Working the Confidence Equation
Thinking of self confidence as a function of perceived capabilities (PC) minus perceived task requirements (PTR ) is a very useful tool in analyzing ours or others sources of confidence. Think of it this way:
Self Confidence = PC - PTR
The formula is a short-hand way to keep us thinking: if we can increase our PC or decrease our PTR (or both), our self confidence will increase.
Both our capabilities and the task requirements are perceptions and, as such, depend on how we define and view the data. A conscious process of breaking down the task requirements into simpler components and re-evaluating our capabilities against those more manageable tasks is an important confidence builder.
An executive gave us the example of buying the building where his company had rented space. At first thought, as the “CFO-grown from an accountant” of a small company the thought of purchasing the building in the big city real estate market seemed well beyond his reach. How could he possibly do that—his only previous purchase had been his house, hardly a lead-in to buying an eleven story building in midtown Manhattan. But what would the task require? As he began to break the task down into “piece parts”, (e.g., work out the financials at different prices, get information on building sales in the neighborhood, convince the CEO and the board), and as he weighed these subtasks vs. his capabilities, he realized that there was nothing here that he couldn’t do. He had also talked with the CFO of another company who had engineered the purchase of their building and he realized (social comparison) that “I am as capable as that guy; if he can do it, I can do it.” And he did!
What did he do? Our CFO worked the formula to re-evaluate his capabilities and the task requirement, resulting in his having the self confidence to begin the project. He first broke the formidable project into manageable segments; then he judged his capabilities against each segment, based on what he had done before and what he saw that someone else could do.
In working the formula, most people are surprised at how much relevant experience they have for a broad array of tasks that make up projects outside their usual scope. When they add up their capabilities vs. the tasks, they are encouraged at what they can do. Given that encouragement, they begin the project that they would not have begun otherwise.
Working the formula is useful as a leadership tool as well as a tool for self-management. The effective leader can help others gain confidence by combining working the formula with social persuasion that they can do the job.
The Confident Look
Our actions tell others how certain is our trumpet. We have our impact on others through our actions—what they see. Research confirms what experience tells us—the mere sight of a confident opponent can cause us to lose confidence in ourselves. Thus, looking confident is more than just impression management—it is an important part of the leadership role.
In our executive interviews we have asked executives “what it is that a confident person does? What do they do? How do they behave?” Here are some of these descriptions:
takes the initiative; has direction; comfortable in their body suit; expresses themselves well; maintains eye contact; has a confident posture; will take risks by expressing disagreement; can ask for help; has a positive outlook on life; relaxed, not rattled by anything; has a sense of security; energetic; enthusiastic; well defined goals; can ignore or shrug off difficulties; optimistic; focused; not concerned about appearances; a listener as well as talker; willing to expose personal thinking to the outside; takes a longer term perspective; can think on their feet; full of energy; non-judgmental in criticism; the way they carry themselves; don’t have to be in control; open; willing to decide; don’t worry about things once decided; not threatened by disagreement; don’t get side tracked when something goes wrong; able to change their minds when they are wrong; appears relaxed, don’t fidget; don’t talk something to death.
We also asked for the opposite, “how do you know when a person is not self confident?”
Always have to keep up a front; no vision or direction; timid; unsure; always hedging; nervous; a hunched over posture; no eye contact; can’t focus; fidgety; too loud laughter and exaggerated movements; doesn’t speak up; unable to recognize own weaknesses; easily swayed; no clear, crisp decisions; CYA; seeks approval; takes things personally; they wait, don’t initiate; don’t trust themselves; can’t deal with ambiguity; suck up to bosses; too concerned about themselves; work an issue 18 times before deciding; unwilling to take risks; voice cracks.
Although the ways self confidence is displayed depends to some extent on the context, certain behaviors stood out as indicating executive self confidence. And, most of these are things we can do once we decide we want to look self confident.
Leaders talk about two reasons for looking self confident: first, how the leader looks impacts followers—indeed, who will follow an uncertain trumpet? The leaders confidence rubs off on the followers; and, second, our own attitudes often follow our behaviors. The song from The King and I , expresses both these reasons: “Whenever I feel afraid, I whistle a happy tune, I hold my head erect, and no one will suspect, I’m afraid.” Etc. and then I don’t feel so afraid. The point is this: all executive leaders sometimes feel afraid, but effective performance requires that they look self confident.
Make your own list: What are your self confidence behaviors? What do you do that shows a lack of self confidence?
The Confidence Prescriptions
How you can use all this information? What are the takeaways? First, executives can use the self confidence information to enhance their own performance and to plan their development; second, they can use their self confidence knowledge to help them lead others to be more self confident. We have found that most people are able to use the self confidence concept, once they think through what it means and its implications—that self confidence is not some magical quality bestowed at birth, but something that you can do something about. So, understanding self confidence—the self confidence insight-- is one of the most important takeaways. Given that action steps come easily. We will list some, and leave others to your creativity.
Your own Performance
1. Place yourself in situations that stretch your capabilities. If you are to develop, you must take risks. Remember, the threat is in the eye of the beholder—what may look like a big risk to you, others may see as a “chip shot.” Check out your risk assessment—are you being too cautious?
2. Work the Confidence Formula—when faced with a new situation that you are unsure about, break down the situation into tasks that you have done before. Analyze your capabilities vs. those tasks to get a better sense of what you have done before that you can apply here. Find where you need new knowledge or skills and look for ways to get them.
3. Look for confidence in others. What do they do? How do they act that shows confidence? Then look in the mirror? How confident do you look? What can you do to look more confident?
4. The self confidence interview is an example of talking to others about how they developed confidence. Are there things that you should be doing? Are there experiences that you should re-evaluate that added to your capabilities without your ever realizing it?
5. Do a Self Confidence Inventory. Where do you have lots of confidence? where do you have less? What sources of information have you been using to build confidence? What do you have available that you haven’t used?
6. Review your Self Confidence experiences? As you look back over your life to date, what are the sources of self confidence that have impacted you? Experiences? Models? People who believed in you? Situations that surrounded you with a confident feeling? What did you learn and how do you use it as you meet new situations today?
Leading Others to be More Self Confident.
Instilling confidence in others is one of the key tasks of the leader, yet one most of us have never specifically considered. Here are some actions you can take:
7. Express your confidence in other individuals—use social persuasion. Stop to think of it—how often have you had someone express their total confidence that you could do something? Surprisingly, most of us have seldom felt that confidence of a significant other? Think of how important it has been to you when you got it. Then take that and give it to others—give them your wholehearted, enthusiastic support; persuade them they can do. (Try this with a spouse or significant other—it can have dramatic effects.)
8. Seek out assignments that will build others confidence. Know your people well enough to find work that will stretch their capabilities, where they will learn new things, develop and build confidence. In making assignments, specifically consider “will this be a challenge?”
9. Encourage others to use the Confidence Formula to broaden their horizons. Show them how to analyze their capabilities and the task requirements to find similarities between new challenges and where they have succeeded in the past. Where they lack specific skills, encourage them to take the steps to get them.
These are, of course, just a few of the actions that can be taken to enhance one’s own self confidence and the confidence of others. The first step is to take away an understanding of self confidence and how it impacts performance. That is the purpose of this paper. The next step is up to you—to apply the self confidence insight in your own life and in the lives of those you lead.
