The Confidence Code Read Online Free PDF Page B

Embassies and a leading expert on international contemporary art. “I certainly think of myself as confident. In my office, I’m a warrior, and I feel extremely comfortable in the world of art. But, when I step out of my office to go to weekly conferences at the State Department, it changes dramatically. It’s all men around the table. Usually thirty men, and maybe a few women.” She seemed comforted to hear that the research shows meetings just like hers happen everywhere.
    Brenda Major, a social psychologist at the University of California in Santa Barbara, started studying the problem of self-perception decades ago. “In my earliest days as a young professor, I was doing a lot of work on gender, and I would set up a test where I’d ask men and women how they thought they were going to do on a variety of tasks or tests.” She found that the men consistently overestimated their abilities and subsequent performance, and that the women routinely underestimated both. The actual performances did not differ in quality.
    “It is one of the most consistent findings you can have,” Major says of that test. And still, today, when she wants to suggest a study to her students where the results are utterly predictable, she points to this one.
    On the other side of the country, the same thing plays out every day in Victoria Brescoll’s lecture hall at Yale’s School of Management. MBA students are nurtured specifically to project confidence in the fashion demanded by today’s business world. While she sees from their performance that all of her students are top-of-the-chart smart, she’s been startled to uncover her female students’ lack of belief in themselves.
    “There’s just a natural sort of feeling among the women that they will not get a prestigious job, so why bother trying,” she explained. “Or they think that they are not totally competent in the area, so they’re not going to go for it.”
    What often happens to the female students is that they opt out. “They end up going into less competitive fields like human resources or marketing, and they don’t go for finance, investment banks, or senior-track faculty positions,” Brescoll told us. And, as is the case with so many of our female experts, Brescoll used to suffer from the same syndrome herself—until she learned better.
    “I’ve always had to make extra sure I was really, really good,” she admitted. “I felt I didn’t stack up unless I had more articles in prestigious publications than my male colleagues. But at the same time I would automatically assume that my work wouldn’t be good enough for a top publication, that I should aim just a bit lower.”
    And the men?
    “I think that’s really interesting,” she says with a laugh, “because the men go into everything just assuming that they’re awesome and thinking, ‘Who wouldn’t want me?’   ”
    What Are Men Actually Thinking?
    Pretty much that they are awesome, and “who wouldn’t want me?” Brescoll is right. Most of the men we interviewed, in addition to our colleagues and friends, say they simply spend less time thinking about the possible consequences of failure.
    David Rodriguez is the vice president of human resources at Marriott. For years, he’s been our go-to management guru. David has to do a lot of public speaking in his job and loves it. When he takes the stage, his dimples soften his corporate uniform (dark suit, power tie). He says he becomes numb to any criticism from the room. He isn’t questioning whether his content is good enough or whether he’s flubbed a line or two. He tells himself he’s going to ace the presentation, be witty, and impress his bosses. “I just get up there and perform,” he said. “The trick is not to overthink it.” And if things do go wrong, he shrugs them off. “I don’t dwell on stuff; when it’s done, it’s done.” We heard the same attitude from most of the men we talked with. Even when they aren’t natural performers,