What is confidence? What helps develop confidence?
I can’t remember what made me check out this book by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, the subtitle of which is “The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance — What Women Should Know.” I think I happened upon it while browsing my library’s online catalogue and requested it on a whim.
It’s a really good book and it revealed more than I was expecting, which makes me wonder what I was expecting.
I think I was expecting a self-help-type book with tips on how to develop your confidence, and while that is part of the book, it’s so much more than that.
Kay and Shipman take a very scientific approach to the subject of confidence, including defining confidence.
Confidence is not bluster. It’s not arrogance. It’s having faith in your ability to do what needs to get done, but it’s also more than that. It’s a willingness to take risks and to fail once in a while.
It’s like the old saying about how it’s not how many times you fall down, it’s how many times you get back up. Getting back up after life knocks you down, dusting yourself off, and trying again requires a certain level of confidence.
As the subtitle suggests, this book does focus on what confidence looks like in women, but not exclusively. They also do look at some examples of confidence in men and how it manifests differently in men and women.
First, they started by seeing if there could be a genetic component to confidence. I was ready to throw that sexist shit right out the window, but it turns out there is a genetic component!
As with everything, though, it’s not all about nature. Nurture plays it’s part, too, and while Kay and Shipman were not willing to give society full credit for the lack of confidence in women, there’s no denying that it plays a big part.
They gathered a lot of data and even submitted their own DNA to see if they were genetically inclined toward confidence (the result was “yes, with some caveats.”)
They also interviewed a lot of women from a variety of industries, all of whom were at the top of their game, to figure out where their confidence came from.
Some had been through some traumatizing shit, which left little in the world that could truly scare them away from pursuing their goals.
Some of them had stories of parents leaving them to take care of their younger siblings for way longer and when they were way younger than any responsible parent would. While that might have played a role in their confidence to tackle larger obstacles later in life, there has to be a balance between that and the helicopter parenting that seems to have become popular.
If I have one criticism of this book, it’s the overreliance on those kinds of anecdotes. They picked people they saw as being confident, but there’s a big difference between feeling confident and acting confident. I think there are a lot of people out there we might assume are confident, who are actually freaking out and just doing a good job of not showing it.
And you can ask someone where their confidence comes from and they can give you their theory, but there’s no guarantee it’s accurate. Kay and Shipman didn’t collect the DNA of everyone they interviewed to be tested. They got a good story out of them and extrapolated from there. That’s not science.
That said, I do appreciate that this book also spent some time talking about the ways in which confidence is encouraged in boys and put down in girls from a very young age. How often are boys rewarded for speaking up and girls rewarded for staying quiet? A loud girl is shushed, but when a boy is loud, people just shrug and say, “Boys will be boys.”
Kay and Shipman started adjusting their parenting strategies for their daughters as a result of their research for this book.
While it’s not a perfect book, it was fascinating and I loved that they looked at confidence from all angles. And while the anecdotes might have been less than scientific, it’s those stories that keep books engaging instead of dry and boring.
Just because I have a B.A. in Psychology doesn’t mean this book is just for me. It’s written to be interesting and informative for everyone. And, yes, you come away with actionable tips for increasing your confidence, even in adulthood.