How to be confident

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1:08Kimberley Wilson:Hello and welcome. I'm Kimberly Wilson. I'm a counselling psychologist and this is Complex. The psychology podcast that I hope can help you find your way through the jigsaw puzzle of information that's out there about the human brain and our mental health. In today's episode, I'm exploring confidence. Now, confidence is the holy grail. So many of us want it or want more of it. We think it will solve all of our problems. But what is it? And is it always a good thing to have more?

1:51Kimberley Wilson:We see so many people around us on social media who look like they are super confident. But actually, my dear listener, I will let you in to a secret. Nearly 60 % of us believe we're not confident enough in new social situations. and even in the therapy room I see people who are very very skilled professionally but who don't feel confident in their private lives and there's also the case that too much confidence can be detrimental to our state of mind. As usual I'll be exploring the topic with my expert guest and together we'll be hearing a listener's experience and can hopefully give you some insight and understanding about you and your confidence.

2:42Kimberley Wilson:So let me be your guide from the relegation zone of misinformation to the World Cup win of understanding.

2:55Kimberley Wilson:And I am joined today by a fellow counselling psychologist, Dr. Oli Twizel. Oli, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Kimpley. It's a real pleasure to be here. Can you tell me and the listeners a little bit about your work? Yeah, so I am a counselling psychologist. I work predominantly with elite athletes, but also kind of high performance individuals in the corporate world as well. Confidence is a theme that comes about time and time again. How does it show up in your therapy room? So it's interesting. I think with each person, there are different facets of confidence where it might be elevated in some ways and then it might be shrunk in other ways.

3:38So it's very dependent on the client really.

3:42Kimberley Wilson:Okay, thank you. And I also hear that you are from a farming background. Is that right? Yes, yes. How is it then that you kind of, what brought you over into the world of psychology? I had a fantastic A-level psychology teacher. I just fell in love with it and it just kind of found a home with it. When it's related to farming and my dad, I think it's maybe a bit cliche, but generally the farming community aren't necessarily comfortable with therapy and counseling and psychology. So yeah, I grew up in that kind of childhood and that family dynamic where we didn't really talk about our feelings.

4:22And then when I stumbled across psychology and I kind of got very interested and passionate about it, it then became a bit of a challenge for myself and just to try and communicate what I wanted to do. My parents, my dad particularly, didn't have a clue what I wanted to, you know, what I was doing and what I was interested in. So then I think, in all honesty, that's probably what directed me into the sport because my dad and I are passionate about sport. A lot of our kind of conversations revolve around sports. So that was a shared language for the two of you. It was a shared language. which was an avenue for me to kind of communicate to my dad and show to him actually what I was wanting to do.

4:57Kimberley Wilson:Okay, I think this is going to be a fantastic episode.

5:05Kimberley Wilson:Now, as listeners know, I do love to start with a definition. I'd like us all to be on the same page. And the dictionary definition of confidence is the quality of being certain about your abilities. Oli would you agree with that would you have a different clinical definition of confidence as you see it my instinct to that is I gently challenge that the way which I see self-confidence is there's an umbrella I think there are three key facets to self-confidence the three bits are self-worth self-esteem and self-efficacy I might need you to define those for the listener. So let's look at self-efficacy.

5:49Self-efficacy is just a fancy word really for agency and power. How much we believe in our abilities to do something, our confidence to do something.

5:58Kimberley Wilson:Do I have the power to create change in my world? Absolutely. So if someone were to hand me a guitar, I wouldn't know which end to hold it, frankly, right? But the self-efficacy would be the ability that I have to feel like I could learn to play the guitar. Yeah. And some people may pick up a guitar and think, I'm not even going to try. Their self-efficacy will be so low that they feel, well, it's just not even worth me. I don't have the hand-eye coordination. Absolutely. That's one facet of it. But then the other side is a self-worth. So self-worth is how much value do I feel I have just by showing up in the room?

6:39So that could be just the fact that I feel that I matter, no matter what, whether I can play the guitar or not. And then self-esteem, this is a little bit more external. It's the value that I have within the world that I'm operating. You can have really good self-worth. You can have good self-esteem, but your self-efficacy, your belief in doing things might be quite low or there might be any combination of those three that one might be falling a little bit and the other two might might still be strong so you may appear confident in certain situations but actually there are going to be other areas where you're

7:17Kimberley Wilson:going to feel less confident thank you that's a really nuanced take because i think when we're thinking therapeutically psychologically it's important for people to hear that your confidence isn't this kind of static thing where you're going to be confident in every single situation with every different kind of person, that it might be really kind of contingent on who you're with, what skills you think you have, your sense of your ability to learn and adapt and change, and that that's going to make your confidence much more open to intervention, change, improvement, and all those sorts of things.

