Sign up for my monthly newsletter
Confidence: the joy of not knowing what you don't know.
Poor Leonardo da Vinci. For all his genius, he was notorious for never finishing anything, which is why so many of his masterpieces are incomplete.
These days he might have been recognised as having dyslexia and ADHD. By all accounts he was also an anxious perfectionist, plagued by self-doubt, a man so hard on himself that one line from his diaries reads: "Tell me if I ever did a thing." If one of the greatest artists of all time could produce so little despite his gifts, it tells us something useful: confidence and competence don't go hand in hand, self-doubt is a killjoy when it comes to actually getting things done, and confidence has a big impact on our wellbeing.
Defining confidence
We all want confidence. Heaps of it. But not so much that we come across as arrogant. So what exactly are we after? Unlike assertiveness or candour, confidence isn't a skill you can practise. It's a belief, based on how we see ourselves and interpret the world. Like contentment or fulfilment, it's subjective and highly contextual, so whether you show up confident depends on the situation. Genes play some role, but environment and life experience seem to matter far more. To understand confidence, it helps to split it into two parts.
Self-efficacy
Self-efficacy is the belief that you can influence most of what happens in your life, that even if you don't know how to do something right now, you can figure it out. I can't bake you a black forest gateau this minute, but I'm confident that with a good recipe and the right ingredients I'd get there. That's self-efficacy, and it's the part coaching is well suited to building.
Self-worth
Believing you can do a task isn't enough. You also need to feel worthy of achieving it. Self-worth is how you feel on the inside and how you view yourself in relation to others. There's no such thing as too much of it. Paradoxically, it's often a lack of self-worth that drives people towards grandiosity. If you struggle with low self-worth, that's usually better addressed in a therapeutic setting than in coaching.
Confidence versus competence
Da Vinci points to the strange relationship between the two. We can all think of people who can't accept how talented they are, and others whose sheer self-belief has carried them somewhere their ability arguably shouldn't. The latter is partly explained by the Dunning-Kruger effect: the less we know, the less we realise there is to know, so the more confident we feel. Incompetent people are often not just poor performers but poor judges of their own performance, precisely because they can't yet see what good looks like.
The benefits of confidence
There's a silver lining to being a little over-confident. Confident people tend to have a brighter view of what they can achieve. Their outlook filters the world into opportunities rather than threats, what psychologists call positive illusions: slightly unrealistic but motivating beliefs that help us assume things will work out. A degree of over-confidence can be genuinely useful, especially in roles that involve risk. Few of us would trust a surgeon who doubted they could operate, or a pilot unsure they could land the plane. This basic belief that things will work out has social value too: trust tends to produce better outcomes than suspicion, which is why higher-trust societies tend to function better.
A word on culture and gender
Confidence is partly cultural. In much of East Asia, openly promoting yourself is frowned upon; in the US, it's more or less expected. Gender matters too. Research suggests women often face higher expectations to prove competence, and that the confidence gap owes far more to socialisation than to any hormonal difference. As Katty Kay and Claire Shipman document, men doubt themselves too, just less often, and are more likely to drift towards over-confidence without trying. The economist Ernesto Reuben calls this honest overconfidence: not bluster, but a genuine belief in your own ability, which is exactly what makes others trust it.
Calibrating confidence
Confidence requires the hope that things will work out, and, more than that, the belief that even if they don't, you'll be fine. So is it better to be under or over-confident? A little self-doubt has its uses: it nudges you to prepare, and people tend to like humility. But under-confidence often tips into inaction, because we hold back when we're unsure. Meanwhile, research shows that those who display confidence are generally more admired and afforded higher status, regardless of competence, with one big caveat: most people can spot fake confidence a mile off. Honest confidence, matched by the right cues, is what draws people in. Da Vinci straddled that fence as much as the rest of us, and seemed to make peace with his perfectionism by accepting that the only way out was to show up and deliver.
← All articles