F (2:18)

And I'm your co host Frances Fry. I'm a Harvard Business School professor and I'm Ann's wife.

A (2:24)

We hope everyone out there had a very restorative summer you can't fix things without taking breaks, as we've talked about before on the show. And since we've had the chance to take a break, we are delighted to share brand new episodes of Fixable with you.

F (2:39)

We're back, baby.

A (2:41)

We are also very excited to announce that we're opening the fall season with a theme which is something we have never done before.

F (2:48)

Oh, I love innovation. What's the theme? Is it can do lesbian spirit?

A (2:53)

You're close, Frances. This season we're going to go after the topic of confidence, which is something you and I think about a lot. It's such a big variable in leadership and such a big variable in our experience of work and of life. So we're going to do a whole series of shows where we look at confidence from a bunch of different angles and try to figure out how it really works.

F (3:15)

We have a lot to say about this. It's something that comes up all the time in our work, including in the questions we get from you, our listeners.

A (3:23)

Yes, that is a great point. Please keep those questions coming. We are planning a quick fix episode on Confidence later in the series. So send us all your burning questions. Are you nervous about stepping into a new role? Are you trying to build up someone else's confidence? Whatever you're thinking about, we want to hear about it. Frances, remind people how they can communicate with us.

F (3:46)

You can call or text us at 234- FIXABLE. That's 234-349-2253. Shoot us an email@fixableed.com all right, after much ado.

A (4:00)

To kick this series off today, we wanted to talk to someone who has been studying the science of confidence for a very long time. So today, the fabulous Ian Robertson is joining us. Ian is a neuroscientist, a clinical psychologist, a professor of psychology at Trinity College Dublin. He's the author of a terrific book called called How Confidence the New Science of Self Belief.

F (4:24)

What I love about Ian's work is he's a great researcher who also is trying to democratize access to some really big ideas.

A (4:31)

Absolutely. These are big ideas that can change the way people move through the world. He is the perfect person to kick us off this season, so let's bring him in. Ian Robertson, welcome to Fixable.

D (4:49)

It's great to be here.

A (4:50)

All right, to start us off, tell us what you mean when you talk about confidence. We want to define the term because we really want to get a hold of this incredible variable in our lives as individuals, but also as leaders of teams and of whole Systems.

D (5:06)

So let me say what it's not. Confidence is not optimism. Optimism is the belief that things will turn out well. Now it's good to be optimistic, and optimistic people are healthier. But it's not confidence and it's not self esteem. Self esteem is your self evaluation. And actually, people can spend an enormous amount of energy trying to protect that self evaluation and can sometimes have the opposite effects to what confidence does. So the critical thing about confidence in the brain and the human brain is, is it's linked to action. Confidence is the belief that you can do a particular thing and that if you do that, then the result, the outcome you want, is more likely to happen. But the critical thing about confidence is it crosses that bridge to the future. The future is by definition uncertain. And so confidence is an uncertainty master. It helps us navigate uncertainty and take action while coping with the anxiety that uncertainty causes.

A (6:19)

Well, what do we do about that anxiety? How can we be confident even in the presence of anxiety?

D (6:24)

People tend to reify anxiety these days to see it as a disorder rather than a perfectly normal response to uncertainty. And by adopting the kind of mindset of confidence, it's possible to make anxiety your friend and make it the energizer of your behavior. Because anxiety is just one of a number of emotions like excitement or anger, which all have the same psychophysiology. And what they are is a general arousal of the brain and body preparing for action. And that means you can harness anxiety to jiu jitsu into excitement in the context of embracing uncertainty in a confident mindset.

A (7:12)

I love it. Now that we've established what confidence is and isn't, I want to talk about how we can do this for ourselves, but also for each other. You organized this idea into four states of the mind or brain. What are those states? How does understanding those four states help us to be more confident?

