Self-Confidence: A Philosophy

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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.

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Go into Training (#ufefd8fef-250d-54cc-b8ed-2b59de9c26db)

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.

Competence is therefore more likely to turn into confidence when it helps us to a greater knowledge of ourselves, our resources and characteristics, our tastes and distastes … No lasting self-confidence is possible unless we know ourselves, unless we are ploughing a furrow that corresponds to our own nature. In learning to play tennis, Serena Williams discovered what she was capable of, what her strengths and her weaknesses were, what kind of woman she was. She understood she was the kind of person who becomes her truest self in moments of adversity.

As soon as our skill or ability tells us something about ourselves, we are no longer locked within the strict logic of competence. When our ability is compartmentalised, it doesn’t help us overcome our anxieties. If we develop a skill thinking that it will give us a broad power over the unexpected, we run the risk of having our confidence shaken when something truly unexpected happens. Life is all too good at confounding our forecasts. If we increase our mastery with the illusion that it will give us total control, we are setting ourselves up for disappointments that will undermine our confidence. We have to develop our mastery while recalling that we will not be able to master everything, that things never repeat themselves identically.

‘We never step twice into the same river,’ says a fragment from the teachings of Heraclitus. Even if our skill level is very high, the second time something happens is never an exact repetition of the first. A surgeon may have a thorough knowledge of the actions he needs to perform, the tools, the timing, but he must deal each time with a new human body, identical overall but individual in its particulars and therefore different. His skill allows him to deal with any novel aspects; it is layered and extensive enough that he can adapt to any unforeseen features of a case. Serena Williams may be extraordinarily skilled, but the first time she saved match point in the finals of a Grand Slam tournament, it was very much her first time doing it. And the two other times were not identical reconstructions of the first. If the surgeon and Serena Williams managed to come up with the right reaction, it’s because they could draw on their great skill. They performed actions that they had mastered perfectly. But they did more than that. They performed them without a tremor, although they were not simply repeating a gesture mechanically. They were able to be inventive, to adapt to the situation, even if minimally, and that’s what makes all the difference.

In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche imagines a grotesque character, the ‘Conscientious One’, to illustrate the difference between competence that walls a person off, and experience that gives freedom. In Nietzsche’s view, it all hinges on what we have ‘in the pit of our stomachs’ when we set out to develop competence. If we are driven solely by the ‘instinct of fear’, if we are working toward expertise because we are afraid of the unknown, then we will never draw true confidence from it. We will be skilful but not confident, like the sinister ‘Conscientious One’. An expert of sorts, a pathetic version of the researcher, he knows everything, absolutely everything, about the brain of the leech, but his great competence in his chosen field cuts him off from life, since nothing else interests him. His unusual expertise will eventually kill him, in a surreal scene that displays Nietzsche’s comic genius. Falling into a marsh swarming with leeches, the ‘Conscientious One’ will be sucked dry of his own blood, devoured by the very object of his expertise.

Fortunately, we can take the opposite approach to expertise, using what Nietzsche calls the ‘instinct of art’, a form of creativity that he contrasts with the ‘instinct of fear’. It will allow us to extend and develop the life within us, not run away from it. It will make us more alive, not less so. Our actions will be guided by curiosity, not the instinct to ball up into a cocoon. Naturally, we harbor both these instincts within us, the fear instinct and the art instinct. Each time that the art instinct wins out over the fear instinct, each time that our creativity wins out over our instinct to curl up into a ball, we make it more likely that competence will translate into confidence.

Let us take Zarathustra’s advice, therefore: let us develop our abilities, but with the soul of an artist, and let us use our abilities as a springboard, not a palisade. Our skills, our areas of strength, reassure us, certainly, but let’s not forget the goal of this reassurance, which is to come out of our comfort zone and have confidence in ourselves. If we work on our abilities with the aim of finding complete reassurance, we will not be able to have true confidence in ourselves, for a reason that Nietzsche diagnosed with pitiless accuracy. Life is unpredictable, at times unfair, and, when you come right down to it, anxiety-producing. As long as we remain lucid, we will never live with complete reassurance.

Our competence, then, must be more than the ability to repeat what we already know how to do. It must become the field in which our creativity develops, the occasion for us to be present to our true selves. This change is possible only as the upshot of a long and slow process: mastery leads us gradually to the acceptance of a kind of ‘non-mastery’, of letting go. Thanks to everything we have learned, experienced, and integrated, we give ourselves the permission to have confidence in ourselves.

Serena Williams started playing tennis at the age of three: her feet, as she sat on the courtside bench, didn’t reach the ground. She learned the different tennis strokes, gradually hitting them better and better until her competence rose to a very high level. But when, in three separate finals, she had to save match point and did so without a tremor, she didn’t just have confidence in her strokes, she had confidence in herself. From repetition, her competence was incorporated into her and became second nature. The leap that I spoke of had occurred, and her competence had become confidence.

