Confidence. It’s something we talk about often, especially in the sports world, but as pertains to ourselves and in a more general life context, it’s a bit different. It can almost seem like you either have it or you don’t. Developing it can be a challenge.
Sometimes you gain confidence unexpectedly – and sometimes that gain is an even bigger boost than most. Not all confidence boosts are created equal. Sometimes other people give you confidence in ways that might not be apparent at the time, or whose impact may not be apparent right away.
For years while covering college basketball, confidence was a subject that would come up, especially with young teams. It was often a thought with non-conference schedules – a light schedule is often designed to build confidence as teams get wins, even over teams they should beat from a talent standpoint, while a challenging one can lead to confidence hits if a team keeps losing, even to good teams. You want to see a reward for your work, so when all the work you put in results in loss after loss, that can be damaging, because we’re humans, not robots.
This would play out from time to time in exactly the ways theorized. A talented team that played a schedule full of top teams and lost too many of them would lose confidence at some point. At times after that, they wouldn’t play the way they normally did, even playing not to lose instead of to win, and in the end, chances are they would underachieve. Meanwhile, a team that might be younger would start winning games that in theory they shouldn’t, carried further by their confidence from earlier wins. They might go on to overachieve.
I can relate in my own career to the effects on both ends of the spectrum. There have been stretches in my career where I have had setbacks and subsequently lost confidence. It’s one thing to have a tough day or two; we all have them, and occasionally we might even have a funk where it feels like a whole week is a challenge. It’s quite another to have a prolonged stretch like that or have the kind of setbacks that have more of an effect. From there, my abilities and the end result later on took a hit; I could feel the loss of confidence I had in myself, and I know I didn’t perform as well as I’m capable of. Losing confidence can sap the output of even the most talented performers.
Fortunately, I have been on the other side of that and am there right now. When a person has confidence in their abilities, they can not only perform to their potential, but start to believe they can accomplish more than they have ever thought possible. I can feel this in myself now, all going back to two particular times where others gave me that confidence and probably didn’t know it at the time.
Several years ago, I met a few executives from a company disrupting adult education. One in particular had the idea that I might teach a technical class or two that they had in their curriculum. I expressed interest, and after a couple of conversations with others on the team, that came to fruition. I taught two of them after never really thinking about doing it before, and enjoyed the experience.
I have plenty of technical knowledge, but having knowledge doesn’t translate into teaching by definition. Not everyone is cut out to pass knowledge along to others in a way that helps them understand the subject. We have all had effective teachers and ones who couldn’t teach to save their lives despite having immense knowledge; at colleges and universities, professors rarely have anything less than doctorate degrees. I got the opportunity and enjoyed it, and look forward to more such opportunities down the road. This pushed me past the point of believing I can do this, and then leads into the second time where this happened because it goes along with it.
More recently, a senior colleague has consistently engaged me on many technical subjects since I joined the company, and he has long been big on knowledge transfer. He’s likely closer to the end of his illustrious career than the beginning, hence his consideration of who will carry the torch going forward. I see him engage many in the company, often helping to spread his knowledge and encourage growth.
He builds up those he deals with, but he’s done something else with me. After I went through a group study of perhaps the seminal book on TCP/IP, which he led, in our subsequent conversations he encouraged me to lead a similar study on a book on the Linux kernel. He had been talking about doing that, and I thought he would lead while I helped him set it up, but instead, he called on me to lead it, picking the book from a number of possibilities. I took that as a big sign of confidence on his part in me. From there was born one of my current side projects, where the group I am leading is now about a third of the way through one of the best books on the Linux kernel (although, as I noted before, many of the best books on that subject are old ones).
Notice how in each case, there was not a direct expression of confidence in my ability. Neither said, “You can do it” straight to me, although they surely could have. Rather, it was implied from the only question being my interest in either teaching or leading the study. In many respects, that might have been more powerful than an overt expression of such, and sometimes, that’s what we need. Sometimes we know we have the ability to do things but feel like we need “permission,” for lack of a better term, to do it. We can sometimes think, “Who am I to (fill in the blank)?” This is especially true if we’re talking about something that many people do, where there is plenty of competition.
We can all boost the confidence of others, and do so in ways that are more subtle but perhaps also more effective. There is no harm in directly telling someone they can do something that they might express some doubt about; that is welcome no matter the situation. Inviting someone to do something, or speaking of them doing just that in the affirmative as if it is sure to happen can have an out-sized impact on their confidence.
The aforementioned expressions of confidence still resonate for me and help drive me today. They might not have seemed like it at the time, but the effect – driving me to better things, like some confidence boosts can do – is the same as if it was obvious at the time.