We spend vast amounts of time acquiring confidence in narrow technical fields: quadratic equations or bioengineering; economics or pole vaulting. But we overlook the primordial need to acquire a more free-ranging variety of confidence – one that can serve us across a range of tasks: speaking to strangers at parties, asking someone to marry us, suggesting a fellow passenger turn down their music, changing the world.
Once we learn to see ourselves as already, and by nature, foolish, it won’t matter so much if we do one more thing that might look stupid. The person we try to kiss could indeed think us ridiculous. The individual from whom we asked directions in a foreign city might regard us with contempt. But if these people did so, it wouldn’t be news to us. They would only be confirming what we had already gracefully accepted long ago: that we, like them – and every other person on the earth – are a nitwit. The risk of trying and failing would have its sting substantially removed. The fear of humiliation would no longer stalk us in the shadows of our minds. We would grow free to try things by accepting that failure was the norm. And every so often, amid the many rebuffs we would have factored in from the outset, it would work: we’d get a kiss, we’d make a friend, we’d get a raise.
Faced with challenges, we often leave the possibility of success to others, because we don’t seem to ourselves to be the sort of people who win.
The impostor syndrome has its roots far back in childhood – specifically in the powerful sense children have that their parents are very different from them. To a four-yearold, it is incomprehensible that their mother was once their age and unable to drive a car, tell the plumber what to do, decide other people’s bedtimes and go on trips with colleagues. The gulf in status appears absolute and unbridgeable. The child’s passionate loves – bouncing on the sofa, Pingu, Toblerone – have nothing to do with those of adults, who like to sit at a table talking for hours and drinking beer that tastes like rusty metal. We start out in life with a very strong impression that competent and admirable people are not like us at all.
This childhood experience dovetails with a basic feature of the human condition. We know ourselves from the inside, but others only from the outside. We are aware of all our anxieties and doubts from within, yet all we know of others is what they happen to do and tell us – a far narrower and more edited source of information.
The other traditional release from underconfidence of this type came from the opposite end of the social spectrum: being a servant. ‘No man is a hero to his valet,’ remarked the 16th-century French essayist Montaigne – a lack of respect that may at points prove deeply encouraging, given how much our awe can sap our will to rival or match our heroes. Great public figures aren’t ever so impressive to those who look after them, who see them drunk in the early hours, examine the stains on their underpants, hear their secret misgivings about matters on which they publicly hold firm views and witness them weeping with shame over the strategic blunders they officially deny.
Making a leap of faith around what other people are like helps to humanise the world. Whenever we encounter a stranger, we are not really encountering such a person; we are encountering someone who is in basic ways very much like us, despite surface evidence to the contrary. Therefore, nothing fundamental stands between us and the possibility of responsibility, success and fulfilment.
Children have great trouble imagining the inner lives of those in authority. A young school child can be deeply puzzled to see their teacher on a Sunday morning at the shops or jogging round the park. In their minds, this mighty person is simply and exclusively ‘the teacher’. Their whole life (the child thinks) revolves around the classroom and the large desk they stand behind. They have no history; they couldn’t have been a child themselves; they have no problems or frustrated dreams or wakeful nights. Our childish selves struggle to flesh out the reality of adult existence.
One of the things that separates confident from diffident people is their approach to history. Broadly speaking, the unconfident believe that history is over; conversely, the confident trust that history is still in the process of being made – and possibly by themselves one day.
The way we enter the world carries with it an inherent bias towards an impression that history has been settled. Everything around us conspires to convey a sense that the status quo is entrenched. We are surrounded by people far taller than us, who follow traditions that have been in place for decades – centuries, even. Our understanding of time hugely overprivileges the immediate moment. To a five-year-old, last year feels like a century ago. The house we live in appears as immutable as an ancient temple; the school we go to looks as though it has been performing the same rituals since the earth began. We are constantly told why things are the way they are and encouraged to accept that reality is not made according to our wishes. We come to trust that human beings have fully mapped the range of the possible. If something hasn’t happened, it’s either because it can’t happen, or it shouldn’t.
The result is a deep wariness around imagining alternatives. There is no point starting a new business (the market must be full already), pioneering a new approach to the arts (everything is already set in a fixed pattern), or giving loyalty to a new idea (it either exists or is mad).
In other words, everything that we associate with history – the impetuous daring of great people, the dramatic alterations in values, the revolutionary questioning of long-held beliefs, the upturning of the old order – is still going on, even at this very moment, in outwardly peaceful, apparently unchanging places like the countryside near Shamley Green, in Surrey, where Eliot wrote the poem. We don’t see it only because we are standing too close to it. The world is being made and remade in every instant. Therefore, any one of us has a theoretical chance of being an agent in history, on a big or a small scale. It is open to our own times to build a new city as beautiful as Venice; to change ideas as radically as the Renaissance; to start an intellectual movement as resounding as Buddhism.
