The Confidence Code (12 page)

What else happened in those therapy sessions? The participants were taught that many of their fears about spiders were unfounded. Some thought spiders might be able to jump on them. Others thought tarantulas were planning something evil. (You can see how this might work in the case of talking through fears about a difficult boss or about coworkers.) They were taught that the tarantula itself was most interested in hiding from humans. Essentially, they learned to keep their catastrophic thoughts in perspective.

Cognitive therapy is a conscious focus on creating changes in our brains. Another element that affects brain plasticity, of course, is all the stuff that we store and use unconsciously. Memory, that repository of life experience, is a huge player in confidence. Think about it. The past is always prologue in our brains. Memory is one of the elements that make our confidence mechanism far more complicated than it is for rats. The way we interact with our environment is based on a preconception of what the world will do to us, which is based on memories of past experiences. We play and replay that tape in our heads.

More important, we may be playing that tape without even being aware of it. Daphna Shohamy, a Columbia neuropsychologist, used an fMRI (functional MRI) machine to scan the brains of students while they played a series of video games. One simple game involved subjects choosing between two images, after being told that certain images came with rewards. Later, while playing a different game, subjects were asked to choose randomly between two non-rewarded images. They had no understanding that this was happening or a sense of the pattern that was involved, but the picture they tended to pick was the one that had been shown
next
to the rewarded choice in the earlier round. The association seemed to have rubbed off and to have been stored and accessed in their brains. The MRIs validated that, because they showed the hippocampus, or memory home, lighting up in that second round, suggesting memory had been accessed in making that choice.

Yet when the students were asked later why they made their choices, they had no
conscious
memory of choosing based on that reason. It’s the first time that anybody has demonstrated that the hippocampus, a hefty middle part of our brain, does more than just consolidate memories. It muscles its way into our cortex as we make choices, pushing and prodding, but leaving no prints.

We intuitively understood how this might affect confident action. Our memories, conscious or not, are informing what we decide to do next. A memory of a negative comment from a colleague in a meeting four years ago may still be contributing to our tendency to keep quiet. Conversely, a few successful speeches in college, even though we may no longer remember those experiences, may be giving us the confidence to speak at the company’s annual meeting.

We both started wondering about these hidden but influential happenings in our lives. Katty thought back to a time when, as a young reporter, she completely fumbled a live report from Japan. She couldn’t help wondering whether, all these years later, that memory resurfaces whenever she feels a bit of nerves on live television. Claire remembered a rejection for a part in a high school play and wondered about the impact that had on her conclusion that she didn’t really like acting much.

Obviously, no one can escape rejection or avoid the pain of a botched performance. We can’t fully control the experiences that will eventually become searing and unconscious memories. But just knowing how heavily our unconscious memory can weigh on future action means we have to build up plenty of positive alternatives, because they will matter.

Laura-Ann Petitto says brain plasticity is the biggest neuroscience breakthrough of the decade. “Suppose,” she told us, “some of your lack of confidence comes from a more Freudian, less genetic place. It may well come from patterns created in childhood, based on how your parents treated you, or on how others perceived you. Your neural tracks will lay down memories in response to that. Think of it as a cement highway that can create knee-jerk first responses in the future. But, if you can layer that over with new memory networks, you can reroute the highway. You can build bridges over the highway. You might not get rid of the highway, because it was put down so early, but you can work around it, and literally lay down new roads.” It’s a remarkably effective way to break a key confidence killer: negative habitual thought. What’s most startling, Petitto says, is the extent to which it’s now possible for neuroscientists to
see
these changes, to watch the brain rerouting, and to witness the new neural routes forming.

UCLA psychologist Shelley Taylor already sees broad prescriptive benefits from understanding our biology. “The potential for the environment to interact with the gene is certainly higher than people have estimated. You might have the version of the oxytocin gene that would predict shyness, but supported in the right fashion, by parents and friends and teachers, you might not even consider yourself shy. However, if your parents are also shy and retiring, and you aren’t encouraged by teachers and friends to engage, you will likely follow the path the genes have laid.”

