Chapter 2
Build Confidence

Confidence. That elusive je ne sais quoi. Like art, we know it when we see it, and we know it when we feel it. The thing is, confidence isn’t summoned on demand from the heavens. Confidence isn’t brought on by clenching our fists. So how do we achieve and sustain it?

We don’t work in a vacuum, and mutual trust and confidence are at the core of successful teams. And building and maintaining confidence is not always easy; it often requires individual acts of courage. And while assuming the best in others is important to the process, obstacles—including stress-inducing bosses—can present challenges. But, if we are persistent, we can overcome many of these.

Sources of True Confidence

The world is full of people who have overcome daunting odds. In chapter 1, we explored how some people faced tremendous challenges. The question then is, “How did these people summon the confidence to attempt their audacious feats?” True and profound confidence comes from a lot of factors, as we explore next.

Preparation

If we eventually are rewarded publicly for our efforts, it’s likely we spent years honing and practicing those skills in private before anyone noticed and applauded. Being prepared ranks as one of the strongest confidence measures among professional athletes and can give any of us confidence, whether on the sports field, on the stage, or at a workplace meeting. Preparation leads to competence, which in turn begets confidence.

Visualization

Recollecting positive performances in the past can give us a confidence advantage. When we take a moment to recall a time in which we were previously successful, we fuel a sense of confidence that we can repeat that success. Just as powerful is visualizing future success, as many high-performing professionals and athletes do.

In an interview with David Winner for ESPN, Wayne Rooney, a prominent English soccer player and team captain, explained that, before each match, he would approach the guy responsible for the team uniforms, the “kit man,” and ask him the colors their team would wear for the game. Then Rooney would lie in bed the evening before the big match and envision himself performing well in the game. As Rooney describes it: “You’re trying to put yourself in that moment and trying to prepare yourself, to have a ‘memory’ before the game. I don’t know if you’d call it visualizing or dreaming, but I’ve always done it, my whole life.”¹

The deeper and more vividly we can visualize our future performance, the better. Nicole Detling is a sports psychologist with the United States Olympic team. As she notes in a New York Times article, “The more an athlete can image the entire package, the better it’s going to be.”²

Detling also coaches Emily Cook, one of the most accomplished athletes on the U.S. Ski Team. Cook’s specialty is aerials—a sport in which skiers fling themselves into the air off of ski jumps and perform twists, turns, and flips in the air. In the article, Cook described the athletes preparing in the starting gate for the aerials competition at the Sochi Olympics: “Oh, yeah, it’s ridiculous; we’re all up there flapping our arms. It looks insane, but it works.”

Great Coaching

Good coaches can instill confidence in many ways, but the greatest coaches are honest, specific, and positive, all at the same time. They’re honest in that they don’t ignore the behavioral or performance weaknesses of the people they coach but instead address those weaknesses head-on and provide correctional advice that is both specific and positive.

For example, if a person practicing a presentation constantly turns his back to the audience and reads bullet points, his coach might say, “You know your content. Turn and face your audience and smile. They can read your bullet points on their own. Or even better, tell your audience a story that illustrates the bullet points on the slide.”

Innate Advantages

We’re more likely to be confident if our team is bigger, faster, and stronger, but we need to avoid letting confidence become arrogance. And any team in a company that simply has more capacity and resources than the competition will likely enter proposal negotiations with more confidence.

Social Support

First-time parents, members of exercise clubs, cooking class attendees, and OCD group participants all get together for one purpose: to support one another through a specific change or toward a specific goal. When we feel a little lost or unsupported, that’s a good time to reach out to those in our work or community who are experiencing the same pain point. No matter what we think, none of us is unique, and we can bet someone else is going through the same issue. Asking for help is the first sign of strength.

Competitive Advantage

In looking at our competitors, we may see that the sun is in their eyes, their lane is full of gravel, the field is tilted, or they simply have a crappy Internet connection. Recognizing such competitive advantages is a valuable source of confidence. The key is working hard to recognize the advantages we might have. This is when competitive sleuthing can be valuable in helping to recognize, and to articulate clearly what our advantages are.

