Above the entrance to Manchester Grammar School lies a coat of arms and a Latin inscription: “Sapere Aude”. Ian Thorpe, then the school’s development officer, translated it for me – “Dare to Be Wise” – as we stood in the front quad on a warm day last July. First used by the Roman poet Horace in his book of Epistles, the phrase was later employed by the philosopher Immanuel Kant: “Dare to know! ‘Have the courage to use your own understanding’ is … the motto of the enlightenment,” he wrote. And it makes a fine motto, too, for a school that counts among its alumni the writer Thomas de Quincy and the director Nicholas Hytner.
Manchester Grammar is the largest all-boys day school in the country, and when I visited they were in the throes of summer sports’ day: a loudspeaker reeled race results out across the grass, a large marquee stood by the track. There was, I felt, a sense of gentle splendour – there in the trees that line its long driveway, mature and broad-branched, and in the quad designed in the style of an Oxbridge college. Certainly, the school wants for little: it stands on a 28-acre site, has a history dating back to the early 16th century, and commands fees a little shy of £12,000 a year.
In the cool of the library, I joined Thorpe, his colleague Laura Rooney and some of their students. We talked about the benefits of the school, their previous educational experiences at a “rowdy” primary and a local state comprehensive. “There’s more attention to individual pupils here,” said one. “When I came to this school, I felt more important,” said another. Rooney spoke of the school’s old boys’ network. “We look after them for the rest of their lives,” she said, and told of how, only the previous week, she had arranged a sixth-form work experience placement with an Old Mancunian who is now a vehicle engineer for a Formula One team.
The boys were open, articulate and delightful, their demeanour imbued with a confidence I found striking. But a school such as Manchester Grammar engenders confidence – not just through the depth and breadth of its education, but through the sense of history and lineage it bestows upon its pupils, the belief that it is quite something to join the ranks of Old Mancunians, the familiarity with Oxbridge and the professional world, a feeling of ease in a variety of social settings and occasions. And although not every public school child will brim with confidence, many will go on to live their lives with the deep-rooted sense that they have worth.
Confidence is a peculiar beast. At its most fulsome it can seem repellent. In some cases it could even prove dangerous – consider the circumstances brought about by the unwavering confidence of Donald Trump or Nigel Farage, for instance, or the kind of financial maelstrom unleashed by the overconfidence of stock market traders. Yet as I left Manchester Grammar that July day I felt a great wash of sadness that not all young people will know that sense of self-assurance; that many will spend their lives feeling perpetually on the back foot. And I wondered whether confidence might be something we can learn at any stage in life.
To an extent, confidence is something hardwired into us from birth. A study of 3,700 twins by behavioural geneticist Corina Greven at King’s College London and Robert Plomin of the Institute of Psychiatry, for instance, concluded that academic self-confidence was 50% nature and 50% nurture. Women, meanwhile, have a biological tendency to seek acceptance and avoid conflict, while men tend to take more risks under pressure, meaning that, in some lights, women might appear to lack inner confidence.
But external factors play a huge role in shaping our feelings of self worth. Let’s say you are white and male and raised in a detached house in the home counties. You attend a fee-paying school, your family is financially secure and well-educated – as it has been for generations. It seems brain-numbingly obvious to suggest your levels of confidence are likely to be higher than if you were female, black and state-educated, growing up in a single-parent family on benefits living on a council estate in, say, Burnley.
“No working-class kid, however self-confident, is ever going to be made the editor of the Evening Standard without any journalistic experience, in the way that George Osborne was,” says the writer and broadcaster Stuart Maconie, who has written often on matters of class, politics and regional divide. “What he has is a complicated nexus, a network of power and relationships that means you can’t really fail.” Underpinning that sort of confidence, he adds, is “actual material and political power and I think this is forgotten sometimes when well-meaning people are accusing working-class kids of lacking the confidence and self-assertion that comes with middle-class people”.
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Some of the reasons for this are glaringly obvious, while others exert a more subtle force. John Grindrod is the author of Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Post-War Britain. “For hundreds of thousands of years, our confidence has been shaped by the environments that we are allowed into or not allowed into,” he says, pointing out that, by its nature, castle design led to the feeling that those inside were protected by its architecture, while those outside were not. After the war, Grindrod notes, this began to shift. “We saw a desire to try to create buildings that were more transparent and more permeable,” he says. “An egalitarian architecture as a panacea to a lot of issues around people feeling very disconnected from power.”
