Free The Confidence Code by Katty Kay, Claire Shipman Page A

when the insidious self-perception that you aren’t able is trumped by the stark reality of your achievements.
    Katty discovered this reality in a high-octane, underventilated White House back office. She was called to attend a briefing of Middle East experts at which she felt like the only unqualified person in the room. “The high-powered setting made me insecure,” she admits. “When it came to question time, I wanted to ask something, but was worried I’d sound uninformed, that I might blush or seem stupid.” It was mostly men in the room and they all sounded so sure of themselves. The easiest path was to do nothing and keep quiet; the risky thing, the confident thing to do, was to speak up. Eventually, after a ridiculous amount of internal agonizing, she did get a question out. “I realized I just had to physically force my hand up, keep it there, and get the words out. And guess what, the sky didn’t fall on my head! My question was just as smart as anyone else’s. Now, whenever I’m in that position I tell myself I did it once, I can do it again. And every time, it gets a little bit easier.”
    We’d seen it in the rats, and we heard it from General Jessica Wright and the academics: Confidence is linked to doing. We were convinced that one of the essential ingredients in confidence is action, that belief that we can succeed at things, or make them happen. Confidence, we saw from the young women in Running Start at Georgetown, is not letting your doubts consume you. It is a willingness to go out of your comfort zone and do hard things. We were also sure that confidence must be about hard work. Mastery. About having resilience and not giving up. The confidence cousins can all support that goal. It’s easier to keep going if you are optimistic about the outcome. If you have self-efficacy in one area, and use it, you will create more general confidence. If you have high self-esteem, and believe you are intrinsically valuable, you won’t assume your boss thinks you’re not worthy of a raise. And, if you fail, self-compassion will give you the chance not to berate yourself, but to take your failure more lightly.
    We were at last confident about the way we wanted to define confidence. We felt all the more so when one of our most stalwart guides through this tricky terrain, Richard Petty, a psychology professor at Ohio State University, who has spent decades focused on the subject, managed to put all we had learned into appealingly clear terms: “Confidence is the stuff that turns thoughts into action.”
    Other factors, he explained, will of course play a role. “If the action involves something scary, then what we call courage might also be needed for the action to occur,” Petty explained. “Or if it’s difficult, a strong will to persist might also be needed. Anger, intelligence, creativity can play a role.” But confidence, he told us, is the most important factor. It first turns our thoughts into judgments about what we are capable of, and it then transforms those judgments into actions.
    Confidence is the stuff that turns thoughts into action . The simplicity was gorgeous and compelling. It immediately became not only our definition, but an organizing principle for the next phase of our exploration. And what was especially useful was that it somehow, naturally, effortlessly, made proper sense of the other threads we’d been gathering. The critical link between confidence and work and mastery suddenly made sense. They form points on a wonderfully virtuous circle. If confidence is a belief in your success, which then stimulates action, you will create more confidence when you take that action. And so on and so forth. It keeps accumulating, through hard work, through success, and even through failure.
    Maybe Nike has it right. At some point we have to stop thinking, and just do it.
    We found a striking illustration of how this might play out in the real world (or in something edging closer to the real