7:56Absolutely. And the key bit is to just to be able to take a step back and just to be open-minded and to maybe do some of that deep work on yourself to say do I feel like I can build this because when it comes to self-confidence it's not something that we're either born with or we're not it's something that we develop and we can gain it and

8:15Kimberley Wilson:we can lose it yeah that's great thank you so much let's get deeper into the complexity

8:25Kimberley Wilson:okay now ollie i'm going to share a story that's been passed to us from someone i'll call felix to protect his identity and i would love to know what you think so felix says i often wonder how to make my confidence stay constant around different people i can be so confident around one person and then completely underconfident around another. I think it's because your sense of self is also so weirdly dependent on who you're with. Also, what is healthy confidence and how do you get it? So lots of questions there, but he really touches on this first part, which you've already described, which is that our confidence can be situational.

9:09Kimberley Wilson:It is about kind of where we are, who we're with, and the combination of those qualities. Yeah, it's some fascinating questions that he poses in that email. And I'm guessing he feels more confident with the people he maybe spends more time with, or his closer friends or family. And he likely feels just a little bit more safer to show a little bit more of himself in those situations. But then we can find ourselves often in a work situation or a a professional situation where we might feel a little bit out of depth and we might feel a little bit like our value might not necessarily be appreciated.

9:47And a lot of that is our self-talk and that's the way in which we're addressing ourselves in those situations.

9:53Kimberley Wilson:He does also ask, you know, what is healthy confidence? Can we kind of describe that? Can we distill healthy confidence for him? Healthy confidence is having a nice balance around that self-worth. The self-worth it's a very internal thing. It doesn't tend to change. It's how you feel, like how you matter and how you show up in the world. And then recognizing that your self-esteem is changeable. And there are times when actually we might even just be having a bit of an off day and we walk into that room and we're just not quite feeling it. And that's okay. You know, we can't be expected to be totally confident at all times.

10:30And then I think as I said, in my world, when I'm speaking to athletes, they tend to have really high self-efficacy. They tend to have a real high sense of they can achieve because they have achieved in their own sporting domain, but they may fall a little bit on self-worth or self-esteem. But when we think about whatever we need, I have a belief that whatever we need is already inside us. So whatever Felix is wanting to get out of building this confidence in different situations. He's already got within him. He's shown himself because he's shown up in other situations where he's felt confident.

11:09Kimberley Wilson:Yeah. Thank you, Ollie. And thank you, Felix, for sending in your email.

11:18So, Ollie, you work with high-performing individuals.

11:24Kimberley Wilson:We assume that they're confident. what does confidence look like when i think about someone who's confident it's an internal thing rather than an external thing it's not necessarily the person who's talking the loudest in the room it's not necessarily the person who's kind of if you like showing their confidence in certain ways um some people can inadvertently just exude confidence but other people can just quietly be in the corner and recognize and appreciate their values and their abilities. The word ease feels really appropriate there is that it's not about kind of demonstrations of grandiosity, but a kind of ease is actually a really nice way of describing it.

12:13I think misconception that we have in society that you have to be that big, bold, brash person. Sometimes the big, bold, brash person is the least confident.

12:21Kimberley Wilson:Right. Sometimes they're the least confident and this is their shield. absolutely yeah and maybe that's the point because i suppose when we're thinking about the opposite you know what does it mean to lack confidence we can all be sensitive to criticism or what we might experience as judgment but it's about how far that permeates our sense of self-worth how long we ruminate on whatever that criticism or critique might be how much value we give to that other person's opinion of us that would mean that that's actually saying something about our confidence. And I think part of what we all should be looking at is thinking about those three legs to the stool, thinking about the self-worth, the self-esteem and the self-efficacy and recognizing within yourself, which one of those legs is maybe a little bit longer than the other.

13:08Which bits of that do I feel I can recognize, I can hang my hat on and say, yep, that leg seems to be okay for me. I might need to do a little bit of work on this one.

13:18Kimberley Wilson:But also your point about the assumptions we make about other people's confidence is really interesting and important because, you know, there's a YouGov poll that says that nearly 60 % of us say that we're not confident in new social settings, for example. So actually, most of us have a sense of insecurity or a lack of confidence in new environments. And I feel like that makes sense. It does. We should recognize and be comfortable that our confidence is going to go up and down throughout the day. But coming at it with an open mind, I think, is the important bit. I think with the rise of social media in particular, there's this sense that everybody else is super confident.

14:02They're all posting these wonderful things about themselves.

