Self-Confidence: A Philosophy
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While working on this book, I met a quite unusual mountain climber, Érik Decamp. A graduate of the prestigious École Polytechnique, he had climbed some of the highest peaks in the world, including Ganesh IV in the Himalayas and Shishapangma in Tibet, with his wife, the well-known climber Catherine Destivelle. But he was also an alpine guide, that is, a professional in the field of self-confidence. To practise this profession, you need to have confidence in yourself and you need to be able to impart it to others, to the clients you are guiding. To help a person overcome his fear, Érik Decamp uses a strategy that might seem risky but that often proves very effective. When someone seems particularly nervous during the preparation and training before departure, Érik Decamp will sometimes pick them to lead the climb. Often that is enough to free the person of their anxiety. Because the guide shows trust in them, the nervous climber suddenly feels stronger. Érik Decamp begins by instilling confidence in his client, through his advice, his explanations, and by rehearsing various moves and protocols until they became second nature. Then he shows that he trusts the climber by asking them to lead off. With the others roped in behind them, the designated leader has to show that they are worthy of the confidence that has been placed in them.
This was the central precept of Maria Montessori’s pedagogical programme, which was based on kindliness and trust – and is still successfully being practised today. ‘Never help a child perform a task that he feels capable of accomplishing himself,’ was the mantra constantly repeated by the great Italian physician and teacher. In other words: trust the student as soon as possible. And placing your trust in a student means not doing the task for them, it means letting them do it themselves. We can now understand better why our children are annoyed when, on the pretext of showing them, but often just to make things go faster, we help them do something they can perfectly well do on their own. They are right to be unhappy about it: we have shown that we don’t fully trust them.
Every parent, every instructor, every teacher, every friend in Aristotle’s sense, should keep in mind this two-pronged method of making someone confident: first instill confidence, then show confidence. First, give them a sense of security, then make them a little insecure. We need both sides to be able to go out into the world. And often, these two dimensions are mingled in the gaze that others train on us: seeing the confidence in their eyes, we feel ourselves to be stronger.
I often experience this in my role as a philosophy teacher and lecturer. Carried away on a flood of words, or deep into a chain of digressions, I can sometimes lose the thread of my argument and come perilously close to having my confidence desert me. But the fact of seeing interest or curiosity in the eyes of my audience is usually enough to get me back on track. Or else I might look at a philosophical text that I have just handed out to my students and find its meaning hopelessly obscure. But as soon as I feel, through the questions they ask, how much confidence they place in me, the text becomes much clearer. Érik Decamp told me he has the same experience: as an expedition sets off, the confidence that others have in him reinforces his own. Given that we are animals who depend very much on our relationships, there is nothing surprising here. The two of us, Érik Decamp and I, are like the beginning mountain climber who Érik steadies by giving him responsibility: when we feel the confidence that someone else places in us, we rediscover ‘our own’ confidence. Confidence is a gift that others give us, and one that we willingly accept. When my students ask me a difficult question, I offer them a similar gift in return: I tell them that they know the answer. I show that I have confidence in them, and that is usually enough to make them come back quickly with an interesting response.
We sometimes hear that a co-worker, a family member, or someone in the neighborhood lacks self-confidence, as though this confidence were purely an internal matter, something that they had failed to generate on their own. But if no one has ever taken the trouble to give them confidence or placed trust in them, it’s not surprising that they suffer from anxiety. People are puzzled that these acquaintances of theirs lack self-assurance, given their abilities. But this is to forget that we are creatures that exist within relationships, not isolated skill-accumulating monads, and that our confidence grows out of the kinds of bonds we have developed with others.
This truth about relational confidence helps us to better understand the suffering of certain oppressed minorities. Often, the best way to oppress them has been to destroy the bonds between individuals by every means possible, and even to remove the possibility of forming interpersonal solidarity. The accounts of former black slaves, and survivors of the Nazi camps, illustrate this unequivocally: nothing is more effective in breaking men than breaking the bonds between them, separating families, pitting one against another, and creating a climate of pervasive distrust and denunciation.
In his powerful book The Fire Next Time, published in 1963, African-American writer James Baldwin exposes this implacable mechanism of oppression and at the same time confirms that the only way to resist it and maintain one’s confidence is to know the value of one’s ties to others, to find in them the strength to fight: ‘Yes, it does indeed mean something – something unspeakable – to be born, in a white country, […] black. You very soon, without knowing it, give up all hope of communion. Black people, mainly, look down or look up but do not look at each other, not at you, and white people, mainly, look away. And the universe is simply a sounding drum; there is no way, no way whatever, so it seemed then and has sometimes seemed since, to get through a life, to love your wife and children, or your friends, or your mother and father, or to be loved. The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass, and trees, but other people, has […] made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can.’