D (7:32)

Yeah. So let me just say that the confidence is the bridge to the future. It helps you cross the bridge to the future. And that bridge has two strands to it. One is can do. That's what Albert Bandura, the great Stanford psychologist, called self efficacy. And the other is can happen, which is the outcome expectation. So I think I can stop smoking. Can do. And I think if I stop smoking, I can stop. Will become healthier and live longer. Can happen. So these two strands give you four states of the mind and brain. One of them is can't do, couldn't happen. And that's apathy. And apathy in the brain. Actually, you can visualize it using positron emission Tomography scanning and you can see lower levels of dopamine receptors in the brain's reward network. So apathy makes you, lowers your initiative, makes you less mentally sharp because there's less dopamine in your prefrontal cortex, makes you less persuasive, it makes you more depressed, it makes you more anxious. And confidence does the very opposite to that.

A (8:39)

And so is can do, can happen. That's the confident state.

D (8:43)

Yes, that's right.

A (8:45)

What is can happen but can't do, what state is that?

D (8:49)

So that's one of the other quadrants where you think, get that college degree. I think I can do that. That self efficacy can do, however, but with my background, it's not going to get me a better job. That leads to a sense of frustration and anger.

A (9:05)

Got it.

D (9:06)

And that sense of frustration and anger when you think you can do it but you're going to be blocked, that raises another set of whole fight and flight system of the brain, the noradrenaline, norepinephrine system. And too much of that in your brain clouds your thinking, clouds judgment. And that's an awful state. It's very much part of the political landscape worldwide these days. The opposite to that is, oh, I can't do that. You know, I can't change my diet. I know if I could I'd become healthier and feel better, but I just can't do it. That tends to lead to depression and again, high anxiety and makes it difficult to correctly assess probabilities of success and failure and to act according to these probabilities. We're all having to become probability experts. Can I do this? No one can say with 100% certainty you can do this, but you have to then say, look, there's a 90% chance I can do this. I believe I can do it. I'm going to choose to focus on that 90% probability and increase my chances of doing it because of the confidence effects that has.

F (10:19)

So if the upper right quadrant is confident, and for me, upper left is frustration, lower right is depression. What's the no, no, what's the can't? What's the label for that?

D (10:30)

That's apathy.

A (10:31)

Apathy.

D (10:32)

And apathy is the most disabling state of all. It's the opposite of confidence. And it means that if you've had a lot of setbacks in life, your ability even to cope with these setbacks in your own brain is reduced because of your lower mood, your higher anxiety, your lower motivation. You're less mentally sharp and you're less persuasive people don't listen to you and people don't see you. And that's what tough socioeconomic conditions do to people. Except there's a proportion of people who are not ground down by poverty. And that's people who have a, a sense of control. They perceive themselves to have some control in their worlds. And that of course, goes with confidence. So confidence is I am confident in social situations. I can do presentations. I'm confident in my work. You may not be confident socially, but you can be confident academically. So it's your belief about your ability to perform certain categories of behavior in certain situations and it's that link to specific categories of action that means that is why confidence works.

A (11:43)

Beautiful.

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A (13:49)

So, Ian, we're going to bring you into some coaching scenarios and talk about how we move through these quadrants that you have defined for us.

F (13:58)

Let's do frustration.

D (13:59)

Yeah.

A (14:00)

And remind us all what that is.

F (14:02)

Frustration is. I can do it, but I don't think it's going to matter. I can get the college degree, but I don't think even with a college degree it's going to affect my prospects. Do I have that right, Ian?

D (14:13)

Yes, you're absolutely right. All emotions have a function. Fear is to get us escape and allow us to pass on our genes. Disgust. Stop us being poisoned and to be killed and allow us to survive to pass on our genes. Anger. Its evolutionary purpose is as a negotiating tool. Anger is to allow us to get our way in a situation of conflict. And so if you feel generally angry in a non specific way, the world is unfair, or I'm stuck because of nameless forces against me, that will be an acid that will burn you up.

F (14:55)

So I'm angry at work because I was passed over for a promotion.

D (15:01)

Yeah.

F (15:01)

Can you help me with the target and the request?

