My nail-biting quest for confidence

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today. Receiving a performance review, for a job that I was good at, I learned that the problem with me was not my output, but rather my confidence. Rachel needed to “trust her own instincts,” I read, thinking of every time I had consulted another person for their opinion, every time I had joked about what I didn’t know. In the next quarter, the hope was that I would “gain the confidence” to ask for less “direction.” Where this confidence should come from, it did not say. I have never had any confidence, or at least, not the kind that people recognize. I do not exude peaceful self-assurance. I have bad posture. I bite my nails until they hurt. For much of my life, I wanted to be an actor, and spent a lot of time in various training programs, where it became clear my strength was clowning and I didn’t want to be a clown. I was, one adviser informed me, not adequately glamorous, which of course wasn’t wrong. I never got over my terror of auditioning, never learned to see it as anything other than a referendum on whether I was good enough. Then I became a writer. At my first office job, my exasperated boss told me to stop saying I was “concerned.” Confidence, we have decided as a culture, is a virtue. It isn’t just that it is effective, though both research and observation suggest it is — confident people are seen as better at their jobs, are more attractive as romantic partners — but that confidence is a moral good. It is an asset to the individual and also the collective. Confidence is embedded in our national DNA: In this great nation, anyone can bootstrap their way to success and fortune with hard work and blind self-belief. Unsurprisingly, given its singular importance, a whole industry dedicated to cultivating more of it has sprung up. In 2014, Claire Shipman and Katty Kay published The Confidence Code, which, after the previous year’s Lean In, may be the pinnacle of Confidence Literature, but there are so many variations. There is Quick Confidence and How to Be Confident and The Tao of Self-Confidence. There is I Can Make You Confident, but also Unstoppable Confidence, Wise Confidence, Radical Confidence, and Confident and Killing It. Online, Tony Robbins will tell you how to be confident, and so will the New York Times, the Cleveland Clinic, and Today.com. “Perfect your posture,” suggests wikiHow in “How to Be Confident (with Pictures).” For a more intensive experience, there are one-on-one confidence coaches and group seminars and online pre-recorded courses, where, for somewhere between a hundred and several thousand dollars, you can learn to unleash your pent-up better self. Udemy, the online education platform, currently offers 403 options. Stuck in traffic or at the grocery store, you can listen to “bite-sized” confidence-boosting pep talks on Marigold ($39.99/year). The confidence-seeker on a budget can make do with access to a nonstop stream of inspirational confidence content on social media for free. I was furious, all the time, at this emphasis on confidence. Why did it matter so much how I felt about myself, as long as I was doing things? A lot of people I knew, in real life and online and in the news, seemed to feel quite sure of their abilities, despite obvious evidence. At the same time, I was desperate for what they had. What a life, walking around, certain that my successes were the well-deserved product of my well-honed abilities, and my failures were simply momentary setbacks on my path up and up and up! It sounded great. Approaching my life with the conviction that I was terminally not quite good enough clearly wasn’t working, even if, objectively, it was on some level true. I cried a lot. I resisted the idea that confidence was the answer, and also wondered what would happen if I got more of it. Confidence is an eternally slippery concept; just ask the experts who study it. For research purposes, Cameron Anderson, a professor at the University of California Berkeley’s Haas School of Business who studies influence and leadership, defines it as “your self-perceived abilities in a given domain.” But Anderson is aware that this is not what most laypeople mean by confidence, and moreover, he suspects they’re onto something. “I just have to think that there is something to a generalized form of it,” he says. “It’s just that we haven’t figured out exactly what that is yet.” “It’s sort of this bucket that everything gets thrown in,” says Juliet Bourke, a professor in the School of Management and Governance at the University of New South Wales. Is a lack of it a performance issue? A personality issue? Some elusive third thing? “It’s this amorphous concept,” she tells me. “But because it’s amorphous, it means we don’t really have a discussion around, what are the attributes of confidence that are