The psychoanalyst and writer Anne Dufourmantelle, author of Power of Gentleness and L’Éloge du risque (In Praise of Risk), who died tragically in 2017 while rescuing two children from drowning, made the radical statement that ‘there’s no such thing as a lack of self-confidence’. Listening to the patients on her couch as they tried to find words for their pain, she understood that their anxiety was primarily a lack of confidence in others, the disastrous consequence of a childhood cut off from the precious sense of inner security. The survivors of these unhappy childhoods were so deprived of security and of people who placed trust in them that they were unable to have confidence in themselves. When Anne Dufourmantelle says that ‘there’s no such thing as a lack of self-confidence’, she means that her patients’ anxiety derives from a lack of confidence in others. Self-confidence and a confidence in one’s relationships therefore refer to one and the same thing.
This is similarly illustrated by paranoiacs: they have no confidence in themselves, nor do they have confidence in others. Being suspicious of everything that comes from the people around them, from the media, from the world in general, they suffer from ‘inner insecurity’. Consumed by their general mistrust, they can find no basis for having confidence in themselves.
There is consequently one action that will help us to develop confidence in ourselves and at the same time have confidence in others: let us venture out, let us establish relations with different and inspiring people, let us choose teachers and friends who help us grow, who awaken us and reveal us to ourselves. Let us look for relationships that are good for us, that increase our sense of security and thereby free us. And let’s remember the little two-year-old: he walks up to the guest who has just entered his house. He advances toward the unknown. He is afraid, obviously. A stranger has just appeared in his house. But he approaches him anyway. He walks forward with his fear. He has confidence in himself, just as he has confidence in the stranger and in the familiar faces around him. This confidence is not genetically or biologically determined. It is developed, little by little, in the intertwining bonds that have enveloped him since birth and reassured him, just like the towels we wrap around infants when they come out of the bath. We sometimes give their little bodies an energetic rub, as if to remind them that we are there, that we are taking care of them, that they are not alone. These attentions give them confidence. This, more than anything, is what they need. Later, when we encourage them to eat by themselves or take their first steps, we will show that we trust them. No one can develop self-confidence all on his or her own. Self-confidence is first and foremost about love and friendship.
2
Go into Training
Confidence through practice
Give me a fulcrum, and with my lever I will move the earth.
– ARCHIMEDES
As an adolescent, Madonna shook off her inhibitions thanks to the words of her dance teacher. But she already danced well, having studied the art for years. And it was because he had noticed her talent for dance that the teacher singled her out for particular praise. We have stressed the relational component of self-confidence, but we mustn’t forget that it also has a great deal to do with skill.
The father of Venus and Serena Williams set his daughters on the path to success. He gave them confidence in the best way: he told them he believed in them, said they would rise above their social circumstances thanks to tennis, emerge from poverty and become the best tennis players in the world. But he didn’t just show confidence in them. He trained them long and hard from the moment they were old enough to hold a racket. The residents of Compton, California, found it fascinating to watch the Williams sisters training: they spent their life on the tennis court, with their father and a basket of balls. Even the gang members in Compton respected the Williams sisters and made sure that no one disrupted their practice. Their father taught them an aggressive style of tennis, starting with a powerful serve and heavy strokes from deep in the back court. He coached them to use an attacking strategy, where the point is decided in two or three volleys, a kind of tennis that hadn’t existed in the women’s game before. He made them hit the same stroke again and again, train and train some more, with a particular focus on serving – and Serena was the first woman to hit a serve that clocked at over 124 mph. The sisters did in fact become the best tennis players in the world, one after another claiming the number one spot in the World Tennis Association rankings. Serena Williams became the best women’s tennis player of all time, racking up thirty-nine Grand Slam titles, twenty-three of them in women’s singles events (beating Steffi Graf’s record), and fourteen in doubles including one when she was two months’ pregnant! In the history of tennis, she is the only female player to have thrice won a Grand Slam title after saving match point in the finals. It takes astonishing confidence not to falter in the finals of a major tournament when you are facing match point.
This confidence came from her tennis skills, a product of her intense training. But it doesn’t just come down to skill. Thanks to repeating the same gestures over and over, they had become second nature to her. Her extreme skill in the end coloured her personality: in Serena Williams’s case, expertise seems to have transformed into confidence. Does this always happen?
In a book that has become a worldwide success, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell attacks the idea of innate talent and argues for the seductive ‘10,000-hour rule’, popularising an idea originally developed by the psychologist Anders Ericsson. Examining the careers of a group of violinists who trained together at the Berlin Academy of Music, Ericsson wondered what accounted for the differences between what were all excellent musicians. The very best became first violinists in prestigious orchestras or soloists with international careers; the very good ones became professional musicians; and the rest ‘only’ became music teachers. He asked them all the same question: ‘Since the time when you first took up the violin, how many hours have you played?’