14:05Kimberley Wilson:They've all got perfect skin and they have ideal workout routines and loads of friends. And that's bound to affect us. It's those two things that coincide because we know that certainly self-esteem takes a nosedive around puberty, adolescence, early 20s. There are brain changes that make you much more sensitive to the opinions and behaviours of your peers. But then also, you suddenly have these millions of so-called peers on social media who are presenting the very best size of themselves, who are, unbeknownst to you, using all sorts of filters to change their faces and their bodies and all sorts of things.

14:45Kimberley Wilson:And I think it really skews your sense of what normal is at a particularly vulnerable stage in your development. I do worry for that if I'm honest if I look back I've got two young children and the world in which they're going to be growing up in and as you said there before people with filters and unbeknownst to them they look this perfect person and they live this perfect world and the reality is that we all struggle and we all struggle with self-confidence we all struggle with with life at times no one's immune to that So what are you doing to help foster good confidence in your children? Because we do know that there's an aspect of building confidence, which is about early life, right?

15:30Kimberley Wilson:It's the feedback that you get from the environment from your parents and your caregivers. As a psychologist with two young children, what kinds of things are you thinking about? One example that I have that is an example of me getting it wrong is with my eldest. She was about three at the time and I love swimming. I swam as a kid. A lot of my thinking time is done in the pool. And we decided that it was important for our children to be water confident. And my eldest is actually quite good. She's got some good skills. She's got great confidence and she loves it. And then about six months ago, she went through a bit of a regression and she learned the word no.

16:07So I knew that my daughter could do these skills and I was trying to get her to do them. And the more I was trying, the more she was refusing. It was getting very frustrating for me and it was getting very frustrating for her. And it culminated in the end of one of the classes. The teacher came up to me and told me that I needed to just focus on having fun. and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I was stood there. I was thinking, I am becoming the parent that I desperately didn't want to be. I didn't want to be that pushy parent. And I was allowing my frustration to affect the confidence of my daughter.

16:46Kimberley Wilson:And presumably you allowed your anxieties to flow over into her. Absolutely. Her self-esteem starts to diminish. Her sense of efficacy, power, agency. So the point is, I guess, we all get it wrong. I think a lot of parents get really worried that their kids aren't going to be confident enough to compete in what is a very competitive world. And so the tendency is to push, push, push, pick yourself up. And I wonder whether you see this working with professional athletes, which is actually the background is push, push, push and drive but maybe that doesn't necessarily equate to confidence in the way that the parents might have hoped yeah i do you're absolutely right because that shows up in the athlete world it's a sense of identity then their confidence is very much centered around one specific entity and then that i think can become very very problematic in the future to your self-confidence so a lot of the work that I would do with athletes is asking them, who are you?

17:52And they may say, I'm a footballer. Okay. Now, a very successful footballer has been a footballer since they were four or five. They show good promise. Mommy, daddy took them to training, took them to extra training. And then that becomes something that they own. And it's something that who they are. So that becomes a real issue I think because as soon as that is stripped away from them they lose their place in the team they don't progress within the team they get injured because suddenly your identity

18:24Kimberley Wilson:is stripped from you yeah you make me think about the risk of conditional affection mummy or daddy is proud of you because you're a good footballer because you were man of the match this time round because you won that award and the real risk then to a child and the adult that they become to their self-esteem if all of their sense of worth is on performance? A hundred percent. Their efficacy is really high, but it's just the self-esteem can plummet in that situation. So to bring it back to me in the swimming pool, the reality is that at times we're all getting it wrong.

19:05Kimberley Wilson:Okay, and so let's flip the switch. We've been talking about kind of underconfidence and risks to confidence. What about having too much confidence? Is it possible to have too much? To me, I think the main risk of being overconfident is a lack of self-awareness. You know, that arrogance of the person who walks in the room who doesn't quite read the room. But I don't think that we could ever have too much confidence if, as long as, we're aware of it. Yes. So not like the 6 % of respondents in this 2021 YouGov poll who believe that they could beat a grizzly bear in a fight. Well, good luck to them.

19:47I'll let those 6 % go ahead of me and that's fine. But yeah, it's recognising what strengths and qualities you have in any given situation and knowing the time when you have to walk away.

19:59Kimberley Wilson:Exactly. You're going into surgery or you're getting onto a plane. you want your surgeon or your pilot to have an appropriate level of confidence you know you want them to be skilled you want them to know what they know but you you don't want them to be overconfident to the point where they will take risks because they're so sure of their capability so there's a kind of a balance to be struck which I think you're saying is about self-awareness about knowing what your limitations are and not pushing it yeah I think there's definitely something to that if If people are tipping into that arrogance or they're tipping into that lack of awareness of themselves and the situation, then it can become problematic.