Monday, April 21, 2014
Good morning,
I recently read an article about women and self-confidence, but the advice applies to everybody.
Here are the takeaways:
1. Strive for excellent imperfection.
According to the authors, women have a tendency to feel bad if they don’t do everything–from how they look to how they parent to how they talk–perfectly. As a result, they sometimes fail to take risks lest they fall short.
In my experience, though, it’s not just women who feel this way. I’ve known plenty of men who are absolutely obsessed with never looking foolish.
Regardless of your gender, perfectionism is the enemy of self-confidence because if you’re trying to be perfect you’ll always find yourself lacking. Instead, try to be excellent or even outstanding–which means falling flat sometimes.
2. Don’t apologize before the fact.
Some women have a habit of saying “I’m sorry” when expressing an opinion or taking action. The automatic “I’m sorry” is intended to make the listener feel more comfortable.
I respectfully disagree. I think that people who apologize for doing normal stuff are doing it to make themselves feel better. People (women and men alike) are protecting their self-esteem in case the other person gets upset.
However, to be successful in business you need to offend people. Sometimes, you even need to step on (or at least over) other people to get to where you want to go. That’s just the way it is.
Rather than preemptively apologizing, take the action that needs doing, say the thing that needs saying, and then apologize afterwards–if and when it becomes clear that an apology is appropriate.
3. Stop turning statements into questions?
Some women have a habit of adding a little uptick at the end of each spoken sentence, whether it’s a question or not.
While women reportedly do this irritating uptick more than men, I’ve heard plenty of men do it, and it really flushes their credibility down the toilet, too.
It doesn’t really matter who’s doing it. The verbal uptick is just a bad habit, similar to the “uhhhh…” pause or peppering your speech with “like” or “you know.”
To break this (or any other) verbal habit, cultivate the ability to listen to yourself as you’re speaking. Pause before saying something, form the gist of what you want to say, and then deliver it as a statement or a question. Not some weird hybrid of the two.
4. Ignore “mansplaining” (and “womansplaining”).
While it may be ironic that I’m writing this, mansplaining is the irritating habit that some men have of telling women what to do based upon analytical findings.
The flip side to this is when women tell men what they should be feeling and how they should be communicating those feelings, based on some psychological findings.
What’s funny about this is that men do a lot of mansplaining when talking to other men and it’s just as annoying. I’ll bet the same thing is true of womansplaining among women.
The net effect of all this genderizing is to leech your self-confidence by treating your gender as if it’s determinate of your behavior. But that’s utter nonsense.
Specific differences between individuals of either gender are almost always far greater than the general difference between men and women. Put another way, men and women alike are from Venus and Mars.
What’s important is your behavior–not whether it falls into some preconceived notion of how somebody of your gender should or shouldn’t behave.
5. Cultivate your overconfidence.
It turns out that successful people of both genders tend to overestimate what they can accomplish and the value of their contributions. As long as your overconfidence is grounded in the possible, it’s a good thing, not a bad thing.
Being overconfident means saying “yes” to stuff that you’ve never done before. It means being “dumb enough” to really believe you can start your own business and make it successful. Without overconfidence, people don’t stretch themselves.
I have to admit that, previous to reading this article, I never understood the value of overconfidence. I always thought that it’s important to know your capabilities and how to apply them most effectively.
However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that every accomplishment of which I’m actually proud emerged from me being unrealistic.
When I look at my friends (men and women), I see that it’s the ones who overestimate themselves who always seem to be doing something exciting or achieving something big. Think of it this way: When you’re overconfident, being self-confident is automatic.