This leap remains somewhat mysterious. But there is one thing we do know about it: in order to accomplish that leap, we need to regularly re-immerse ourselves in our mastery so as to have the courage to take a step into ‘non-mastery’, reassure ourselves in our comfort zone so as to then be able to leave it.

Think of your comfort zone, your area of competence, as a circle. You go into it to soak up warmth. Then you leave it to explore the big world beyond. You come back to it to be reassured again. And so on. Compose yourself inside your comfort zone, only to re-emerge from it each time. Dancing. Moving forward. Enlarging both the circle of your comfort zone and the boundaries of your exploration. To a rhythm. This dance step, this two-step waltz, gives us a model for the way self-confidence operates. Each person has to know himself well enough to sense how often he will need to re-immerse himself in his comfort zone. The less security we received in childhood, the more often we will need to reassure ourselves. You must know yourself well to find the rhythm that works for you, your dance.

My students acquire various abilities: they master certain concepts that are part of the curriculum. As the time approaches for them to take the baccalaureate exam, they sometimes get nervous at the thought of all the topics we haven’t covered. They ask me to give lectures or distribute handouts on the skipped concepts. I urge them instead to review the ones they have already mastered. To reread the lectures they liked. To re-experience pleasure, which is the best ally of confidence. In a word, I tell them to re-immerse themselves in their comfort zone. And afterwards, but only afterwards, to go out and discover new concepts. I invite them to dance this two-step waltz.

I also advise them to get in training by writing short introductions or essays. ‘It’s by blacksmithing that you become a blacksmith,’ says a medieval proverb. Even Hephaestus, the god of blacksmiths, didn’t become a blacksmith overnight. Because of his ugliness, his parents threw him into the sea when he was born. He was rescued by nymphs, who raised him and, over the years, taught him the art of blacksmithing. Hephaestus, the god of the forge, had to put in at least 10,000 hours of practice! I ask my students to train, but I also warn them against the idea that by increasing their skills they will automatically get a better result – the topic they are given on the baccalaureate exam is likely not to resemble any topic that has come up before. This is one of the chief difficulties of being a teacher: you must instil competence in your students, while paradoxically teaching them to mistrust competence in and of itself.

The students who train with fear in their bellies, anxious to be prepared for any topic, will never achieve true self-confidence. They acquire abilities that will win them some success as scholars, but they will continue to lack self-confidence and trip up at some point or other. They will be more prone to panic on the day of the big exam, faced with an unexpected question. They put too much faith in their abilities and not enough in themselves.

On the other hand, there are students who train in the spirit of discovery and are less intent on scholarship per se. They are not as obsessed with being perfectly prepared and are more likely to try things, to respond to challenges. They aren’t looking to reassure themselves at all costs. They turn to their studies with a sense of pleasure, being creative about it. They don’t talk about topics in quite the same way as the others – there is excitement in their voices, and an active curiosity crowds out their anxiety. The results are striking. While the first group of students are terrified by the uncertainty that is part of any exam, the second think of it as fun. They are ready to deal with what’s served up to them. They understand that this is integral to human life.

Confidence is not the same thing as reassurance. To have confidence in yourself is to know that you can handle the unexpected, not to mistakenly believe that life is foreseeable. It’s true that there are situations where a high degree of competence reduces the risk of the unexpected almost to nothing, but in those cases you don’t really need confidence in yourself – competence is enough.

In his essay Oser faire confiance (Daring to Trust), the philosopher Emmanuel Delessert explains the difference between confidence and competence: ‘Having confidence in oneself does not mean being certain one can do something because one has already done it a thousand times – how sad! How limited! On the contrary, it means turning to that uncertain part of oneself – which has never yet been activated – and electing to call on it, to wake it up.’

To trust ourselves is to undertake something we haven’t ‘already done a thousand times’, something that we may never have tried before. When we succeed, it isn’t just our competence that gives us confidence: it’s ourselves.

‘The experience of others is a comb for a bald man,’ says a witty Chinese proverb. What does it mean? That only our own experiences count, not other people’s, because only our own experiences can give us confidence. Like ‘a comb for a bald man’, someone else’s experience isn’t much use to us. At most it adds a little to our competence. But what’s more important than our competence is the path we have travelled and how we’ve negotiated it, which is what makes up our true experience and our treasure. Along the way, we have learned about how we react to adversity, failure, or success; we’ve taken the measure of our talent, our desire, our ambition. We’ve gained in self-knowledge. No one can walk this road for us.