Self-Awareness

Contrary to the old wisdom of using positive self- talk, such as “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can,” to boost self- confidence, using positive questions is much more powerful. If instead we ask ourselves, “Can I do this?” we will have to answer the question in our minds and be specific about how we will meet the challenge.

I didn’t make this up. Researchers asked a group of people to solve anagrams—puzzles in which the letters of one word are reshuffled to form another word, such as “team” or “meat”—but told participants that the study was looking at handwriting practices.³

“With this pretense,” the researchers explained, “participants were given a sheet of paper to write down twenty times one of the following word pairs: Will I, I will, I, or Will. Then they were asked to work on a series of ten anagrams.”

Those participants primed by writing “Will I” solved twice as many puzzles as the others. In being honest with ourselves and asking if we are up for a challenge, we’re more likely to face that challenge successfully than simply repeating, “I think I can.”

Self-Control

Studies have shown that practicing small, consistent acts of self-control can bolster confidence and self-esteem. Simple, small acts—such as avoiding sweets and candies, or consciously improving one’s posture, or even practicing the routine discipline of keeping a daily diary—were all demonstrated to improve personal sense of self- esteem and confidence, according to studies by Mark Muraven at the University of Albany.⁴ Muraven found that the specific self-control activity—avoiding sweets, improving posture, or keeping a diary—was less important than the act of self-control itself.

Through small acts of self- control in any activity, we can gain self-control in all we do. It’s a self- reinforcing, positive feedback loop.

Trust

Trust could be the biggest factor in creating confidence in team settings. I once watched a dynamic youth soccer team whose members trusted one another crush a team of handpicked all-stars. The all-stars had been told that each of them was amazing, so they played like that. The kids on that team passed the ball as little as possible, and each selfishly worked for his own glory. The other team was a real team—one that had built strength, experience, and trust in one another over years of working together. They were never told that they were great individually. They had built their wins by always relying on one another.

Trusting and relying on others also works the other way around. When we have the trust to rely on others, we also accept responsibility for their reliance on us. Becoming a reliable teammate is absolutely a choice, in the same way that becoming more “engaged” in our work also starts with a personal choice.

Building Confidence Through Personal Acts of Courage

Even for those who can call on some, or all, of the factors discussed above, building confidence sometimes comes down to personal acts of courage.

“Seek small improvement one day at a time,” UCLA Bruins Coach John Wooden famously said. “That’s the only way it happens. And when it happens, it lasts.”

I recently spent half a day working with executives from a global technology company. Our goal was to develop ways to heighten the engagement and drive of the company’s team members. The twenty or so executives assembled that day were responsible for immense teams and for the work and livelihood of thousands of people around the world.

To kick things off, we reviewed results from a recent companywide engagement survey. The results were so-so. While the ratings were fairly positive in response to the question of whether respondents were proud to work for a famous and well- known brand, the results were poor regarding levels of personal engagement and whether respondents felt the company leadership was open, accessible, and communicative.

Many respondents claimed communication was lacking between the higher and lower levels in the company, that they felt left in the dark, out of the loop. In an anonymous comment, one of the participants in the survey asked, “Now what are the executives going to do about the lack of engagement around here?”

So how do we solve this problem?

It Starts with Choice

There is a simple truth about people who become great leaders: they step up. It doesn’t start at the top. We can’t sit around and wait for the culture to change, or the engagement to start happening magically. We have to make it happen. It starts with each of us and our own personal attitudes and behaviors.

Yes, it is true that managers often define the personality of the company for the employees they manage, and that we experience the company through the quality of our relationship with our bosses. It’s also true that the best way to attract outside talent is to have great managers.