Petitto agrees that environment modifies predispositions, but not totally. From birth, for example, some babies are labeled “high arousal,” and some “high attentive.” High attentives are kids who can usually stimulate themselves; they tend not to be bored. They are often more confident, because they don’t need a high degree of external validation to tell them that they are competent.

High arousal babies, however, are often those who are inconsolable and demand attention. They can become the teenagers who end up in trouble. “As kids, they are the ones who constantly go for danger, who find high-risk danger delicious. They can be raised by nuns but still grow up and look for danger,” Petitto says with a laugh.

Yet again, we found ourselves focusing on our daughters, who sometimes behave just like boys (we know, a cliché), operating with little caution and no fear of consequences. Wiping dirty putty on the living room wall, for instance, to see whether it leaves marks (yes); riding a sled down the steps to see what crashing will feel like (painful); or disregarding our warnings about the repercussions of launching an indoor water fight (no television for a week—aggravating for all involved).

With these extraordinary leaps in science, we began to channel Orwell and imagine a time when we might be able to learn our genetics, and then know how to structure our environment to become our best selves. We wondered whether we should find out about our kids’ genetic mix. Would we handle them differently? It was a step too far; we each knew we were not ready for that kind of information. We were nervous enough waiting for our own.

The state and pace of neuroscientific research and genetic discoveries made for an exhilarating part of our exploration. We’d come to understand that while we get a confidence framework at birth, we can alter it significantly. We do have a choice in the matter. We realized, though, that there was one thing we had
not
uncovered: a genetic smoking gun. We’d seen no conspicuous evidence in our inquiry thus far that men have proprietary access to any sort of master confidence gene; nothing to clearly and tidily explain an imbalance of confidence. Nurture, and environment, demanded some close examination.

4

“DUMB UGLY BITCHES” AND OTHER REASONS WOMEN HAVE LESS CONFIDENCE

The young men at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, have a name for female students. They call them DUBs—dumb ugly bitches. Yes. Disgusting. We didn’t quite believe it until we verified it with a number of recent graduates. The men blithely insist it’s a term of endearment, and indeed, it has now become so pervasive that even some of the women use it, too. Imagine living and trying to rise to the top in an environment where that’s what you’re called.

Navigating the Naval Academy can be tricky for a woman, and there are plenty of things Michaela Bilotta chose to let roll off her back while she was there. DUBs was not one of them. She hated the phrase, and made a point of telling people to pick another term when they were in her presence. But she also knew that she had to survive four years at Annapolis, so when she did let people know that she disapproved, she tried to be polite.

What we heard in that coarse language being used at one of the most respected institutions in the country is more than an ugly slur. It contains echoes of the centuries of imbalance that accounts for some of the confidence gap between men and women today. Genetics help explain why some people are naturally more confident than others, but it doesn’t sufficiently account for the gender difference. We wanted to know what women are doing to themselves—or what is being done to them by others—that might shed some light on the confidence gap.

The atmosphere at the U.S. Naval Academy definitely falls into the “being done by others” category. Of course, it is an extreme example, but if you ever need proof that women, like Ginger Rogers, are still dancing backward and in high heels, remember that term DUBs. When women have to deal with abuse like that, it’s little wonder that so many of us struggle with confidence.

It’s been half a century since women first forced open the boardroom doors, and the workplace terrain still looks very different for us than it does for men. The statistics are well-known, and they aren’t pretty. Women earn on average 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man. Four percent of CEOs in the
Fortune
500 are women. Twenty of the 100 United States senators are women, and even that is celebrated as a record high.

We now know this discrepancy isn’t caused by lack of competence. Over the past fifty years, women in the United States have reversed the education gap and turned it in their favor, now earning more undergraduate degrees, more graduate degrees, and even more PhDs than men. A half dozen global studies, from Pepperdine to the IMF, now show that companies that do employ women in large numbers outperform their competitors by every measure of profitability.

When women are given a fair shot at success, they do well. Take the intriguing case of classical musicians. Back in 1970, women made up only 5 percent of the musicians in America’s top symphony orchestras. By the mid-1990s, we were at 25 percent. The gains came after orchestras introduced a remarkably simple change in how they chose their new hires. During their auditions, they put up a screen to hide the candidates’ identity. The judges heard the music, but they couldn’t see whether the performer was a man or a woman. Based exclusively on the sweet sound of performance, women began getting hired in greater numbers.

