In one of my previous blogs, I mentioned the day I went onto a racetrack with my friend who races classic cars. We set out in an old Renault 5 with him driving at an astonishing speed (for a Renault 5). We hurtled at corners, hitting the brakes only at the last possible moment and flooring the throttle coming out of the bend. Thrilling! My friend’s confidence in his ability and his belief that I could do the same persuaded me that, having seen him do it, I could do it too. But there is a difference between seeing someone do something and actually doing it and feeling what it feels like to do. Nevertheless, before starting on the track, I was confident that I could do it too.
Confidence, we are constantly told, is a good thing; we actively encourage it. It enables us to rise to new heights of achievement, well, not in my case. In my ignorance and lack of experience of doing it, I was confident that I could do what I had seen someone else do. Clearly, the confidence needed must be backed by some competence, and competence was something I lacked.
When we watch someone do something, we think we can do it too: how hard can it be? But the reality is often very different.
The illusion of competence often equates to confidence. We don’t know what we don’t know.
The Dunning Kruger Effect.
When we don’t know what it takes to do something or what it actually feels like to perform that task, and we observe others doing it, like my racing driver friend, we often overestimate our abilities. We don’t know what we don’t know. The less we know, to some extent, the more confident we can become. This is a cognitive bias called the Dunning Kruger Effect.
This bias results from an internal illusion that people with low ability have when watching someone with high ability. If we are unable to recognise our own lack of ability, we may become overconfident. Confidence, of course, doesn’t tell us anything about competence, so the least competent may well be the most confident because they don’t know or fully understand what is actually involved.
However, suppose you are truly competent at something. In that case, you may well be justified in your confidence, as with my friend who has hands-on experience of what it feels like to drive in a race (believe me, it’s very different from everyday driving). Experts, for instance, may feel supremely confident because of their competence, but their confidence doesn’t necessarily increase with additional knowledge. In fact the reverse occurs; the more we know, the less secure we become. We become aware of everything that could go wrong and everything we don’t know. Yet, with skill and competence, we develop sufficient self-awareness and belief in their ability to succeed, translating into confidence.
We tend to trust in our competence, and trust plays a crucial role in confidence, both for ourselves and others.
Sam Powers
Con Artists.
I don’t know if you have all experienced the recent telephone scam calls? These claim to have discovered a severe fault on your computer, or they are calling from HMRC (probably IRS in the US). They may claim that you need to do something on your computer or pay them something, or you have a refund or owe some money. They say that this needs your immediate attention.
Why are these calls so successful? It all comes back to trust.
By the way, the word “con” in con artist is short for confidence, as in “confidence trickster”. Our default position is trust. Confident people inspire our trust. We believe (trust) in them; they gain our trust with their confidence and assurance.
Our starting position is trust. It seems that most of us have a natural desire to believe what people tell us and to trust them in the first instance (hopefully, you have heard enough about these scams and are aware of them). We mostly feel that we are savvy and streetwise sufficient that we cannot be fooled. Therefore we are quickly drawn into the scam.
Without trust, it’s hard to imagine how societies would be able to progress. If our default position were suspicion and mistrust, it would be difficult to form relationships and progress in business. Money, which is wholly based on trust, would cease to have any value if we didn’t think we could exchange that money for goods of an equivalent value in the future.
Perhaps that’s why politicians always state their policies with gusto, assurance and confidence. If they were tentative, would we believe and trust them?
In the film “Catch me if you can”, Leonardo DiCaprio plays the con artist, Frank Abagnale. Based on a true story, Abagnale becomes a Pilot, a Surgeon and a Lawyer without ever having passed any exams or achieved any qualifications. He fakes it all. Yet, most people were taken in by his confidence and by their belief that most people tell the truth. They trust other people. Confidence is compelling.
It turns out that we are not very competent at evaluating others due to our natural bias to trust. As a result, con artists who realise this can manipulate us. When someone is confident, when they lean towards us, when they make good eye contact, we tend to believe and trust them.
Catch me if you can
Fake it till you make it.