One of the greatest sources of despair is the belief that things should have been easier than they have turned out to be. We give up not simply because events are difficult, but because we hadn’t expected them to be so. The struggle is interpreted as humiliating proof that we do not have the talent required to carry out our wishes. We grow subdued and timid and eventually surrender, because a struggle this great seems impossibly rare.
The capacity to remain confident is, therefore, to a significant extent a matter of having internalised a correct narrative about what difficulties we are likely to encounter. Unfortunately, the narratives we have to hand are deeply misleading, for a range of reasons. We are surrounded by stories that conspire to make success seem easier than it is, and therefore that unwittingly destroy the confidence we can muster in the face of our obstacles.
But there comes a point, when we move from consumers to producers, that we start to pay in heightened currency for our ignorance; the currency of confidence and self-respect. We see our early failures as proof of conclusive ineptness rather than as the inevitable stages on every path to mastery. Without an accurate developmental map, we can’t position ourselves properly with regards to our defeats. We have not seen enough of the rough drafts of those we admire, and therefore cannot forgive ourselves the horror of our own early attempts.
We are, by contrast, recklessly short on detailed, honest and compelling accounts of what to expect around key aspects of our professional lives. To shore up our confidence, we would need regularly to encounter the modern equivalents of the works of the classical sculptors: films, poems, songs and novels that would represent for us the agonies that unfold in the unglamorous but hugely representative hubs of modern capitalism; the world’s distribution centres, tax offices, airport lounges, HR conferences and management retreats.
The confidence-boosting artists would show us, without reserve or coyness, what a successful life truly involves. They would take us through the tears we will shed in office cubicles; the meetings in which our ideas will be rejected and our projections thwarted; the mocking articles we will read about ourselves in newspapers; the hours we’ll spend in lonely foreign hotel rooms while we miss out on our children’s school plays; the sense that our best insights have arrived far too late; the inability to sleep from worry and confusion.
Thereby, we’d be better placed to meet our own eventual experiences against a realistic set of expectations. Our setbacks would take on a different meaning. Instead of looking like confidence-destroying evidence of our incapacities, they would much more readily strike us as proof that we were on the standard path to what we admire. We’d interpret our worries, reversals and troubles as unavoidable landmarks, not aberrations or fateful warnings.
Confidence isn’t the belief that we won’t meet obstacles: it is the recognition that difficulties are an inescapable part of all worthwhile contributions. We need to ensure we have plenty of narratives to hand that normalise the role of pain, anxiety and disappointment in even the best and most successful lives.
There is so much that we put off every day: the relationship that, for the sake of both participants, it would be better to end; the new person it would be thrilling to get close to; the alternative career that promises to utilise our deepest talents; the house with the beautiful views over water. And yet we do nothing. There may be distressed moments of recognition at three in the morning, but in the light of day we bury our longings and muddle on. We find ourselves musing on the interesting things we’ll do when we retire. We let life leak away.
Our hesitation is grounded in a sense of risk. Every move presents us with appalling dangers. The new house might not be right; the change of career might lead to ruin; the beloved might reject us; we could regret leaving the old relationship. But our inaction is not in itself cost-free, for in the wings, out of regular conscious awareness, there is something arguably even more frightening than failure: the tragedy of wasting our lives.
We too easily ignore the most stupid yet deepest fact about our existence: that it will end. The brutal fact of our mortality seems so implausible that we live in practical terms like immortals, as if we will always have the opportunity to address our stifled longings one day.
For the underconfident among us, enemies are a catastrophe. In our psychological make-up, the approval of the world effectively supports our approval of ourselves. Consequently, when enemies agitate against us, we lose faith not in them (they continue to exert a mesmeric authority over us), but, more alarmingly, in ourselves. We may, when with our friends, casually profess to hate the haters (and curse their names with bravado), but in private, over the ensuing months, we simply cannot dismiss their judgements, because we have accorded them a status logically prior to our own in our deep minds. Their objections may feel unbearable, like a physical discomfort we cannot correct, but we can’t reject them as unwarranted either. In despair, it feels as if we do not know how to carry on, not only because we’ve been called idiots or egotists, but because, as a result, we must simply be idiots and egotists.
In our distress, we may keep harping back to the idea (it brings tears to our eyes) that the situation is profoundly ‘unfair’: we did nothing especially wrong, our intentions are benevolent and our work is acceptable. Why, therefore, has our name been trampled upon and our reputation trashed? Either because we truly are fools (which is an unendurable truth) or because we’re not fools (in which case the hatred is an unendurable error). Whatever is right, we can’t just walk away and get on with our lives. We feel compelled to take some kind of corrective action to scrub away the stain our enemies have applied. In the middle of the night, we contemplate a range of responses: angry, passive-aggressive, self-harming, charming, begging.... Our partner might implore us to drop it and return to bed. We cannot: the enemy refuses to leave our heads.
Although we assume that we, like everyone else, must want to be confident, we may harbour private suspicions that confidence is in fact an unappealing state of mind. We might, without fully realising it, find the idea of being truly confident strangely offensive, and secretly remain attached to hesitancy and modesty.