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Mastering The Confidence Code: When in Doubt, Act, with Claire Shipman, Journalist and Co-author, The Confidence Code
Develop a bias toward action
The most important thing you can take away from our research on confidence is this: when in doubt, act. For most women, when in doubt we think, and think some more, and overanalyze, and worry, and hand-wring, and call a hundred people, and often we end up delaying or not even taking any action. From the research we’ve seen, what women need to do is act more. And if we can start to get into our system that, in general, everytime we’re looking at a situation – and especially a situation that involves us and our careers – we need to take action. We need to be biased in favor of acting instead of holding back. That’s not going to be easy because we’re naturally biased in favor of holding back. Our confidence barometer is stuck this way and we want to inch it that way, so that we say to ourselves, “I can do that”, “I am capable of doing that”, “I can easily learn that”. Instead of all the reasons why not, all the reasons why. And the virtue of doing this isn’t just that you’re going to get that job, or something else will happen, it’s that each time you act you are building more confidence. You’re building and replenishing your store of confidence for the next challenge when you’re taking action, whether you succeed or fail. Because you’re having these experiences that are necessary. Some failure is necessary, and then the ability to recover from failure is necessary. But we’ll never learn to have grit and determination unless we’re recovering from failure. So really, when in doubt, act.
Fail fast
A good friend of ours who’s in the tech world mentioned this to us. It’s a techie buzz phrase, “fail fast”. And the notion behind it is that the only way you’re going to succeed in today’s world is with some failure. The world’s just moving too quickly to try to get everything done perfectly. You’re better off having four prototypes, throwing them all against the wall, seeing which one sticks, learning from the failures and being done with it, instead of waiting a year and making sure everything’s just right. And the reason we like it is that failure is an anathema for women – we can’t deal with it. The idea that you’re telling women to go out and fail and try to embrace it is really hard. But we figured if mentally, somehow, we could start to get women to see that failing is part of success, and if you’re not doing some failing you’re really not learning. And it means you’re not stretching and growing. And I think that’s what we’re trying to get women to start to understand. They need to be testing the waters, stepping outside of their comfort zone, in ways where they may fail, but they need to be able to just fail and move on and keep going. The other part of that is to not ruminate and agonize over it, and analyze it all, when you do fail. View it as a learning experience and move on. Easier said than done, right? What you have to do is look at the areas where you feel the most fear, where you feel the most locked down, and force yourself to take small risks in those areas. Pretty soon you start to get used to it and it becomes easier. Maybe it’s speaking up at a meeting, maybe it’s giving a speech, for all of us it’s something different. I used to be terrified of speaking without notes. I would cling to my notes because I thought I needed to say every single thing that I wrote, I wanted it all prepared. At one point I thought, ok, I’m just going to try this without notes. This is crazy, I’m doing so much speaking. And actually, it didn’t go very well. It was pretty bad – I thought it was bad. It was probably medium bad. But I learned that, alright, I wasn’t tarred and feathered. And now I know, alright, I should have a few notes. And it started me on a different path. I don’t think I’d be trying some of the things I’m trying if I hadn’t done that.