D (15:03)

Yes. So what is the cause of my failed promotion? Is it something I failed to do or wasn't as good at, or was there just someone better than me who got it? Or is it to do with some unfairness? Is someone deliberately thwarting me? So it depends on what your analysis of the situation is. If you put it down to the randomness that's inherent in all assessment systems, you have to say, well, look, the world has a certain amount of randomness in it. You have to live with this. I'm just going to have to accept I didn't get it this time and I'm going to move on. So you can neutralize your anger by your analysis of the situation. Similarly, if it was the case that in some way there was someone performing better than you that got a limited quota promotion, you say, well, okay, my job is to, to become a bit better and I'll get it next time there's a round of promotions. If it's unfairness, say by someone senior, if you think someone either wasn't doing their job properly, then that's a very tricky one because of course your senior person has power over you and you have to deal very, very carefully with power. In some ways your boss is your only client. And so if you've got a boss who's behaving unfairly to you, then you have to say, what realistically can I do? The goal might be to Actually, see if your boss is aware that this is the case and say, okay, my goal to channel my frustration and anger. My goal is to attempt to have a very respectful and civilized conversation with my boss. Now, maybe your boss is just the kind of person is going to behave whimsically, say, okay, if you don't like it, you can get out of here. You know, that's the risk. So then your anger has to be then channeled into, right, okay, am I going to stay here? Have I any choices? Am I going to move and to say, I'm going to show them, I'm going to show them, I'm going to go out, my anger is going to be channeled. My, my job, I'm going to find a better job, and they're going to regret having done this. So that's the way of channeling your anger and to make it energizing. But it's all about selecting goals, selecting goals and assessing probabilities.

A (17:37)

So let's say I am confident in doing my job, but I am not confident in giving big presentations. So that's a profile we see a lot. What's my action plan towards confidence in this one?

D (17:51)

It's all about goal setting. And so setting goals too, have the sweet spot. Goals that are too easy don't give us a boost in confidence. Goals that are stretches that are a little bit, there's a little bit of uncertainty. Can I do this or not? Doing the thing makes you feel a bit anxious. If you manage to achieve a goal like that that stretches you, that's one of the great sources of confidence, doing something in spite of anxiety. So you think about the big presentation. But no, what you do is you say, okay, I have to contrive a situation that makes me mildly anxious. So I'm going to get one of my friends and I'm going to simulate a formal presentation. But there's only one of my friends sitting there. You can do this over zoom, you can do it face to face, whatever, but I'm going to do it as if role play, as if it was a formal presentation. And then you're going to say, actually, next time I'm going to do it with a couple of friends, which makes it more intimidating. And the next time I'm going to do actually with a couple of colleagues I'm not so familiar with. And then you're gradually stretching yourself. And this is where taking action and doing the behaviors. And if you do that, you will definitely find that there will be some other intermediate goals that may involve a Small list, not a big keynote presentation in a big hall. It may be, you know, a dozen colleagues around a table at work. So if you can contrive carefully graded goals of behavior, making sure that none of the goals are too easy, if you're 100% certain you can do something, you don't need confidence. Okay, so people that we. When we see people that look effortly and we say, oh, that person's so confident, they're so effortless and they're not confident. They're just in habit mode. They've done this so often before that they're not dealing with uncertainty. They maybe have power or status. That means they don't have to think about possible downsides. But it's not confidence they have. The confidence always has to go with a bit of anxiety. So it's almost like you make anxiety. Your friend and Tiger woods, the golfer, he said that the day I'm not nervous when I go onto the green is the day I give up. Because he needs that level of norepinephrine in his brain to achieve his sweet spot. And when he goes in there, that kind of edgy, edgy anticipation of the goal that's stretching you a bit. If you manage to do the thing helped by that edgy anticipation, you will get a significant boost to your confidence. And of course, confidence, like compound interest, is exponential.

A (20:43)

Yeah, we've told this story in the show before, but a big aha moment for me was seeing a world class guitarist perform and filled up an entire stadium. There's no question that she's among the best of the best. And we happened to be sitting in a way where we could see her hands very clearly. The first couple songs that she performed, she was shaking the whole time. And this is someone who has performed countless times. If you were to zoom with her, you would just have trophies and Grammys behind her. And so in that moment, it was clear that she might have been using that anxiety in some way. It might have been helpful to her, but in some ways she just seemed to be ignoring it. Like the act was to perform this beautiful music in spite of the fact that her body was sending her all these warning signals to stop. So is the goal to take action in spite of these feelings or to really wrestle these feelings into something else? Or both.

