The Confidence Code (19 page)

So, yes, as Sheryl Sandberg argues, we do need to lean in. We need to act, instead of holding back. And that means, we now know, that we have to be ready to work in ways that will often challenge our most basic instincts.

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.

We laughed. As if! This was early in our pilgrimage, so failing still seemed exactly the opposite of what women do easily and naturally. Failure, it went without saying, we abhorred. And to do it quickly? That would mean we hadn’t made a full effort, or done our work perfectly. I think we may have actually shuddered as we listened.

He wasn’t joking. Fail fast, as it happens, is a techie buzz phrase, and more important, 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. These days, the world won’t wait for perfection, and spending the time endlessly refining your product is just too expensive. Failing fast allows for constant adjustment, testing, and then quick movement toward what will actually work. The beauty is that when you fail fast, or early, you have a lot less to lose. Usually you are failing small, rather than spectacularly. And you have a lot to gain from learning as you fail.

We’ve come to see the theory of failing fast as the ideal paradigm for building female confidence. First, it just sounds more appealing than typical failure. It’s not that it’s “healthy” to fail, in the dreary way that kale cookies are healthy. It’s actually hip now, even potentially lucrative. And this bite-size failing seems manageable. We need to fail again and again, so that it becomes part of our DNA. If we get busy failing in little ways, we will stop ruminating on our possible shortcomings and imagining worst-case scenarios. We’ll be taking action, instead of analyzing every possible nook and crevice of a potential plan. If we can embrace failure as forward progress, then we can spend time on the other critical confidence skill: mastery.

Our quick failures will let us be choosy about how we spend our time. No longer will we need to try to get everything right. A lot will land in the garbage heap. We would do well to remember that it’s not the strongest species that survives in the long run—it’s the one that is the most adaptable.

Shortly after we talked to our tech friend, Claire decided to stick her toe in the failure water.

“One thing I’ve long wanted to try,” she says, “is to give a speech where I simply wing it. To stand up there with no notes, and just talk. You know—Oprah, Ellen DeGeneres, Bill Clinton style. My gut tells me I’d be a more effective speaker; I’d connect more to the crowd and harness more of my energy. The fail fast concept pushed me to try. I didn’t want to fail big and fast, of course, so I left half of my speech unscripted. It was a shock to hit that blank page. And I wasn’t great, to be honest. I got through it, but with much more meandering than necessary. A lot of
um
s. I’m not sure I covered the right ground. But I learned. A totally blank page doesn’t work for me. Next time I’m going to try an old CNN live shot trick—just have a list of a few key words to guide me.”

Confidence, as we’ve said (at least fifty times by now, and there are a few more repetitions to come), is about action. It also takes repeated attempts, calculated risk taking, and changes to the way you think. Sadly, you cannot simply square your shoulders, straighten your skirt, and ease into confidence as your grandmother might have suggested. Some of those vintage maxims can help, but not in isolation. The latest research yields intriguing, counterintuitive, and holistic implications for how to follow the confidence trail. A lot of the advice we’d never heard of before, and frankly, before we tried it, we just didn’t believe it could work. But it does. We’ve ferreted out what we found to be the most salient information, especially that with application to our everyday lives. Grab the strands that resonate with you.

Leave the Comfort Zone

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. Risk keeps you on life’s edge. It keeps you growing, improving, and gaining confidence. By contrast, living in a zone where you’re assured of the outcome can turn flat and dreary quickly. Action separates the timid from the bold.

It’s okay to start simple. If your confidence gap is in meeting new people, begin small: Pass food at a party and introduce yourself along with the salsa and chips, or make eye contact and then conversation with a stranger at the dry cleaner. If you aren’t confident going to parties alone, try this: Start with a small gathering where you know there will be people who are friends, say yes in advance so you can’t back out, then move on to the work reception, dare yourself not to back out at the last minute, and when you get there quickly find a group of two or three people and introduce yourself and ask them questions about their lives. Focus on their answers, be very present in that conversation; it will take your mind off the fact that you are there alone. If you aren’t confident asking for a promotion, practice making the case on a trusted friend; give her five ways you’ve helped the department. Small steps prepare you for taking more meaningful risks. It’s called the exposure technique.

And for many women, risk can take less obvious forms. Just as often it means allowing ourselves to be imperfect, braving the displeasure of authority figures and loved ones, or learning to be more comfortable when you’re at the center of attention. Once you master these, you can build up to bigger risks: challenge your colleague’s opinion on a project and don’t cave at the first counterattack; try out for a play; take on a job that seems out of reach.

Sometimes the most important actions and risks to take aren’t physical at all—they have nothing to do with talking in a meeting or applying for a new job. The ability to make decisions big and small, in a timely fashion, and take responsibility for them, is a critical expression of confidence, and also leadership, according to all of our most confident women. We listened to Linda Hudson give a compelling speech on the subject of decision making. Even if you make the wrong decision, she says, decide. It’s better than inaction.

What’s the worst that can happen, in all of these scenarios, when you leave your comfort zone? That’s right. We’re back there again. You could fail.

