Free The Confidence Code by Katty Kay, Claire Shipman

best at everything, whether it’s winning soccer games at age five or making partner by age thirty-five. We live in a culture where being anything other than the winner is frowned upon.
    “If I were to tell you that your work as a journalist is average, you’d be devastated, right?” Neff said. “Being called average is considered an insult. We all have to be above average. It sets up a very comparative mind-set. But the math doesn’t work. It isn’t possible for us all to be above average, even though many studies show most Americans think they are.”
    We live in a world of constant comparisons that extend well beyond the workplace. She’s thinner, richer, and more successful than we are. She’s a better mom, has a better marriage. But constantly defining yourself through other people’s achievements is chasing fool’s gold. There is always someone doing it better. Sometimes you fare well by comparison; sometimes not.
    Self-compassion recognizes the folly of this. To take risks, we have to know that we won’t always win. Otherwise, we’ll either refuse to act or be devastated. Self-compassion isn’t an excuse for inaction—it supports action, and it connects us to other people, to being human, with all the strengths and the weaknesses that implies.
    Self-Efficacy
    If self-compassion is the kind, gentle cousin, self-efficacy is the tough, just-get-it-done member of the family.
    In 1977, psychologist Albert Bandura’s article “Self-Efficacy: Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change” was published. In the sedate world of academic psychology, this work, with its arcane title, sent tremors throughout the field. For the next thirty years, self-efficacy was one of the most studied topics in psychology. Self-efficacy is defined as a belief in your ability to succeed at something. Bandura’s central premise was that those beliefs, our sense of self-efficacy, can change the broader way we think, behave, and feel. Self-efficacy, much like mastery, creates spillover effects.
    Self-efficacy’s goal-oriented nature especially appealed to the success-focused baby boomer generation. But it’s also a simple and practical quality. We can all identify specific goals we want to achieve: lose twenty pounds, learn Spanish, and get a pay raise. Bandura says the key to actually putting those aspirations into action is self-efficacy.
    If you have a strong sense of self-efficacy, you will look at challenges as tasks to be conquered; you will be more deeply involved in the activities you take on, and you will recover faster from setbacks. A lack of self-efficacy leads us to avoid challenges, to believe that difficult things are beyond our capability, and to dwell on negative results. As is the case with confidence, mastery is fundamental to self-efficacy. In other words, try hard, become good at something, and develop self-efficacy—a belief that you can succeed.
    Some experts told us they see self-efficacy as interchangeable with confidence. Others maintained that there are distinctions, that confidence can also be a much more generalized belief about your ability to succeed in the world. Self-efficacy also sounded, to us, a bit like Seligman’s view of learned optimism. All three are closely tied to a sense of personal power.
    Whatever formal label you put on it, whether it’s a slice of self-efficacy or a component of optimism or an element of classically defined confidence, that belief that you can succeed at something, that you can make something happen, resonated right away with us. It fit with our observations about action. It seemed to be a central strand of the confidence we were after.
    The Real Thing
    You know that old saying, “It’s all in your head”? Well, when it comes to confidence, it’s wrong. One of the most unexpected and vital conclusions we reached is that confidence isn’t even close to all in your head. Indeed, you have to get out of your head to create it and to use it. Confidence occurs