D (21:48)

You rightly pointed out her attention, particularly later on in the performance would have been all in the music, all in the notes. She would have felt that one with her instrument and being carried away. And that's the other huge factor in confidence, is what you pay attention to.

A (22:07)

This advice would have been very helpful to me last week. I got totally thrown off when the skeptic in the room got on his phone and stopped listening. Meanwhile, there were 10 other people who were leaning in.

D (22:19)

Exactly.

A (22:20)

And I lost my mojo in the middle. I got it back. But that's really practical advice.

D (22:25)

There's a part of your brain, the anterior cingulate, a conflict. And if locks onto threat signals, it's a priority signal. And so you're having to use your prefrontal cortex to drag your attention away from that primitive call on your attention.

A (22:40)

Yeah, I love it. Super helpful. So we think a lot about leadership in our work. So how do we inspire confidence in other people? What are some reliable ways that we can help other people to become more confident?

D (22:55)

Well, the first thing is the leader of the team has to genuinely believe that we can do it and not just I can do it. There is such a thing as collective confidence. So mediocre teams can produce stellar results if they have the collective belief that we can do this. And that's why some sports teams do really. Maybe we don't have star players in them. The right coach or manager can get that feeling of, we can do this. You can get outstanding results. So that's a precondition. And that, of course, requires that you don't have too much egotism or narcissism on the part of the leader. You know, inspiring charismatic leaders can be great and they can be generous and they can be inspiring. But if it's all about me, then they can diminish the collective confidence of a team because everyone else think, oh, I could never be that good. So there has to be a generosity of spirit and humility in a leader to inspire collective confidence. But the second thing I would say about that and related to that is there was brilliant research done at Carnegie Mellon on Group IQ. The IQ of a group is independent of the individual IQs of the members of the average IQ of the members. Instead, the performance of a small group trying to solve an IQ type problem is predicated on three things. One is how roughly equal the time speaking was between the members of the group in trying to solve the problem. In other words, if you had a group where one or two people do all the talking and the other people are not really participating, that group will be less smart. Because sometimes it's the quiet person who feels inhibited by the person who's doing all the dominant talking. That person may have some brilliant ideas going on, but they're inhibited. The Second thing is the average ability of the group members to read other people's emotional expressions. So that's the social intelligence, the emotional intelligence. And thirdly was the gender balance in the group between males and females. And that's because on average, women are better at reading other people's emotional expressions than men. So if you think about it, what you're doing when a group of people try and solve a problem is essentially, it's like networking computers together. And computers have to be networked and they have to have good free flow of information between them. But if you have a network brains, and if you've got a number of people in the network that don't know that the other person's looking as if they want to say something, or looking doubtful, or looking worried, or looking angry or looking irritated, you're not going to network the brains together. Well, so that's why the other thing about collective confidence is this, making sure that you're using your networking the brains of the team together. And to the extent that you do, that will also contribute to collective confidence.

A (26:06)

So let's say I'm a leader of a team, and whether it's a mediocre team or team of a players, we're going to hit setbacks at some point. So what can I do as a leader of a team facing a setback to make sure that we come through that in a way that increases our confidence rather than reduces it?

D (26:27)