But this doesn’t absolve managers of the responsibility of being accountable, and being as present as they can be in their work. Each of us must accept responsibility for our own “engagement.” Managers only create the circumstances and the opportunity for those they manage to do their best work.

Make It Easy on Yourself

The expression “activation energy” was coined 150 years ago by a chemist. The term refers to the minimum amount of energy required to stimulate an interaction between available reactants.

We should also minimize the amount of energy it takes to get us active—remove all the hurdles to taking action that we can. If we want to start jogging more, we should lay our gear and our shoes by the bed before we go to sleep. That way, it will be right there staring at us in the morning. And if we want to become better public speakers, we need to block off a doable amount of time—perhaps thirty minutes each day—to focus on that.

When we make it easy to begin something, we lower the amount of energy it takes to get started. And if it takes less energy to get started, we are more likely to do it.

It's Not Where but What You Think

Hip workplaces and free cafeterias are cool, but ultimately it’s not where but what we think, and how we behave, that matters. For example, in April 2015, I had an interview with Paul Hiltz, president of Community Mercy Health Partners. I had previously interviewed him for my first book, Out Think, back in May 2011, when he was president of Mercy Health Select, and since then Paul has grown in his career and is now the president of Community Mercy Health Partners in Springfield, Ohio. In his new position, he heads the staff of two different hospital systems that have come together and moved into a brand- new, $500 million, state-of- the- art facility.

Over the course of several years leading up to 2015, the center had begun to create remarkable results: its emergency department wait times had plummeted from almost an hour to less than ten minutes; the rate at which discharged patients return soon after with the same condition, also known as “bounceback” rate, had fallen tremendously; and the center’s surgery efficiency rating and surgery error rating were 30 percent better than the national average.

Thinking perhaps the new building was somehow inspirational to the staff, I asked Hiltz what role the new facility played in helping to bring about high levels of staff engagement and focus on patients. He explained that the new hospital, equipment, and facilities were all very nice, and definitely increased their ability to effectively treat patients, but they were not big factors in developing the collaboration and camaraderie of the staff.

In his opinion, the deep and meaningful collaboration and heightened patient care from his staff came from the conscientious work and collaboration of all employees, not from simply working in a fancy building.

Rehearse Excellence

Last year Odell Beckham Jr., wide receiver for the New York Giants, made what many argue to be the greatest wide- receiver catch of all time. When you watch it on YouTube, it looks like a magic trick out of Cirque du Soleil.⁵ But here’s the thing: he worked on that exact type of catch over and over and over in practice. He didn’t just summon that move on the spot, unrehearsed. He spent many, many hours preparing for that exact moment.⁶

In practice, and before every game, Beckham warms up by attempting exactly these types of acrobatic catches. When the moment came in the actual game, he was exceedingly well prepared and practiced. He caught that ball because he rehearsed that difficult move, not because he got lucky.

Striking a Power Pose

Want to summon confidence quickly? Power posing certainly helps. As we learned, Harvard professor Amy Cuddy has spent the last few years of her life spreading the gospel of striking a power pose.⁷ And it does work. When we stand like Wonder Woman or Superman, we get a shot of dopamine and oxytocin, which spreads a warm cocktail of confidence throughout our brain.

Cuddy recommends that, before a big interview or meeting, we go hide in the bathroom or elevator and do power poses. Doing this gives us a nice shot of confidence for a short period. But it’s a stopgap—the duct tape of confidence.

The upshot is, go ahead and strike a power pose, but remember that real, sustainable confidence is found through developing competence. This is tough love, but nothing substitutes for hard work, perseverance, and dedicated practice.

Building confidence in ourselves and others also starts with small acts of trust and assuming the best intentions of others. The next story illustrates what I mean.

Assuming the Best Intentions of Others

A young woman is waiting in a busy airport. She has some time to kill, so she buys a little bag of cookies and sits down to read her book. Pretty soon, a young man comes and sits beside her and starts reading a magazine. The two people keep to themselves, and after a couple minutes he reaches into the bag between them and takes a cookie.