But the issue is that we do not live in an egalitarian society. The design of a public school such as Eton has much in common with, say, the colleges of Oxbridge, as well as the Inns of Court and the Houses of Parliament. If you grow up among these kinds of buildings, you are not only less likely to be daunted by their grandeur but ,on the contrary, you will feel at home, as if you belong there and they speak your language. “When the competition to build the Houses of Parliament came along in the 1830s, you were only allowed to enter buildings that were neo-gothic or Tudor,” adds Grindrod. “People who understood this vernacular, of course, would have been to Oxford and Cambridge and all those other hallowed institutions.”
There have been architectural ripostes to the established elite, however. Maconie speaks fondly of St George’s Hall in Liverpool, a neoclassical building begun in 1841, when the city was flourishing: “It’s designed to be the first thing you see when you get off the train at Lime Street, this grand edifice, and it’s supposed to say, ‘We’re not bowing to anyone, we’re supremely self-confident and we’re as good a city as anywhere in the world.’ You see that in a lot of Manchester’s cottonopolis-era architecture. A sort of swagger in bricks.”
“Swagger” is one of those words often used to describe confident northerners – particularly men. “I think of the self-confidence of the north in terms of, say, the Gallagher brothers [from Oasis], that and Arthur Seaton [from Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning],” says Maconie. “That kind of self-confidence is born, to a degree, of failure. You get a lot of street confidence in northern males, it’s an ‘I’m never really going to make anything of myself in terms of money or power or prestige, but I can enjoy the prestige of being the loudest guy in the pub.’”
Confident women, meanwhile, often find they are described as “bossy” or “snobby”. Katty Kay presents BBC World News America – you may remember her as the presenter whom Dr Ben Carson, the former candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, tried to silence during a live TV discussion of Trump’s alleged sexual assaults, asking for her microphone to be turned off. She is also the co-author of The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance – What Women Should Know.
Kay is the daughter of a diplomat, she attended Oxford, and worked for the Bank of England before beginning her career in journalism. Despite this grounding, professional confidence has been a quality that has often alluded her, and she attributes its cause to “thinking I wasn’t bright enough, and I was conscious of not being confident enough”.
But she is aware that she is not alone. “Evidence of women underestimating their abilities is comprehensive and across the board,” she says. “It exists in sports, it exists in politics, it exists in business, it exists in the military.” It is quite the reverse for men. “One of the most reliable social studies you can do is to give men and women a scientific reasoning quiz,” she says. “Men tend to overestimate their abilities by more than 30%. Women routinely underestimate their abilities.” In reality, the quiz results reveal men and women tend to do about the same.
This, of course, has implications for both an individual’s career and the workplace in general. “Hewlett Packard has done work on promotions,” Kay continues. “Women will apply for promotions when they have 100% of the skill set, men will go for those same promotions with 60% of the skill set, because they figure they’re going to learn the rest when they get there – and they’re right, they will, and so could we. It’s one of the biggest factors I think in why women hold themselves back at work. Now, there are lots of structural reasons, the playing field is not level, but we are also not going for those promotions, we’re not asking for those pay rises in the way that men do.”
During the last few months I have been making a radio series about confidence – what it is, where it comes from, why some of us have it and others don’t, and what to do about it if your confidence levels are in short supply. I should note that I am not a confident person. I spent my entire first term at primary school allowing myself to be called Louise because I was too shy to tell them my name was actually Laura. I also recently gave a talk at a festival and, for fear that I was taking up everyone’s valuable time, began early, then garbled through it at high speed and low volume, apologising frequently. I did not ask for a lectern, or for the window on to the noisy street to be closed, I did not allow myself to stop and breathe, because I feared that to do any of these things – things that would have benefited both the audience and myself – might have been considered arrogant.
It seems to me that confidence has much to do with space – with how much room you feel able and allowed to take up. Grow up in a detached house with several acres and you might feel entitled to more room than someone raised in a terrace or a high rise with a tiny balcony. Attend a school where the class sizes are smaller, where fees are paid, and the buildings are grander, and you will learn early that you have a right to spread out, raise your voice, ask for more.
To muddy things further, girls are raised to believe that being smaller is preferable; in a hundred thousand ways we receive the message that we should be quieter, thinner, less demanding, in case we are deemed bossy, or our views too strident, or in case a man asks for our microphone to be turned off. To ask for a pay rise, then, is demanding; it says I am worthy of more – and to women, who have spent their lives being told that they should be less, this is conflicting. Men, meanwhile, are raised to be go-getters, to conquer and to win.