Yeah. So attitude to failure is critical for confidence. And we all have failures at times. But there's a great risk if you have a failure, a setback, say a promotion or a failed job application or a failed relationship. Indeed, where there's a tendency often for us to start thinking big, I thoughts? I'm this or I'm that or I'm not this or I'm not that. And the trouble is they all convey a fixed mindset and we know that from the research that mistakes and failures are actually much better teacher than success. And so if you can learn to approach failure with a process thought. Okay, let's analyze what went wrong here and what that does. Of course it puts you in action mode rather than kind of retreat protecting your self esteem that's been threatened by the failure. You're now in action mode thinking, okay, well let me analyze this. What went wrong there? Why did I fail? Okay, was that an unfair selection procedure? Maybe. So what do I do about it? Was that some deficit in my presentation? What do I do about it? And then you're suddenly in the territory of goals, intermediate Goals. The great Irish middle distance runner, Sonia Sullivan. She bombed out at the Atlantic Olympics and she just forgot all about medals, forgot all about world titles, and it was just, could she improve her time in the next Saturday's race? And she changed her goals and she built up and ended up getting the silver medal against a runner from another country who got the gold medal, who turns out was drugged afterwards. So she really was the world champion, but she forgot all about the great honors and just refocused her goals.

A (28:18)

Yeah. When we see leaders model, that kind of relationship with the setback is incredibly infectious and incredibly powerful at the team level because people see that modeling and it's so persuasive. Do we need to worry about overconfidence for any reason? Is this a problem we should be thinking about?

D (28:38)

Oh, yes, big time. Big time. Because it's like nuclear energy. If something can do incredibly good things, it will be able to do incredibly bad things as well. You know, psychotherapy can harm as well as help. And confidence is so powerful that, yes, it's a two edged sword. Success can go to people's heads and they can start to attribute that success to something wonderful and magical in them. That's why most dictators end up feeling they're godlike, because they feel they're so special. They must be so special because they have such success. Actually, Most success is 90% luck. But success can intoxicate people. And then of course, you end up with too much dopamine in the brain reward network. You end up with the opposite. Your attention's now focused on future rewards. Makes you greedy, it makes you blinkered, makes you risk blind. It makes you dismissive of other people's opinions and believe that only you can make judgments on what we're talking recognizable foreign dictators.

F (29:52)

You're talking about a very prominent political phenomenon for sure.

D (29:57)

And it happens much more in male leaders than in women leaders.

A (30:01)

Stop it.

F (30:02)

Yeah.

A (30:03)

So what do we do about it when we spot this in other people, when we spot it in ourselves? What's a practical response that you have seen work, sir.

D (30:11)

There's only two things to combat this. One is external governance, and that's democracy. Was a brilliant invention to guard, to deal with the problem. We are a group species. Groups need leaders, but leaders become power intoxicated, many of them do. And that can lead to bad effects for the groups. Happened to Stalin, happened to Hitler, happened to Napoleon. And so that's why you need an independent judiciary. You need a free press, you need elections. And that's why in companies you need boards, you need governance, you need non executive directors, you need guidelines, you need audits. All of these things were designed because of this incredible effect of power and confidence on people's brains. But the only other category of things to consider this is internal constraints. And that is evidence that the potential power holder feels him or herself to be subject to principles or laws or guidance that's bigger than them. Ethics, constitutional, maybe sometimes even religious, that they know it's not all about them. And you can actually empirically verify whether people have this kind of motivation by the number of nots don'ts and shouldn'ts they have in their free speech. They're evidence of the internal inhibitory guardrails, the sense that they feel themselves constrained by things that are values, if you like, that are bigger than them. So that's the only two categories. And that's why selection of leaders, that's why the moral dimension is so incredibly important. Of course, the problem is now that has become unfashionable in politics. And so it's all about the constraints of government's legal constraints and democratic free press. And that's what the awful thing about the loss of newspapers, local newspapers, allowing local officials to do things that are not corrected by criticism or publicity, et cetera. That's why these things are so dangerous.

A (32:25)

Ian, if I'm listening and I want to do one thing tomorrow to boost my confidence, what's your advice?

D (32:33)

Take action in some domain that makes you feel uneasy. Do something. Do something. If you're stuck at home and you're anxious and you're frightened to go out, set yourself a goal. You're going to go out, walk 200ft down the road and back, Take action and then reward yourself for taking that action. In spite of uncertainty and anxiety, don't feel victim of nameless genetic or biological forces. Even someone with Alzheimer's disease has got quite a degree of brain plasticity. And it's all about you deciding and not being held back by fixed mindset deterministic myths about what you can and cannot do.

