Category: confidence
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Grounded hope
What’s wrong with positive thinking? In their book Supersurvivors, David Feldman and Lee Daniel Kravetz explain: The supporters of positive thinking get to have it their way no matter what. If people succeed at work, thrive in life or survive an illness, those supporters can say, “See! It was the positive thinking that did it.”…
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Gaining confidence
What’s the “magic formula” for gaining confidence? “For once, we found surprising clarity and consensus,” write Katty Kay and Claire Shipman in their book The Confidence Code. “Confidence…requires hard work, substantial risk, determined persistence and sometimes bitter failure. Building it demands regular exposure to all of these things. “You don’t get to experience how far…
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The pursuit of perfection
What’s the most crippling thing we do to undermine our confidence? Trying to be perfect, answer Katty Kay and Claire Shipman in their book The Confidence Code. “If perfectionism is your standard, of course you will never be fully confident because the bar is always impossibly high, and you will inevitably and routinely feel inadequate.…
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When in doubt, act
Katty Kay and Claire Shipman stress that the most important lesson to remember from their book The Confidence Code is this: “When in doubt, act.” “Nothing builds confidence like taking action, especially when the action involves risk and failure,” the two authors explain. “Risk keeps you on life’s edge. It keeps you growing, improving and…
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The opportunity to get over it
Major General Jessica Wright, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, remembers when she was a brand-new lieutenant, and a superior told her that he didn’t like females in the military. “There were 500 things going through my head,” the major told Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, who write about the incident in their book…