From Annapolis to the New York Philharmonic, some of the reasons women lack confidence can be found in our environment. Sometimes the inequities are outrageous and obvious. Often, though, the cards are stacked against us innocently, with the very best of intentions.

“If Life Were One Long Grade School, Women Would Rule the World”

Take a trip down memory lane to your elementary school classroom. There you’ll find the insidious seeds of society’s gender imbalance, because it’s there that we were first rewarded for being good, instead of energetic, rambunctious, or even pushy.

It is in school that girls are expected to keep their heads down, study quietly, and do as they’re told. We didn’t charge around the halls like wild animals, and we didn’t get into fights during recess, and today’s girls still provide a bit of reliable calm behavior for overstressed, overworked, and underpaid teachers. From our youngest years, we learn that cooperating like this seems to pay off.

Peggy McIntosh, associate director of the Wellesley Center for Women, thinks that encouraging our girls to be compliant can do real long-term damage, but she also thinks that it’s hard to avoid. It’s actually easier for young girls than young boys to behave well, because our brains pick up on emotional cues from an earlier age. So we do it because we can, and then because we’re rewarded for it. We do it for our teachers and our parents, too. Soon we learn that we are most valuable, and most in favor, when we do things the right way: neatly and quietly. We begin to crave the approval we get for being good. And there’s certainly no harm intended: Who doesn’t want a kid who doesn’t cause a lot of trouble?

The result is that making mistakes, and taking risks, behavior critical for confidence building, is also behavior girls try to avoid, to their detriment. Research shows that when a boy fails, he takes it in stride, believing it’s due to a lack of effort. When a girl makes a similar mistake she sees herself as sloppy, and comes to believe that it reflects a lack of skill.

This is not a message that Claire’s daughter seems to have taken to heart, thank goodness. Della is nothing like her perfectionist, teacher-pleasing mother. She’s a tomboy, absolutely fearless. She despises dresses and looking neat and doing anything with her hair, some of which she herself chopped off recently.

“It’s challenging sometimes, to say the least, having a daughter who doesn’t conform to society’s expectations—people don’t encourage girls to be grimy and loud and obstreperous. But I had a breakthrough moment with her the other day, when I realized she’ll do well in life, as long as I don’t mess with her natural path.” Claire recalls, “I’d been encouraging her to raise her hand in class—to participate. I asked her when she came home that day whether she’d raised her hand. ‘Yes, Mom, I did,’ she said. ‘In fact I raise my hand all the time now, even when I don’t have anything to say.’

“Initially I wanted to offer some motherly advice about ‘being prepared,’ and then I thought, thanks to all of the research we’d done, ‘How terrific! What a metaphor for confidence, for all of us. How
masculine
to think about raising your hand, even if you have nothing to say.’

I’d since used this gem of an anecdote often, to great laughs and appreciation, and so was surprised when Dr. Richard Petty, who’d so kindly took the time to read our entire manuscript and offer valuable analysis, said that my use of her story as general guidance was the only piece of advice in the book he thought was misguided. Taking seriously foolish risks, such as volunteering yourself to speak publicly when you don’t actually have anything to say, could easily have devastating confidence consequences, he pointed out. I thought about it. Indeed, he’s right. Thank you Richard! I realized I had been somewhat glib in so thoroughly embracing Della’s gumption regarding risk-taking. Truly having nothing to say, and yet attempting to speak up, can clearly backfire. So, after further thinking, let me clarify why I still, instinctively, can’t let go of the power of the image of female hands spontaneously popping up, in all walks of life. I also believe that Della, and most women, need to realize that while we may
feel
as though we’re raising our hands with ‘nothing to say,’ thanks to our still faulty confidence meters, I’m betting that we usually, in fact, have plenty to contribute, and will surprise ourselves. I suppose I am quite confident, actually, that once we start to nudge our hands skyward, we will find our wisdom to be easily unleashed.”