In many moments of my life, I have felt incapable of doing certain things like applying for a job, giving my opinion about a subject, learning something new and I continually ask myself why, why do I feel a lack of confidence in myself? Why don’t I feel safe? Why don’t I feel beautiful? Why don’t I feel smart?

I started reading many articles about the behaviour of women and men in the course of their growth, it really intrigues me how we make decisions, make good or bad choices or even worst, not make any choice. These crucial moments can literally change everything! Based on my experience of being afraid to make decisions because I do not feel capable of facing the consequences because “I am not intelligent enough” (bad thought), I found an article that talks about how women and men behave in life situations and that I would like to summarise here.

The article is written by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman. It starts by talking about lack of confidence: 

“Women feel confident only when they are perfect. Or practically perfect”. That is a crucial point. Perfectionism is a confidence killer. When people are confident, when they think they are good at something, regardless of how good they actually are, they display a lot of confident nonverbal and verbal behaviour. ” (the confidence gap)

Do you see yourself reflected in this comment ladies? I’m very much reflected!

“The natural result of low confidence is inaction. When women hesitate because we aren’t sure, we hold ourselves back.” (the confidence gap)

And this leads me to think about how we were educated when we were little? How did we grow up? What did we learn about the world of our childhood?

“Dweck writes in Mindset. Complicating matters, girls and boys get different patterns of feedback. “Boys’ mistakes are attributed to a lack of effort”, while “girls come to see mistakes as a reflection of their deeper qualities. Suggesting that women are more likely than men to form strong emotional memories of negative events since they were young.” (the confidence gap)

Ok, so let’s think about what confidence is and how we can develop it, here’s a definition according to Richard Petty:

“Confidence is the stuff that turns thoughts into action.”

Anger, intelligence, creativity can play a role.” But confidence is essential because it applies in more situations than these other traits do. It is the factor that turns thoughts into judgments about what we are capable of, and that then transforms those judgments into action.” (the confidence gap)

The article concludes by talking about Zachary Estes experiment, (a research psychologist) in which he separated two groups, one of the women and one of the men, he asked them to carry out a  3-d puzzling test to verify that the two groups were equally capable of solving them, where he verified that yes, but the most interesting comes at the end of his experiment:

“Estes decided to attempt a direct confidence boost. He told some members of the group, completely at random, that they had done very well on the previous test. On the next test they took, those men and women improved their scores dramatically. It was a clear measure of how confidence can be self-perpetuating.” (the confidence gap)

My conclusion is, we have to change our thoughts towards ourselves, change our brain and act, just act without thinking what would happen next, have positive thoughts and if they come out a negative thought, question yourself why you are thinking that? take out an imaginary broom, sweep the thought and send it out of your body and boost confidence in the people around you, spreading some nice words maybe will help to start a confidence butterfly effect!