The results surprised him. By the age of twenty, none of those who would go on to become ‘just’ music teachers had played his or her instrument for more than 4,000 hours. All those who would become highly qualified professional musicians had played and practised on their instrument for about 8,000 hours. And the highest achievers, those who would become stars in the violin world, had all played for more than 10,000 hours. There wasn’t a single exception. Anders Ericsson then repeated his research with pianists and came up with similar results: professional pianists had about 8,000 hours of playing under their belts, while virtuosos had at least 10,000 hours. He didn’t find a single case of a musician who became a virtuoso without passing the 10,000-hour mark (which works out to roughly three hours a day for ten years).
I am a great fan of the saxophone improvisations of Sonny Rollins: they strike me as a symbol of pure confidence. Sonny Rollins ventures down paths that no one else has explored and creates heavenly, dream-like ballads of astonishing freedom. Recently, I came across an interview with Rollins where he described playing the saxophone at some points in his life for up to seventeen hours a day. His confidence was achieved with a huge amount of work. He had to practise scales on his instrument and master its techniques before he could improvise with such freedom. Among great artists, confidence comes first and foremost from constant, devoted, almost obsessional practice.
But the results of Anders Ericsson’s study should not be interpreted in a simplistic way. Not everyone is going to become a virtuoso just by sticking to his instrument for 10,000 hours. You need to take pleasure in the activity, which has to align with your aspirations, and have a basic predisposition for music. And you need to give those 10,000 hours your attention, be truly present to your art. Other factors probably enter into it as well. The study is interesting all the same because, through its different gradations, it shows how a skill can gradually be incorporated to become genuine confidence. After 8,000 hours, my capabilities are at the point where I can become a professional. Once I have passed the 10,000-hour mark, I can entertain the ambition of becoming one of the best in the world in my field. When Serena Williams became the number-one female player in the under-ten age group, she in fact had 10,000 hours of playing behind her.
Malcolm Gladwell took Anders Ericsson’s study and made it into a general law, as well as a bestseller with a whiff of demagoguery about it. He suggests that in any given field, you need only practise for 10,000 hours in order to acquire mastery of your art and full confidence in yourself. He analysed many instances in great detail, including Mozart and the Beatles, showing that in every case true excellence was achieved only after crossing the 10,000-hour threshold. It’s true, of course, that Mozart could follow a score and play to tempo even before he knew how to read or write. And it’s true that he started composing at the age of six. But his first masterpiece, according to Gladwell – his Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat Major, K.271 – was written in Salzburg in 1777. Mozart was twenty-one at the time and already had 10,000 hours of composing to his credit.
Re-examining the history of the Beatles prior to their wildly successful United States tour in 1964, Gladwell counts how many hours John Lennon and Paul McCartney spent onstage playing music. He tells how in 1960, when they were a schoolboys’ rock and roll band, they were lucky enough to be asked to play at a club in Hamburg. The sets at the Hamburg club lasted eight hours at a stretch, and sometimes all night. This was playing on a different scale from the band’s practices in Liverpool, which had lasted an hour at most and often involved repeating the same few songs over and over. In Gladwell’s telling, the Hamburg club gave the Beatles a chance to really train, and it was there that they gained confidence in themselves, especially in their ability to perform together onstage. The many hours of playing allowed them to learn their instruments thoroughly, to expand their repertoire, and to explore their vocal range. It was also there that they learned to read their public and bring it to a pitch of excitement. The Hamburg experience made them a great band. When they landed in the United States in 1964, they had already spent – according to Gladwell’s detailed calculations – some 12,000 hours onstage. That’s what allowed them to win the hearts of Americans.
Clearly, Anders Ericsson’s findings are not strictly speaking scientific: his theory that excellence can be achieved in any field with 10,000 hours of practice is neither verifiable nor refutable. And when Gladwell uses the work of neuroscientist Daniel Levitin to support the thesis that 10,000 hours is the time it takes the brain to master any discipline, he seems to be reaching for scientific validation. There are many reasons to be wary of this thesis. But I have to admit I find it quite seductive. It makes us realise that even among geniuses, confidence takes time to achieve. It develops in tandem with growing competence that, as it becomes integrated in stages and incorporated, has a liberating effect. Confidence is not innate but something that is largely acquired.
‘Genius,’ as Thomas Edison put it, ‘is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration.’ We shouldn’t forget this when we start to have doubts about ourselves. Often, when our confidence is at a low ebb, we start to think that we lack talent, that we aren’t good at what we do, when in fact it’s just a matter of not having trained enough. Whenever doubt starts to gain the upper hand, whenever we’re afraid that we won’t measure up, the best thing to do is to bolster our confidence by actively developing our skills, rather than invoking some hypothetical lack of talent. Gladwell’s unusual book reminds us of this: Mozart was perhaps an inspired genius, but he also perspired a great deal. He even perspired considerably more than many musicians less inspired than he. Keeping this in mind can help us draw strength from his example.