But, male or female, we are all a mess of contradictions: the business leader who can’t make small talk, the party animal who balks at intimacy. I feel relatively self-assured so long as you can’t see me – so I can write an article, or present a radio programme, or be as cocky as you like on email, but in the decade that I worked in the Guardian’s offices, it filled me with dread to have to walk over to speak to my editor.
In the making of this series, there have been moments when I have begun to question whether confidence is such a marvellous thing at all. I don’t know if I always trust it, and certainly I have wondered whether confidence always has to equate with brashness – whether there might not be a quieter, gentler form of self-worth. I have thought often of something Maria Konnikova, author of a book about con artists, The Confidence Game, said to me: “I have to be very wary of people who speak confidently. That is actually a sign that you should be a little bit more sceptical of them.” And I’ve considered the state of the world and wondered whether maybe all the big mouths and hot-talkers should just pipe down for a moment. “I certainly look around me at the world and see strong, confident men who seem to be leading us into very dark places,” Maconie notes. “Isn’t quiet, modest competence a better thing? Ease in one’s own skin, I think, is a different matter. To not feel beholden to anyone or inferior to anyone, that’s hard-acquired, I think, and that comes from a long immersion in what you do. Sometimes a little more discretion and humility might be a good thing.”
Susan Cain is the author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. She cites a recent study by the Kellogg School in the US which found that in an average large meeting, three people do 70% of the talking. “And that’s horrifying,” she says, “because if you imagine it, everyone in those large meetings is equally likely to have good ideas but we’re only hearing from three of those people. That is just so much power and mind talent that has never seen the light of day.”
The problem, she says, is that we have created a culture in our schools and workplaces where those people who “are just more vocal, who are more dominant, more willing to take up space are automatically accorded all kinds of advantages, both consciously and unconsciously”. But if you consider that a third to a half of the population is introverted, perhaps it is time for us to change the culture rather than change ourselves.
Still, we have grown accustomed to trying to change ourselves. Visit the self-help section of any bookshop and you will find any number of guides to gaining confidence: Susan Jeffers’ Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, Paul McKenna’s Instant Confidence, Russ Harris’s The Confidence Gap among them. One of the bestsellers is Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly. In 2010, Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston, gave a TED talk called The Power of Vulnerability which has gone on to be one of the most-viewed TED talks of all time (31,649,423 views at time of writing). Brown’s theory is that we acquire true confidence through vulnerability. “Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen,” she writes.
The School of Life, the educational company founded by Alain de Botton, takes a similar approach. It runs a popular confidence workshop and publishes a guide, On Confidence, that draws on the wisdom of Erasmus’s 1509 essay In Praise of Folly, and suggests that a willingness not only to be vulnerable but also to be a fool is crucial to evolving greater self-worth. “There’s a type of underconfidence that arises specifically when we grow too attached to our own dignity and become anxious around any situation that might seem to threaten it,” it states. “We hold back from challenges in which there is any risk of ending up looking ridiculous, which comprises, of course, almost all the most interesting situations.” The happy news is that, far from regarding it as an elusive gift, confidence is rather “a skill based on ideas about our place in the world, and its secrets can be learned”.
Katty Kay, agrees. “I see confidence almost like building blocks,” she says. “It’s almost a tangible physical commodity. You get confidence by doing things and trying stuff that’s hard for you and when you do those things it’s like you bank a bit of confidence, you put it in your confidence wall.” Not so long ago she was called to a meeting on Middle East affairs at the White House. “And I thought: ‘Oh my God, I’m a fraud, all these people are super-duper experts, what am I doing here? I’m just a generalist!’” When they reached the Q&A part of the meeting, Kay noted how “the men in the room just jump in with questions, and I’m sitting there thinking to myself: ‘I must ask a question, I can’t be one of only two women and neither of us ask questions!’ And eventually I think: ‘For God’s sakes, Katty, you’re nearly 50! Put your hand in the air and ask a question!’ So I put my hand up, and the question comes out, and the Earth didn’t open up and swallow me whole. And the next time I was in that situation it was that bit easier because I had banked a bit of confidence.”
It’s an approach echoed by Brown. “Courage is a habitus, a habit, a virtue: You get it by courageous acts,” she writes. “It’s like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging.” The brain, after all, is not rigidly set, but malleable and open to change, and so we can learn to be bolder through repetition and reward.
