In this monthly column, Step Up CEO Jenni Luke shares her take on mentorship through role modeling.
If confidence is ‘the purity of action produced by a mind free of doubt’, as the new book The Confidence Code by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman suggests, then we will have many confident women and men on hand at Power Hour coming up on Thursday, April 24 in NYC. Our Power Mentors are all ‘doers’ who are making their mark on the world and paying it forward by sharing their stories with our teens and guests next week. The good news takeaway from the book is that confidence can be cultivated. But it requires work. Below are a few key takeaways:
1) Confidence trumps IQ as a predictor of success.
2) Hewlett-Packard conducted a study about how to get more women into top management. They found that women applied for positions only when they had 100% of the qualifications, men applied when they met 60% of the qualifications. Alarming! Don’t ‘fake it until you make it’ but recognize that confidence in your ability to learn new skills and enjoy the challenge is part of what makes you competent for the role.
3) Resilience is impacted by your genetic makeup. However, you can learn to become more resilient by taking small risks, succeeding, taking more risks, succeeding, and learning from setbacks along the way. If you have a ‘growth mindset’, knowing that your skill set is not finite but that you can always learn new ways to get you to your goal, then you will take chances and build the belief that you can succeed. More often than not, you will.
4) Women’s propensity to dwell on failures and mistakes, or potential failures and mistakes, by over-thinking, ruminating, and obsessing is the opposite of confidence. Certainly our ability to see things from multiple angles and have emotional intelligence in a broad range of circumstances is a good quality. Ruminating on mistakes is not a good use of that skill. Genetics seem to play a role in these tendencies but we can learn to control them. Stop ruminating. Shake it off. Move on.
5) Our willingness to take action, the volitional contribution to a trait like confidence, may be as high as 50%. No matter where you are starting from, you can gain confidence if you make the effort to challenge yourself.
6) Role models have a big impact. Seeing the embodiment of your goal in human form takes it from fantasy to reality. Small interactions and exchanges, encouragement to act, can make a big difference.
I’m committed to getting to confidence for myself and instilling it in our next generation of girls. As a Step Up woman you inspire girls to be confident when you take risks and are willing to share the results, successes and failures, with others. The act of taking the risk, as the book points out, is the most important thing. The result is not. Continue to take action, be resilient, and you will succeed more times than you fail.