But Gladwell is only interested in a very localised confidence, focused on the skill on which 10,000 hours of practice have been devoted. True self-confidence, on the other hand, is much broader in extent. It goes beyond the mastery of a single discipline, even if that mastery contributes to it.
Through her skill at tennis and the great success it has brought her, Serena Williams has acquired a sense of confidence that is not limited to the tennis court. When she makes her voice heard nowadays, it is no longer just as a high-ranking sports figure but as a woman, a mother, a citizen, and a feminist. And her voice finds a wide audience.
In 2016, she published an open letter denouncing sexism in sports and the persistent inequality between the sexes. Here is an excerpt: ‘What others marked as flaws or disadvantages about myself – my race, my gender – I embraced as fuel for my success. I never let anything or anyone define me or my potential … Women have to break down many barriers on the road to success. One of those barriers is the way we are constantly reminded we are not men, as if it is a flaw. People call me one of the ‘world’s greatest female athletes’. Do they say LeBron is one of the world’s best male athletes? Is Tiger? Federer? Why not? We should never let this go unchallenged. We should always be judged by our achievements, not by our gender.’
Serena’s confidence is also a transformation of her prowess. By training for all those years, day after day, by hitting balls for hours, she didn’t just train at tennis. On a daily basis, she showed her strength of will, her hunger for achievement, her ability to overcome obstacles. The confidence that now allows her to take courageous positions is the fruit of that experience. As she developed her skill at hitting serves, as she worked on her forehand and her backhand, she became aware of her own power and her drive for life. On the tennis court and everywhere else. By playing tennis, she discovered her own truth, she reached deep within herself and found remarkable resources.
By developing our range within a discipline, we are fortunately able to gain a broader self-confidence. Our experience in that discipline, whatever it may be, can then serve as a fulcrum. ‘Give me a fulcrum, and with my lever I can move the earth,’ said Archimedes. Because our self-confidence plays an important role in how we act, how we engage with the world, everything that anchors us to reality can serve as a base, a springboard.
‘All consciousness is consciousness of something,’ said the German philosopher Edmund Husserl. He meant that we become conscious of ourselves by being conscious of something other than ourselves. For example, because I am conscious of the taste of coffee in my mouth and of the cup I’m holding in my hand, I am conscious of myself. But I am not conscious of myself in a pure, abstract, or disembodied way.
The same goes for self-confidence. In order to feel confidence in ourselves, we must first feel confidence based on specific actions. To paraphrase Husserl, we could say that ‘all self-confidence is confidence in the accomplishment of something’. We need concrete experiences, specific skills, and real successes in order to have confidence in ourselves. So let’s not hesitate to celebrate our successes, even the small ones – they are so many stages along the way to full-blown self-confidence. We sense this when we congratulate our children: we are inviting them each time to have a little more confidence in themselves.
During childhood, we developed confidence in our ability to put one foot in front of another, to write in cursive, to ride a bike. As adults, we might have confidence in our ability to read a score, to find our way around a foreign city, to start a conversation, to express our disagreement, to formulate what it is that we want, to speak in public …
And then one day, we have confidence in ourselves.
That’s what I call the leap in self-confidence. All the other actions we take are so many paths leading to this leap and making it possible, so many opportunities for experiencing this metamorphosis. There is no point, as it happens, in wanting to hasten its arrival: we don’t gain more confidence in ourselves by seeking it out insistently. You have to practise your scales patiently, with your curiosity aroused. And one day, almost without realising it, you start to improvise.
By what miracle does a particular capability lead to true confidence? There are in fact skills that exist behind a wall, that never morph into self-confidence. Serena Williams is a model of one kind, but there are many excellent tennis players who aren’t able to assert themselves beyond the tennis court. Psychologists are aware of the problem: our confidence is often compartmentalised, limited to a skill set that we have mastered. Or worse, sometimes we do not even have confidence in ourselves in the field where we’ve gained mastery. We have mastered it, but we are trembling inside. What is the best way to turn competence into confidence?
The first step is to take pleasure in developing that competence. I see this with my students every day: there is nothing like pleasure to help a student develop his or her abilities and acquire confidence. Those who find a kind of enjoyment in staking out the parameters of a problem and constructing their arguments make much better progress than those who think that serious work has to be performed with a serious attitude. Those who relish the process escape the strict logic of competence and are quicker to have confidence in themselves. The reason is simple: taking pleasure in what they are doing lets them step back and be more relaxed. If they make a mistake, at least they will have had fun. And, in fact, they make fewer mistakes when they are enjoying the work they do. The pleasure we feel in such circumstances is an indication that the field of study suits us, that we stand to gain by delving deeper into it. It’s reassuring to know that we are pursuing a path that is congenial to us.