She can’t believe it. I mean, seriously? The gall! But she’s too astonished to say anything. So she takes a cookie and keeps reading her book. Time goes by, and she keeps reading and eating her cookies. But every couple of minutes this strange guy keeps reaching into the bag and taking a cookie until there’s only one left. Then he takes the last cookie, breaks it in two and offers her half. She can’t believe his guy! She stands up, and without a word to him, walks away and boards her flight.

Sitting in her seat on the plane she takes a deep breath to calm down. Then she reaches into her purse to get her book and finds the bag of cookies she bought earlier.

The moral, of course, is to be careful in making assumptions. Or better, always assume the best intentions of others. The following tools can help us meet this goal:

• Practicing mindful listening. Waiting to talk isn’t listening. We all probably have had ineffective conversations before. We say something and, instead of acknowledgement or affirmation, we get back a completely different agenda because the other person was simply waiting for her turn to talk. Instead of just waiting for our turn to talk, we should listen carefully, then reiterate what the other person has expressed, but in our own words. This deepens the conversation, and the relationship. The other person is likely to say, “Yes, exactly!”

• Focusing on behaviors, not people. Instead of describing someone’s personality (as abrasive, fun, mean, weird, interesting . . . ) to ourselves and to others, we should stick to describing their behavior, and we should also not reduce them to stereotypes. People are complex, and each is unique. Their days are likely to be filled with stresses and joys, as are ours. We need to remember that moods change.

• Honoring differences and disagreements. We often have meaningless, small-talk conversations because they are easy. We all show up in the world with our own history, predispositions, and beliefs. And we know if we express those ideas we might create conflict and disagreement. It’s okay. There’s a difference between disagreeing and offending. When we set our defaults to listening and understanding, we are more likely to honor and learn from the differences among us.

While all this may sound simple, there is often a big gap between knowing the best thing to do and actually doing it. To build confidence in ourselves, we need to remember to assume the best in others. This small step can make a world of difference.

Building Confidence When the Boss Is Always Watching

While we should try to assume the best in others, sometimes bosses make that difficult.

According to researcher Robert Hogan, 75 percent of working adults today say the most stressful, most dreaded interactions they have at work is with their immediate boss. Stress- inducing bosses have even been linked to increases in illnesses related to heart disease,⁸ with studies showing that the correlation of bad bosses and heart trauma seem to occur together.⁹

As a result, these same professionals avoid dealing with their bosses by hiding, often in plain sight—hiding in their e-mail, meetings, phone calls, commutes, and projects that “demand” their attention. And, with the current quest toward greater transparency, this hiding has become more difficult. This quest has spawned open work spaces and naked communication practices that approach surveillance levels—all in the pursuit of “visibility.” Indeed, the seventh principle of “The Toyota Way” is “use visual control so no problems are hidden.”¹⁰

Many bosses with good intentions believe that regular oversight will elevate performance, drive healthy competition, and enable them to tweak processes by watching workers from a higher vantage point. They think that, by studying worker activity, they can gently guide the team activity in the right direction toward higher efficiency and greater collaboration and productivity.

Yet Harvard professor Ethan Bernstein discovered almost the opposite. In a series of studies, he found that the greater the oversight, the lower the productivity and worker morale. He dubbed this phenomenon the “transparency paradox.” What he discovered is that even modest levels of privacy for small groups of workers significantly increased productivity and engagement in their work.¹¹

Organizational transparency can, of course, have very positive effects. It can enable increased awareness of the capabilities of other teams, and enable team members to more easily build cross- functional collaboration. These are clearly good things. And transparency in surfacing product or service issues can certainly isolate problems more quickly, enabling faster correction. Transparency can also help ensure that localized problems don’t linger. As Justice Louis Brandeis famously said, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

However, in Bernstein’s studies, the professor found that when transparency was applied as constantly observing workers it had a negative effect. Constant observation by bosses was not only a performance distraction but also severely discouraged employees from experimenting with processes and deviating from procedures. In other words, when every action we take is constantly monitored and scrutinized, we are far less likely to try something new, experiment, and come up with a better way of working.

To perform better, innovate faster, and be happier in our work and life, we need to try to build autonomy into our lives. We will also likely be more persistent and tenacious in pursuing our goals.

Building Confidence Through Persistence

Back in the early ’90s, my friends and I used to go to a club in Charlottesville, Virginia, to see Dave Matthews and his band play. It was free to get in. One time we drove there, and the doorman asked for $5, and we were like, “What!? What a rip- off. It’s just Dave.”

During that same time period, I found myself president of the Student Activities Union at my college in North Carolina, a job that mostly required throwing parties and sometimes managing intramural sports leagues. I discovered that, if your job is to throw parties, people often recommend bands to you. A friend recommended some band from Columbia, South Carolina, I had never heard of, but he assured me they would rock the house. He told me to call Darius Rucker, a member of the band, so I did and asked him if his band, Hootie and the Blowfish, would come play at our school. He asked for a keg of beer to play, which seemed pretty reasonable.

Once I picked my head up to pay attention to popular music a couple of years later, Dave Matthews and Hootie and the Blowfish were playing stadiums at $200 a seat and touring the world. I realized what a sweet deal I’d gotten when I booked Hootie back in college.

But here’s the thing: all of those blockbuster songs they were playing, such as “Ants Marching,” “One Sweet World,” “Only Wanna Be with You,” and “Hold My Hand,” they had been playing in little nightclubs for fourteen people back in the day—and they’d been playing those songs for years. They didn’t get famous and then write hit songs. They wrote hit songs, and the world didn’t know it until after they had played them, again and again.

This is the myth of “suddenly” becoming famous. We don’t become successful overnight. We become successful as a result of showing up every day and putting in the hours, developing deep expertise, and finding our tribe over time. Or, as Will Durant summed up the wise philosophy of Aristotle: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit.”¹²

It’s about grit. We implore our kids to persevere, to stay in the game, to try new ways of solving a problem. We encourage our colleagues to “fail faster” in expectation of an innovative breakthrough. We all just need to be a bit grittier. One parent in California had a Kickstarter campaign to develop a line of action figures for boys called “Generation Grit.”¹³ The project subsequently failed on Kickstarter, which, according to the project’s founders, only deepened their resolve to get a little “grittier” to make it work.¹⁴ (See more about applying grit to our work and life in chapter 3.)

But how do we instill stick-to-itiveness in our kids, and in our colleagues? There are a few clues in recent studies from Brigham Young University in which researchers followed 325 families with kids between the ages of eleven and fourteen over four years, examining the behavior of those families.¹⁵ After examining parenting styles, family attitudes, and subsequent goals attained by the kids, the researchers concluded that three key ingredients consistently created higher levels of persistence:

• Supportive and loving environment
• High degree of autonomy in decision making
• High degree of accountability for outcomes

From research by Teresa Amabile, Harvard University, and others, we have known for some time that high levels of autonomy lead to more creative outcomes (see more on the value of autonomy in chapter 6). But here we see that high levels of autonomy also build the confidence we need to live up to our aspirations.

“When held accountable in a supportive way, mistakes do not become a mark against their self- esteem, but a source for learning what to do differently,” writes Paul Miller, associate professor of psychology at Arizona State University. “Consequently, children are less afraid of making mistakes.”¹⁶

As we’ve learned, when we make positive assumptions of others, we amplify not only their confidence but also our own. Assuming the best intentions of others is an act of confidence, and building our own, and others’, confidence is a personal choice. And yet, it’s not like flipping a light switch. Bolstering confidence takes constant, incremental, and intentional effort. Creating confidence is the result of applied effort and work.

As Stephen King put it: “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration. The rest of us just get up and go to work.”¹⁷