Mounting evidence connects social confidence to well-being and career success. We explore the more effective and evidence-based ways to boost it when we need to.
5-minute read – 100% written by humans.
Autumn starts with what the French call la grande rentrée. We return to work after the summer, leaves turning brown, conkers on the ground and a sense of renewal in the air. For Threshold, it’s graduate training season. Our focus shifts towards preparing early talent with the soft skills that they will need to navigate their careers.
We start the process by informally interviewing as many as possible to gauge where they feel their developmental priorities are. The process is a useful survey of the emotional landscape of our young people entering the workplace. Over recent years, the desire to cultivate greater social confidence has been a consistently high priority.
This concern about social confidence fits with changes that we’re seeing in wider society. The American Psychological Association concludes that social-media-driven comparison and feedback-seeking are associated with lower self-worth. COVID particularly disrupted young adults’ social lives, wellbeing and formative face-to-face experiences. At the same time, financial pressure to live at home for longer has prolonged adolescence and delayed adulthood.
Many feel that a lack of confidence has held them back
We shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that a shortfall in social confidence is the preserve of Gen Z. Many experienced leaders with whom we work confide in us that they feel a lack of confidence has held them back.
Rebecca was a senior digital-technology manager in a major oil-and-gas corporation. Her colleagues had forewarned us that she could come across as aloof and be status conscious. However, at a leadership workshop Rebecca spoke with remarkable candour about her lifelong battle with shyness. Despite what she had achieved in her career she felt she had never really conquered it. We are often tempted to mask a lack of social confidence with what psychologist’s call ‘compensatory strategies.’
Greater social influence
We are sometimes asked where confidence ends and arrogance starts. Our response is that this is a category error. Confidence does not sit on the same axis as arrogance. The latter drains and diminishes those around us, while confidence is an enabler. It’s a tide that raises all boats.
Research shows that leaders who project more confident body language exert greater social influence within their organizations.
Getting it backwards
Simply turning up the dial a notch or two on your level of social confidence means that you are relaxed before that presentation or difficult conversation. Your ideas are persuasive and taken seriously. You feel less tension and have more energy.
These benefits are readily accessible to all of us. Yet, the standard approach to confidence-building techniques taught at leadership development workshops over the last 30 years sends people in the wrong direction. This is because it has the intellectual foundation precisely backwards: it encourages a focus on belief.
So what’s wrong with this approach? Perhaps the person who articulates it best comes from a different domain. Writer and director David Mamet has been a leading figure in Hollywood, on Broadway and in London’s West End over the last 30 years. Famous for groundbreaking dramas such as Glengarry Glen Ross, Oleanna and Speed the Plow, Mamet isn’t afraid to shake up the conventions of his own profession; or anyone else’s, for that matter.
In his book True and False, Mamet demolishes the work of the leading lights of method acting such as Stanislavski and Lee Strasberg, with their focus on reconstructing internal belief systems. He argues that an actor simply can’t force their mind to believe something. To attempt to do so is a waste of time and effort and will likely have precisely the opposite effect, as the effort required takes the actor away from being present and in the moment. And the neuropsychology backs him up.
Take Hamlet confronting the possibility of a ghost. The actor doesn’t need somehow to make himself literally believe in ghosts. He needs to deal truthfully with what Hamlet would do.
The effortful attempt to make ourselves believe
Psychologist Daniel Wegner argues that trying to control the mind can make the mind fight back. When we try to force our minds to believe something there are two processes happening. There’s the operating process, in other words the effortful attempt to make ourselves believe. The second process is all about monitoring how we’re doing. This means that we’re constantly confronting ourselves with the gap in reality between what we want to believe and what we currently believe.
Self-affirmations can make us feel worse
The self-help industry encourages the process of self-affirmation as a means to change our belief about ourselves. But again, the evidence suggests that this is often counterproductive. A 2009 experiment by psychologists Joanne Wood, Elaine Perunovic and John Lee tested the familiar self-help technique of repeating “I’m a lovable person.” Among people with low self-esteem repeating the positive affirmation actually left them feeling worse.
Imagine you have that tough presentation coming up. You’re feeling nervous. Your strategy is to work on shifting your internal belief system about yourself. You seek to convince yourself, “I’m a confident presenter.” Your mind is monitoring how your efforts to believe are performing against the reality.
Our capacity for playfulness and imagination
Mamet would advise you to forget all of that. That’s not your job right now. Your job is to act like a confident presenter would act. That’s it. And frankly, that’s all your audience sees or cares about. Don’t try and convince yourself you’re a confident presenter; act as if you already are.
The beauty of the “act as if” approach, is that it readily fits with our mind’s capacity for playfulness and imagination. The ability to imagine and act accordingly is a mental module with which evolution has equipped us. It’s one that we apply effortlessly in childhood. And it remains every bit as available to us in adulthood.
When I hand my child that cardboard tube to play with, within seconds it has become a lightsabre. They are not monitoring how they are performing against the belief that it truly is a lightsabre. In that moment, it simply is.
Surfing other people’s reactions
Now, allow me to anticipate a pushback. When my child plays, there are no consequences. He doesn’t risk an adverse reaction from his audience. And here’s the point. Confidence that only exists in the absence of a difficult or adverse response, is no confidence at all. Confidence comfortably surfs the waves of other people’s reactions. So, extend the principle of “acting as if” to cover the reaction that you get from others. Whatever the response, you’re choosing to act like a confident person would act when faced with it.
If that sounds simple, it is. And that’s the point. You are not wasting cognitive and emotional effort forcing your mind to do something that it has not readily evolved to do. Imagination is effortless and enjoyable.
The power of acting as if
Acting as if works. Ultimately it has the desired effect on ourselves and those around us. Psychologist Richard Wiseman sought to test this principle at a speed-dating event involving around 100 people. Instead of simply talking, some participants were encouraged to behave as if they were already attracted to one another, such as maintaining eye contact, sharing personal information and acting more warmly and intimately. Afterwards, these participants reported greater attraction: 45% wanted to see their partner again, compared with 20% in the conventional speed-dating condition. Wiseman argues that feelings don’t always have to come first; sometimes acting as if we feel something can help produce the feeling itself.
There’s similar evidence from the world of fitness and exercise. Start working out and you start to feel like someone who works out. Your daily regime, habits and practices start to align accordingly and working out becomes easier.
We still retain that capacity for playfulness and imagination into adulthood. For most of us, it’s simply a case of rediscovering it and trying it out again. The more we practice acting as if, the more readily we slip into it when we need to.
To find out how we can help leaders in your organisation to be more impactful, influential and persuasive visit www.threshold.co.uk