A 2014 study at Dartmouth College, looked at the role of the frontostriatal pathway, which connects the medial prefrontal cortex, implicated in self-knowledge, to the ventral striatum, which provides feelings of reward and motivation. Researchers used magnetic imaging to measure both the physical parameters of that pathway, which it termed the “road” and the activity levels on that pathway, termed the “traffic”.
Participants answered questions about how they rated themselves in the short and the long-term with regard to qualities such as “happy”, “hard-working”, “pessimistic” and “depressed”. The researchers found that an individual with a strong “road” was likely to experience higher long-term self-esteem. Higher “traffic” levels on the pathway, meanwhile, showed momentary rises in self-esteem. They also only saw “traffic” when participants rated themselves with positive qualities, not negative ones. So if we think about ourselves positively, the areas of the brain connected with motivation, pleasure and reward are stimulated.
“Just like mastering any other talent, gaining self-assurance requires repetition and time,” writes Dr Stacie Grossman Bloom, a neuroscientist who has examined the role that neuroscience can play in raising confidence. “The first step is to push back against the obstacles we know stand in our way by being mindful of the situation, and deciding to be confident. Making that complex decision is a multi-step process that taps into our emotions and engages many other parts of the brain. It doesn’t matter what level of self-assurance you start at, the more time and effort you dedicate to practicing being more confident, the faster your brain will change and the faster you’ll master it.”
At the Impact Factory in north London, Jo Ellen Grzyb runs workshops on communication, negotiation and public speaking. Over the course of her career she has developed her own tricks for pushing back against obstacles and mustering confidence. If, for example, you find yourself in a meeting in which only three people are blathering on, you might consider interjecting for the good of your colleagues. “You put on your Superwoman or Superman cape and you are rescuing everyone else,” she says. “Because if I’m thinking, ‘I have to speak, I have to speak, what am I going to say?’, I’m all in my head. But if I think, ‘I can rescue this meeting’, then that builds my confidence because I’m not just doing it on my behalf, I’m doing it for the whole room.”
There are physical tools, too. “You think you don’t have the confidence to interrupt this blusterer,” she says. “But if you begin to speak and you give eye contact to everybody but that person, it’s one of those little tiny magic tricks, because that person is being ignored. It’s not being rude, but you can change the dynamic very quickly. Speak, make eye contact – but not with the person who is taking up all the space.”
Among many roles, Patsy Rodenburg is head of voice at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, and works with actors, teachers, world leaders and members of the corporate world, teaching on matters of voice and presence. “Although I can’t talk about the psychology of confidence, I know what it looks like in the body, and the breath, and the voice and the pace,” she says. “Often people who are trying to be confident and aren’t swing the pendulum the other way and they’re too loud. They take up too much space.” Others are “collapsed in their bodies. They don’t want to make eye contact, so there is a withdrawal from the world. You disappear. You stop breathing. It’s the equivalent of the mouse with the hawk above it.”
Her advice is that there is no overnight fix for the underconfident. “It takes consciousness, choice, but also simple exercises that might have to be done for the rest of your life. Technique is for the moments when you’re upset, disturbed or fearful.” She asks people where they feel uncomfortable in these moments. “All these tensions stop us breathing,” she says. “And breath is the fundamental thing in using our voice and connecting to people. So we have to get the breath low and deep and not rushed.”
For a lot of women, it’s a matter of lifting the sternum, for others it might be finding some kind of external connection. “I might be sitting at a desk feeling scared,” she suggests. “So I’m just putting my hand against a desk and I’m just gently pushing. And if you push against the desk, and your feet are on the floor, you can re-set the breath. It’s about re-setting. You’ve just got to come back into yourself.”
Conversely, coming back into yourself is often a matter of stepping out of yourself. “Somebody who is incredibly confident has authority and stillness and they’re interested in us,” Rodenburg says. “Real confidence has gravitas. And when we’re fully present, we’re interested in something outside ourselves. So one of the best things you could do if you’re not feeling confident is just listen to others, and be attentive.”
Once, I thought gaining confidence might require me to become someone else entirely – someone harder and louder and more bruising. But really I think it is a matter of stepping beyond yourself; an adventure of sorts, into the unknown and the brilliantly possible. It is about taking up as much space as you need. About daring to be wise. And, if necessary, it’s about keeping a steadying hand on the table.
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