On Confidence (Essay Books)

In our psychological make-up, the approval of the world effectively supports our approval of ourselves.

We may, when with our friends, casually profess to hate the haters (and curse their names with bravado), but in private, over the ensuing months, we simply cannot dismiss their judgements, because we have accorded them a status logically prior to our own in our deep minds.

Once we learn to see ourselves as already, and by nature, foolish, it won’t matter so much if we do one more thing that might look stupid. The person we try to kiss could indeed think us ridiculous. The individual from whom we asked directions in a foreign city might regard us with contempt. But if these people did so, it wouldn’t be news to us. Th

The solution to the impostor syndrome lies in making a crucial leap of faith: that others’ minds work in much the same way as ours do. Other people must be as anxious, uncertain and wayward as we are.

To be on the receiving end of such parenting is a heavy burden. We, the recipients of conditional love, have no option but to work manically to fulfil the conditions set up by parental and worldly expectations. Success isn’t simply a pleasant prize to stumble upon when we enjoy a subject or a task interests us; it is a psychological necessity, some

But our inaction is not in itself cost-free, for in the wings, out of regular conscious awareness, there is something arguably even more frightening than failure: the tragedy of wasting our lives.

When it came to their own children, these underconfidence-generating parents would have applied a similar method of judgement: the issue of how much and where to love would have been to a large extent determined externally. If the world felt the baby was adorable, they probably were (and if not, then not so much). Later, if the child won a maths pr

The capacity to remain confident is, therefore, to a significant extent a matter of having internalised a correct narrative about what difficulties we are likely to encounter. Unfortunately, the narratives we have to hand are deeply misleading, for a range of reasons. We are surrounded by stories that conspire to make success seem easier than it is

Making a leap of faith around what other people are like helps to humanise the world. Whenever we encounter a stranger, we are not really encountering such a person; we are encountering someone who is in basic ways very much like us, despite surface evidence to the contrary. Therefore, nothing fundamental stands between us and the possibility of re