F (33:25)

I look forward to listening to this episode with our two teenage sons.

A (33:29)

I have so many more questions, Ian. I hope you'll come back and talk to us again.

D (33:37)

Thank you both very much.

G (33:52)

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Yep.

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A (36:02)

Frances, I'm curious what you wrote down on your pieces of paper.

F (36:07)

So the two by two of the can do can happen. Although in my mind it's can do might happen. So the fear is for escape. Disgust is for poison. Anger is for negotiating. There are just so many mic drop educational aspects of this. What should you do? The action plan associated with it. Goal settings. Too easy. Like everyone, I don't know if I'm part of the 90% that's right or 10% that's wrong. I got so much clarity from them. But that why stretch goals are helpful was very useful to me.

A (36:50)

You know, it's interesting like we selected this, you know Confidence as a theme. And we were like, oh, this isn't a lot of people. Think about it. I think what is really hitting me in this moment is the stakes of this force that is confidence for us as individuals, for organizations, for nations, for the like. This is the. This is a underexplored, like, literal force of nature. Like that is. Literal force of nature is so. Is so relevant to all of our lives on every level. I think that's. I mean, I found it quite sobering by the time we got to the end. And I'm thrilled we're going to hang out in this. On this confidence canvas for a little while.

F (37:40)

Places where I want to further explore. So the group IQ is independent of individuals iq. Wow. Just wow. So I also found that his knowledge of other people's work and then his ability to thread it in seamlessly with his waste. Beautiful. And then one thing I wrote, when I'm on Twitter, the only way I use Twitter is to talk about the wnba. So naturally I was writing WNBA themes in my margins. And Coach of the Year is coming up. Well, I just came up with a new definition of Coach of the Year based on this conversation, which is success conditioned on the number of Olympians you had. And what we usually do is we just give the Coach of the Year to the team that had the most success, but that's not who should. It should be conditioned on the quality of the individuals and who was able to genuinely believe we can do it. Yeah, that collective confidence. And so that's what I think a great coach can do. And I think we over reward people who are lucky enough to coach a lot of Olympians. And it's not that you can't be Coach of the Year if you coach a lot of Olympians, but you gotta perform a lot better than people who have no Olympians for it. And I think the way you do it is in that collective confidence. So that's an area I really look forward to our exploring.

A (39:06)

Yeah, I love that. You know, I don't usually take notes, but I wrote down three phrases in this conversation. One was, we can do it. Just the power of really getting in touch with that fact and making it infectious. The second was leaders become power intoxicated. As a rule of the universe. We're all susceptible to it, but we can put systems in place. Obviously, democracy is system capital S. But even inside our own lives and families and organizations, you know, the power of building in these guardrails because our own thoughts will become unreliable at some point depending on how much access to power we have and then do something.

F (39:53)

Do something. Sophie Cunningham.

A (39:58)

Back to the wnba. But just the power for all of us of just being in motion. We talk about action, absorbing anxiety, and it's this transformative metabolic thing. But there's this confidence byproduct that also comes out of it. Particularly we're doing something hard right where we're not a hundred percent sure we're going to be able to do it.

F (40:21)

So yeah, I fell in love with confidence throughout this conversation.

A (40:25)

In addition to Ian himself.

F (40:27)

In addition to Ian himself, I fell in love.

A (40:29)

I'm all in on confidence.

F (40:31)

Yeah. And that's our show. Thank you so much for listening. Please, please send us any and all questions you have about confidence at work. And it's also okay if you have other questions. We still want to help you solve those problems too. So please keep reaching out. Send us a message, email, call or text fixableed.com or 234-fixable. That's 234-349-2253.

A (41:05)

Fixable is brought to you by the TED Audio Collective and Pushkin Industries. It's hosted by me, Anne Morris and me, Frances Fry. This episode was produced by Rahima Nasser from Pushkin Industries. Our team includes Constanza Gallardo, Banban Chang, Daniela Valoraiso and Roxanne Hylash and our.

F (41:24)

Show was mixed by Louis at Storyyard.

B (41:41)

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.

E (42:01)

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C (42:30)

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