Beth Wilkinson is a quick decision maker, a consummate risk taker, and one of the most confident people we know. As an assistant U.S. attorney, she helped to prosecute Timothy McVeigh, and her consistent ability to win high-stakes courtroom victories has made her one of the most sought-after litigators in the country. Sometimes, though, even she fails. Indeed, she confessed to us, one early Saturday morning at Starbucks, that she’s a pro at failing fast in small ways, which is the fallout from making lots of decisions quickly. She shrugs. “I usually learn from it,” she says, laughing. One early failure has become a touchstone for her. It was one of her first solo cases and, wanting to get her opening argument just right, Wilkinson wrote it down, and read it verbatim, instead of trying to memorize it. Later, she overheard a male colleague criticize her performance. She was crushed. Instead of dwelling on it for too long, she thought it over, and realized that he was right. “It was a turning point for me,” she says. “It is far better not to say everything perfectly, and to just connect with the jury. It taught me a lot. And I’ve never read a closing statement again.” Here was an almost perfect execution of failing fast with a growth mind-set. Do it, learn, and move on.

Missteps really do provide accelerated opportunity for growth, as well as a chance to tap into that other internal resource we mentioned: self-compassion. As the research shows, practicing self-compassion provides a sturdy emotional safety net, one much stronger than our traditional concept of self-esteem. Self-compassion, you’ll recall, centers on the acceptance of our weaknesses. Instead of saying, “I am not a failure,” it’s more useful to say, “Yes, sometimes I do fail, we all fail, and that’s okay.” It’s extending the same kindness and tolerance—the very same qualities we find so much easier to afford our friends—to ourselves, while coming to terms with our own imperfections.

Taking a big risk, and surviving, can be life-changing. “My most confident moment coincided with my least confident,” Jane Wurwand told us, because it meant finding the confidence to get out of a marriage that was undermining her confidence. She was young, living in South Africa far away from her family, in a society and era that frowned on divorce. She was worried about what would happen to her, socially and financially, if she abandoned the stability of married life, but the relationship was making her profoundly unhappy. Decades later, she still remembers the day she summoned up the confidence and courage to leave. And she remembers, too, the cheap plastic shopping bags her husband shoved her clothes in, before he threw them out of the apartment window. “That’s all I left with, those two plastic bags, and I remember driving to my friend’s house and thinking, ‘I will never let myself be this vulnerable again.’ It was the hardest thing I ever did. But it was also an incredible confidence builder. I thought, ‘My God, if I survived that, I can survive anything.’”

Don’t Ruminate—Rewire

Simply put, a woman’s brain is not her friend when it comes to confidence. We think too much and we think about the wrong things. Thinking harder and harder and harder won’t solve our issues, though, it won’t make us more confident, and it most certainly freezes decision making, not to mention action. 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. Those negative thoughts, and nightmare scenarios masquerading as problem solving, spin on an endless loop. We render ourselves unable to be in the moment or to trust our instincts because we are captive to those distracting, destructive thoughts, which gradually squeeze all the spontaneity out of life and work. We have got to stop ruminating.

It’s not easy. Even a neuroscientist sometimes can’t help herself. Laura-Ann Petitto is a leader in her field. She’s made numerous important discoveries about the origins of language, and runs a prestigious laboratory, supported by Gallaudet University and the NIH, which studies the brain and language development. She’s created a new discipline known as Educational Neuroscience, won more than twenty international awards, and made an Oscar-nominated documentary about her pioneering work with a chimpanzee called Nim. When we met her at her lab, she was a welcoming and dynamic blur of energy and curiosity wrapped in a sleek orange and purple dress. Utterly confident, we imagined. Petitto told us though that while she knows she is thoroughly competent, she still dwells on her weakness—her fear of public speaking, for example. For years, she had a debilitating habit. She would sit on the bus on the way home from her lab creating a long list of her perceived failings. It was her mental default mode. “I could have done that better,” she would say to herself. “That wasn’t as good as it could have been. I shouldn’t have been so nervous speaking in public.”

Recently, she vowed to make a change. To break this negative pattern, Petitto decided to react to it by reminding herself of three things she’d done well. Now, when the negative ruminations start, she consciously goes through her list of achievements and successes: “That was a good paper I finished,” the interior monologue might now go. “I got that lab report done quicker than I expected. I had a good conversation with my new grad student.”

Such thought exercises rewire the brain and break the negative feedback loop. The effect may not be immediate, but in some cases, you can produce a regular change in thoughts and then in actions within weeks. You must start by becoming a keen observer of the relationship between your thoughts, your emotions, and your behaviors, and how one can affect the others. It is basic cognitive behavioral therapy. 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 mind did the work.

Kill NATs

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
. Unfortunately, they buzz around more frequently than positive thoughts, and can multiply at lightning speed. Do any of these comments sound familiar?

“That dress was too expensive. Why did I waste my money?”

“I’ll bet when I go to work Sophie will be in earlier than I am again.”

“I’ll never finish this project; I knew I wasn’t up to it.”

“If I don’t finish this project tonight, then I’ll look bad to my boss, and I won’t be promoted.”

Unfortunately, you can’t simply wipe out these NATs with a can of spray, but you can challenge them and wrestle them down with logic and alternatives. The first step is recognizing them. It may sound tedious, but keep a journal and write them down. There’s no substitute for it. Just do it for a few days. Keep one by your bedside and jot down some of what’s circulating in your brain each evening. Here’s a sample from our notebooks: