Chapter 1
Believe in Yourself

The respect and regard we have for ourselves is our self- esteem. The strength of our belief in our abilities to accomplish our goals and achieve our potential is our self- efficacy.¹ These are two different things, and without self-efficacy, we are likely to fail in leading others. When we have a strong sense of self-efficacy, we take deeper interest in and make a greater commitment to our activities, we view challenges to be mastered, and we recover quickly from setbacks and pitfalls.

It’s easy to think we don’t know what we’re doing, that those around us have a better handle on the situation and are more competent. But often that’s not the case—often everyone is in the same boat, looking for a captain. By believing in ourselves, we can become that leader.

And, surprisingly, it’s not always the fear of failure that keeps us from acting but rather the fear of success. We ask ourselves, if we succeed, will others have higher expectations that we can’t fulfill? Will we be able to top our last success? Are we charlatans who just had some blind luck? When life comes at us hard, do we panic or do we thrive?

When life is hard, even scary, and options seem slim, letting go and embracing optimism can actually save us, put us on the right track. By avoiding panic and giving our minds some space to work, it’s amazing what we can accomplish, how we can come to our own rescue.

In this chapter, we look at the traits of those who believed in themselves and survived tremendous, life-threatening challenges. Although most of us don’t face such challenges on a daily basis, we do deal with stress, often extreme stress, in the workplace. We could just quit, and many people do, but wouldn’t it be better to find a way to deal with the stress and, like an alchemist, turn that negative stress into positive pressure and have confidence in ourselves?

And while we often think we’re lucky or unlucky, we can choose to make our own luck by facing challenges head-on, trusting our own intuition, and expecting the best outcomes. And when we believe in ourselves, we find it easier to be true to our values and live authentically instead of trying to be who we think others want us to be.

Believing We Are Impostors

Have you ever believed that you are not deserving or are worried that people will reveal you as a fraud? Have you ever thought someone else could do your job better, or thought you got that bonus or promotion by luck? Have you ever been in a hurry to leave before someone finds out you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about?

The feeling that we are frauds when we succeed is known as “impostor syndrome.” It can be defined, according to the Caltech Counseling Center, as “a collection of feelings of inadequacy that persist even in face of information that indicates that the opposite is true. It is experienced internally as chronic self-doubt, and feelings of intellectual fraudulence.”²

It’s hard for any one to have self-confidence when she thinks she’s the only one who doesn’t know what she’s doing. Each year, Olivia Fox Cabane, who teaches at Stanford, asks her incoming group of freshmen, “How many of you in here feel that you are the one mistake that the admissions committee made?” Each year, more than two-thirds of the students raise their hands.³

It’s human nature to compare ourselves with others. In any given situation, we often look around and make comparisons. And these comparisons can make us feel inadequate. We know that the less we focus on comparisons the happier we will feel about ourselves, but we still can’t help ourselves. Someone else is always smarter, prettier, funnier. “There are an awful lot of people out there who think I’m an expert,” Dr. Margaret Chan, director- general of the World Health Organization, once said. “How do these people believe all this about me? I’m so much aware of all the things I don’t know.”⁴

The immensely talented and brilliant Maya Angelou authored eleven books in her lifetime. She once said, “Each time, I think, ‘Uh-oh. They’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.’”⁵

Kate Winslet won an Academy Award for her role in Titanic. After receiving the award, she said, “I’d wake up in the morning before going off to a shoot, and think, ‘I can’t do this. I’m a fraud.’”⁶

The interesting thing about impostor syndrome is that the more successful we become, the greater the likelihood we will encounter more bouts of self- doubt. The reason is that, as we enjoy greater and greater success, we encounter increasingly successful people with whom to compare ourselves. Here’s the secret: they don’t know what they are doing, either; they’re just winging it, too.

Social media doesn’t help. We all get to see the happier, more beautiful side of successful people online, instead of the moments of doubt, sleeplessness, and insecurity. Sure, they know something about something, which is what got them there in the first place. But, when under the influence of a self-doubt attack, we begin to believe those around us must be brilliant.

We should try to remember these truths, as I remind myself when I feel doubt: you do deserve to be here. It wasn’t luck. It was your tenacity and hard work. Ambition is a good thing. Strive for more. It’s okay to ask. And stop comparing—it’s self- defeating. Instead, start by trying to be the person you would like to work for. It’s kind of like trying to live up to, and become, the person your dog already thinks you are.

Escaping the Trance of Unworthiness

Maintaining belief in ourselves can be difficult in the face of failure. But sometimes, failing is less scary than succeeding. Failing is status quo, going back to the norm, maybe even further back to Slackville. We can allow ourselves to sink into a trance of unworthiness.

Failing can be especially terrifying when the stakes are high. It’s a common misconception that successful entrepreneurs are filled with confidence, acumen, and bravado. Real estate mogul Barbara Corcoran lost nearly everything in her first failed marketing campaign. Bill Gates’s first company, Traf-O-Data, was a complete bomb. Milton Hershey’s famous company, Hershey’s, was actually the fourth candy company he founded, after the first three failed. The point is that, while failure can be expected, those who persevere and succeed eventually don’t let their failures define them.

Even success may not rid us of our feelings of self-doubt. Sometimes the thought of actually accomplishing our audacious dreams can bring as much dread as contemplating failure. Succeeding means change. Change, by definition, is unfamiliar and uncomfortable. And succeeding can make us stand out, make us different from our peers. It can bring envy and jealousy from others, as well as hurt, notoriety, limelight, pressure, confusion, and the doubt that we can do it again. Success takes courage.

Some say each of us is the average of the five people we hang out with the most. Those people make up our posse, our tribe—they’re our peeps. And the most uncomfortable idea in the world can be the threat of social and emotional isolation from our tribe. It’s terrifying to think that actualizing our dreams might alienate those closest to us, simply because we are stepping outside of the group’s comfort zone.

We will face hurdles on our way to taking on, and crushing, our own audacious challenges, and fear of social and emotional isolation is the first among them. To overcome this hurdle, we can start by helping others over it, and letting them know that they are safe in following their ambitions. We should cheer on and support our friends and colleagues when they step out and try something bold. Even if they bomb in their efforts, we need to make sure they don’t fail because we made them feel like they don’t deserve to succeed.

Sometimes the act of asserting ourselves in the face of competition can bring a wave of guilt. Playing someone else who is better than ourselves elevates our game, making us feel good to be pulled up a notch, but the inverse can be uncomfortable. When we are the one elevating the game, when we are the one quickening the pace, it can feel like we are dropping our pals and betraying loyalties.

We also sabotage ourselves by fearing that we may discover higher potential, which might make us feel unworthy or unqualified. To escape the trance of unworthiness, we should focus on competence, not confidence. Too often, we clench our fists and try to summon confidence on demand.

As Harvard professor Amy Cuddy demonstrates, when we make power poses and take an assertive posture, we enable our brain to release dopamine, and a burst of confidence can wash over us, providing a brief heightened state of confidence and joy.⁷ However, true, profound confidence comes from deep competence. Our true potential is fulfilled through tenacity, as we pursue excellence and succeed.

Finally, we can feel pressure to constantly match or exceed our own previous best performance. There is a 10K road race I do every year. And every year I try to post a personal best. Usually I don’t beat my previous performance, but I try to. Although that’s getting tougher every year, I still believe it’s possible. Last year I did manage to beat my personal best, which I first posted more than nine years ago. It’s hard, but it can be done.

But here’s the funny thing: I exceeded what I thought was my own capacity by approaching the problem differently. I used to train in volume by simply running more miles. Now I focus more on the quality of each run, approaching each effort with focus, concentration, and a plan. That plan may involve intervals of strenuous effort or intervals of hill climbing, or that plan may simply involve rest. Resting, as I focus on in chapter 12, is an important ingredient not only of effective training but of every aspect of life.

The pursuit of quality, rather than quantity, can bring about the greatest success in terms of personal achievement and happiness. And we can explore new outputs only by changing the inputs. One good strategy for fighting doubt is to get “pronoid.” Pronoia is the opposite of paranoia. It is the belief that the world, and everyone around you, is conspiring for your success.

Thriving Instead of Panicking

M. Ephimia Morphew, a psychologist and founder of the Society for Human Performance in Extreme Environments, spent some time with her colleagues puzzling over why some novice scuba divers drown even though they have plenty of oxygen left in their tanks, as Laurence Gonzales relates in his book Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why.⁸ The reason, it turns out, is that, in a stressful and unfamiliar environment, people often start to hyperventilate because they feel like they can’t breathe. And the instinctive response to that feeling is to remove any obstruction from their mouth. In a moment of panic, they rip the regulator off their face and suck in a deep breath of the ocean. It’s similar to the reason those suffering from extreme hypothermia often take off all their clothes in a snowstorm.

Fear is an unpleasant emotion, to say the least. It can make us do what in other circumstances would seem irrational. It can even immobilize us. Fear is a natural reaction to changing, unpredictable situations, or the threat of imminent harm to ourselves or those around us.

While it may seem trite or clichéd to say, fear does exist only in our minds. It is our personal reaction to these changing circumstances and perceived threats, and we can change our reaction of fear, instead seeing such situations as merely challenges to be overcome, opportunities to grow. The following stories exemplify that believing anything is possible, even in the direst circumstances, can lead not only to success but, in some cases, can save our lives.

Moving from Fear to Resolve

On January 29, 1981, marine architect Steve Callahan woke abruptly from a dead sleep in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on his little twenty- one- foot, self- made sloop. There had been a mighty crash. In the seconds before he could stand into action, the boat was already starting to list and fill with water.

Quickly, within a minute or two, he was able to deploy his self- inflating life raft and gather a few items as the boat sank. He leapt to the raft and discovered that a couple of small, airtight compartments within the sailboat were keeping it afloat—and likely only for a few moments longer.

He made a small joke to himself about how lucky he was, and calmly used the opportunity to swim inside the sinking boat to retrieve some valuable items—a flotation cushion, a sleeping bag, an emergency kit, food, a spear gun, a solar still, and a few other things.

Over the next seventy-six days, he drifted 1,800 miles west in that little raft. During the course of his journey—as his skin became covered in saltwater sores and sunburns, his raft was set upon by sharks, his radio failed to signal rescue, and his body deteriorated— he took time each evening to admire the beauty of the night sky.

Callahan’s story, as he recounted in his book Adrift, likely would not have ended the same for everyone in that situation. According to Laurence Gonzales, when disaster strikes, those who don’t succumb differ in that “they immediately begin to recognize, acknowledge, and even accept the reality of their situation. . . . They move through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance very rapidly.”⁹

One thing Callahan remembers vividly from the episode is that he was very calm, hyperaware, and focused throughout the sinking event, from first impact to minutes later, as he watched his boat slide under the waves. He can recount his every action. He can play the video in his mind of every nuance of the event.

Al Siebert, in his book The Survivor Personality, continues this thought: “The best survivors spend almost no time, especially in emergencies, getting upset about what has been lost, or feeling distressed about things going badly.”¹⁰ When things go badly, those who survive move away from the emotion of fear and toward a state of resolve.

Stress is a response to a trigger, which can be a challenge, a circumstance, a rapidly changing environment, or even a negative thought. But the extent to which the trigger induces distress or a positive sense of challenge is largely up to us. How we react to these triggers can be the difference between the two emotional states.

In psychologist Kelly McGonigal’s research over an eight-year period, she found that those people who experience high levels of persistent stress had a 43 percent higher mortality rate. But that was only true for those people who also believed that stress has negative health consequences. According to McGonigal, it’s possible for those who embrace stress to convert it into positive pressure. Under these circumstances, when stress is reinterpreted as constructive pressure, the negative health consequences are largely removed.¹¹

Pressure can yield excellence. The difference between those who become paralyzed and succumb to fear and stress, and those who interpret obstacles as something to overcome, is resolve. Resolve is a mindset.

Seeing a Light in the Void

In 1985, Joe Simpson and his climbing partner, Simon Yates, decided to climb the massive mountain Siula Grande, in the Peruvian Andes. They didn’t take the conventional route but instead chose to ascend the never- before- attempted west face of the mountain, which is nearly vertical and covered in nothing but “a sheer layer of ice, loose dirt, flat rock, motorcycle grease, melted butter and used cooking oil,” as writer Ben Thompson describes it.¹²

Simpson and Yates triumph in the climb, but on the descent Simpson suffers a broken leg. Yates lowers him by rope down the mountain for hours, and then, in a rising blizzard, mistakenly lowers him over a cliff into a fathomless crevasse. After an hour, Yates cannot hold the rope any longer and believes his partner is irretrievable. It is impossible for Yates to physically pull Simpson back up to safety. In a moment of personal torment, Yates chooses to save his own life, cuts the rope, and allows Simpson to fall to his death.

Miraculously, Simpson doesn’t die. He awakens to find himself on his back, having survived the fifty-foot fall with a crushed knee and destroyed leg. He crawls, limps, and drags himself for three days back to camp.

Simpson recounts this story in his book Touching the Void, describing the ordeal of hanging on the rope for an hour, in the void, as night was turning to dawn: “A pillar of gold light beamed diagonally from a small hole in the roof. . . . I was mesmerized by this beam of sunlight burning through the vaulted ceiling from the real world outside. . . . I was going to reach that sunbeam. I knew it then with absolute certainty.”¹³

Turning Workplace Stress into Opportunity

While it may seem extreme to compare the harrowing experiences described above to today’s workplace, our work environment can sometimes make us feel as if we are drowning, too—or hanging onto our jobs by a rope, dangling over an abyss. A March 2015 survey of 160,000 employees around the world found that 75 percent of today’s workers experience “moderate” to “extreme” stress.¹⁴ An April 2014 survey of more than 7,000 employees by the job-hunting website Monster found that 42 percent even left their jobs because the workplace was too stressful.¹⁵

In the electrifying August 16, 2015, New York Times article, “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Work-place”—which was later rebutted, and whose validity is still deeply debated—Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld wrote about marketer Bo Olson’s take on those who succumbed to workplace stress at Amazon: “Bo Olson . . . lasted less than two years in a book marketing role and said that his enduring image was watching people weep in the office, a sight other workers described as well. . . . ‘Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.’”¹⁶

In a typical stress response, heart rate and breathing increase, and blood vessels constrict. But those people who rise to challenges with the belief that stress is a positive opportunity have an opposite physiological response: the blood vessels open and relax as if they were in a state of elation or preparation for physical test.

Or, to put it in Kelly McGonigal’s language, embracing adversity and challenge with a positive mindset is another way of saying that you trust yourself. It’s another gesture of confidence. And that confidence and resolve will make you much more resilient for whatever challenges arise.

To take this one step further, not only can we convert negative stress into positive pressure and adopt a mindset of resolve, but we can also make ourselves luckier. Seriously.

Making Luck a Choice

Rabbit’s feet, four-leaf clovers, and rain during sunshine are all thought to be signs of fortune and good luck in some cultures. The good-luck ritual of “knocking on wood” comes from pre-Christian customs in which it was considered important to invoke the powerful and benign influence of the tree gods.

Cats throughout history have been believed to be both powerful and good (ancient Egypt), and powerful and bad (medieval England). In the 1560s, in Lincolnshire England, the story goes that a father and son chased a black cat into an alley, and then threw stones at it before it escaped to the home of a nearby woman suspected of being a witch. The next day they returned to discover the woman limping with bruised legs, presumably from the stoning the night before. That led to the belief that witches could transform into black cats.

In the same vein, when a ladder is propped up against a wall, a natural triangle is formed, symbolic of the holy Trinity. To walk under the ladder would break the Trinity, and therefore bring ill fortune. Numerous experiments demonstrate such superstitions have no real worldly effect.

In his book The Luck Factor: The Four Essential Principles, Richard Wiseman describes luck in terms of choice.¹⁷ In his research working with more than four hundred individuals on something he called “The Luck Project,” Wiseman found several key attributes of those who describe themselves as “lucky”:

• They create chance. Wiseman has a fun game in which participants write down six activities or experiences they have not tried but would be willing to try, then roll a die and do the activity that corresponds to the outcome. This game reinforces our willingness to try something new, to be curious and creative.

• They think lucky. Decision making driven by intuition seems impossible to control, yet Wiseman discovered those lucky decision makers actually spent more time reflecting and meditating on the decision once considered, and spent more time envisioning hypothetical circumstances in which they may have to make decisions, than the other subjects. So when the envisioned situation arose, those who were “lucky” were better prepared to make a decision in the moment.

• They feel lucky. This is despite any negative past experiences, whereas “unlucky” people allow past negative events to dictate future expectations. The lucky people also described their expectations of upcoming interactions with other people as generally positive. That is, they anticipate their own good fortune.

• They deny bad luck. Wiseman describes two primary ways people turn bad luck into good luck. Basically they interpret the bad as “could have been much worse.” And, when they reflect on past events, they spend more time visualizing and selectively remembering the positive. In other words, the bad wasn’t all that bad, and the good was pretty great.

Like Wiseman’s subjects, we can all create our own luck by doing what people who consider themselves lucky do: position ourselves to have chance encounters that lead to interesting new possibilities and opportunities, see the upside of the experience, and harness the power of curiosity to be creative.

Living True to Ourselves

In her book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, Bronnie Ware describes her years of experience working with patients in their final days.¹⁸ As a palliative nurse, she cared for those who had often lived a long life and were reflective in their last days. As she recounts in her book, the number one regret her patients expressed was not being authentic and true to themselves—not daring to take on their dreams and challenges—and instead trying to live the life others expected of them.

It’s not laziness and indolence that holds us back. It’s an inability to overcome the fear of trying. Courage is not blindly facing the unknown and stampeding ahead anyway. Courage is instead carefully considering and recognizing the risks, obstacles, and opportunities before us and proceeding in measured steps despite these risks.

By carefully considering, and preparing for, each forward move, we mitigate risk and become stronger and mentally sharper with each step. But the stepping is critical. The starting means everything. When initiating an endeavor we have never attempted before, it’s important to overcome fear and paralysis by making forward progress, however small. Action creates clarity.

Here’s what I mean: you can think and envision and ponder and predict what will or might happen when you start that new business, give that big presentation, run that marathon, or take that trip to Madagascar. But you won’t know, really know, what it’s like until you start. Experience is invaluable, and making tiny adjustments along the way is required, which is why action creates clarity.

Consider the acrobats in a Cirque du Soleil show. Their tremendous feats of flying high above the arena are the result of hours and hours of careful and methodical training. We know this. But there was still a first time they leapt without a net. And there was still a first time that an Olympic skiing long jumper launched off a ninety- meter jump. And there was also a first time you gave a presentation in front of fifty people, or gave a formal report to your executive team.

The greatest leaders, and our dearest friends, cheer us on when we try something new.

Courage can be learned, and courage can be practiced. The more we practice risk, the more we are able to take risks.

Once we recognize, and believe in, the strength of our own growth potential, we can work on building our own self-confidence and the confidence of those around us, as we explore in the next chapter.