The film demonstrates the often quoted “Fake it till you make it!” In the West, perhaps more so than the East, we value confidence highly. We hear phrases like “How can we have confidence in you if you don’t have confidence in yourself?” We tend to brag and inflate our achievements. As mentioned in my blog last week, we overstate our successes and understate our failures. However, in the East, this is not usually the case; humility and self-deprecation are more highly valued. Confidence is often seen as an undesirable trait.
In the West, we believe that we can transform ourselves by being what we want to be before achieving the right level of competence to (genuinely) become that person.
To some extent, this must be true; you have to have a level of confidence (perhaps unjustified) to attempt to become whatever you want to become and to attain goals. You must have some level of self-belief and some lack of knowledge to want to step out of security and routine and into uncertainty and chaos. A level of fatal optimism is a necessary credential for any entrepreneur, innovator and creator.
Creative thinking is based on imagining something that doesn’t yet exist or combining things that haven’t yet been connected. That requires a belief in a different future outcome than the present and confidence (the faith in the ability to deliver) combined with optimism. So, we all have to “fake it” a little because we don’t fully know what the future has in store or if our skill base is sufficient for the task. We have the confidence and perhaps the competence to make it happen. If we didn’t have confidence and optimism, we wouldn’t attempt to change or do anything.
Evolution and confidence
There is a clear evolutionary advantage to confidence. If we didn’t believe we might be able to succeed, then we wouldn’t even try. Confidence is a metric of optimism, and optimism believes that the future can be different, perhaps better, than the past. That’s how we progress and how we change our cultures. Confidence helps us. Bullishness can be good.
In business, you wouldn’t start anything if you didn’t believe it might succeed. Economies are built on confidence. If people believed that their future finances would worsen, they would slow down, or stop, purchasing items. The more people spend, the more demand is created, and the more is produced, which creates wealth, generating more confidence and more spending. Confidence in governments and economies are highly prized. A confident market is a bull market. Just look at the stock markets. Despite a great deal of analysis and data, they can crash or surge based on nothing more than the “feeling” of confidence.
Health, sport and confidence
It is true also that confidence has been shown to yield positive results in patient recovery. It seems that there is a causal link between the confidence that we will recover and the rate of recovery, obviously not in all cases. We shouldn’t underestimate how our minds can assist our bodies in healing themselves.
Confidence is also an essential component in elite sports. Confidence can motivate because it sees a future (in this case, a better future) different from the present. Confidence in sport equates to self-belief and the belief that the goal can be achieved. Before Roger Bannister, it was believed that humans could not break the 4-minute mile barrier, yet Bannister achieved it with a slight shift in mindset, and so have several athletes since.
By seeing things through rose-tinted glasses, we create a positive mindset and a belief in what we might achieve. Elite sportspeople must believe that they can succeed, run faster, jump higher or further to get out there and do it.
For elite athletes, there is a reliance on practice and training, both physical and mental. The development of skills is combined with the development of mental toughness, self-belief and confidence. It seems there must be an optimum balance between competence, knowledge and confidence.
For elite sportspeople, this is a combination of elements. Deliberate practise to build skills; Knowing what you don’t know and developing a level of humility, and having sufficient self-belief to build confidence, sufficient to match and go a little beyond mere competence.
Embracing and acknowledging negative thinking, being slightly underconfident yields the benefit of closing the gap between desire and present abilities. To adapt to changing circumstances, you need to be able to assess risk, future risk.
“Doubt is an unpleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.”
Voltaire
High achievers are often their own worst critics. Nevertheless, some level of insecurity doesn’t mean incompetence or any lack of confidence. When we err on the side of underconfidence, we open the gate to improve so that we can get better. There seems to be a balancing act between confidence, humility and realistic evaluation of skill. Some measure of exaggeration helps to convince others and ourselves.
However, some doubt is necessary for confidence. To say, “I don’t know” is probably more rational than the person who says, “YES, I know”.
Some insecurity doesn’t mean incompetence. Most things in life don’t have a clear-cut answer to begin with. So we are better off having some doubt to temper our confidence rather than none.
As with my racing friend, confidence also takes courage. You can never be absolutely confident that you’ve got it absolutely right.