meaningful?” The confidence professionals are also trying their best to define it. “At the core of the definition of confidence is certainty,” said Alyssa Dver, founder and CEO of the American Confidence Institute, which “uses brain science to train leaders and coaches how to effectively give confidence to others.” The thing you are supposed to be certain about, specifically, is yourself. Confidence coach Jodie Bruce-Clarke sees it similarly: To be confident is the fundamental belief that “you’ll be able to handle anything that comes your way.” In The Confidence Code, Shipman and Kay define confidence as “the stuff that turns thoughts into action,” a definition I found both persuasive and confusing. What does a confident person do? A confident person asks for what they want, at work and in life, authoritatively, but not aggressively. Everyone likes a confident person, but a confident person doesn’t need everyone to like them. A confident person seizes opportunity; a confident person takes strategic risks. She does not hedge, needlessly apologize, or cower, and when she speaks, her sentences end clearly and decisively. The confident woman commands the room, fights for the raise, wears the dress, gives the toast, and she does this without sleeplessness or the occasional stray Xanax. One primary advantage of confidence is that other people do in fact eat it up. In studies, Anderson and his team broke people into groups and set them to work on a particular task, tracking their behavior; midway through, they’d reveal the actual abilities of the participants, based on pre-testing information. “We kind of exposed everybody,” he says. “We would say, you’re actually the best at this, and you’re the worst.” But when the exact same groups got back to work after the revelation, very little changed. “I would have expected there to be a kind of backlash against the people who had come across as really confident but who turned out to be terrible, because the group doesn’t want to underperform. They don’t want to fail at what they’re doing,” Anderson told me. There wasn’t. “People really wanted to hold onto this belief that they were great for reasons we don’t know.” I told him that I found this very frustrating, and he agreed it was. “That’s why I started studying this,” he said. “I hate that this happens.” Anybody can lack confidence, but culturally, it is a women’s issue, like body dysmorphia. “God give me the confidence of a mediocre white dude,” the writer Sarah Hagi tweeted, spawning a meme and an infinite parade of Etsy mugs. Not that women would necessarily benefit from having the confidence of a mediocre white man, even if they could get it: If women “do perform confidence, they’re seen as being too aggressive,” says Darren Thomas Baker, an assistant professor of responsible leadership at Monash University, and Bourke’s frequent collaborator. “And if they underperform it, they’re seen as not being confident enough.” [Image: https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Vox_Confidence_Spot_1_Final_Stapleton.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] Luckily, the Confidence Industry promises, women can learn to thread this needle with diligent self-surveillance and a can-do attitude. If they practice, the thinking goes, anyone can be confident, because confidence is not a random genetic blessing but, in fact, a skill. This is reassuring, in the way that all self-help is reassuring: You aren’t stuck the way you are. “I often liken it to fitness,” Bruce-Clarke told me. “You can choose to increase your fitness.” On Zoom, I met with Lucy Baker (no relation to Darren), who is a confidence coach in Lincolnshire, on the eastern coast of England. (Americans may have a particular affinity for confidence, but we do not have a monopoly.) Before she was a coach, she was a makeup artist, and before that, she worked in ad sales at a magazine. She was good at both of these things, she tells me from the backyard shed that is now her office, but she felt terrible all the time — a phony among the capable. “I just always had a head full of negativity,” she said. It was only after giving a pep talk to a high-powered client in her makeup chair that Baker began to think there had to be a way to help women, herself included, feel less bad. She devoted the next six months to a self-led confidence immersion course of her own ad-hoc invention, which would become the backbone of her methodology. “I did a lot of journaling,” she told me. “I’m massively into journaling.” I had never worked with a confidence coach before. During our session, for which I paid 150 pounds (or around $190; generally, she charges 650 pounds or about $830 for three), I tried to explain my problem. I was not incapacitated and did not shrink from opportunity; I just lived in a constant state of low-key panic that I was on the verge of irreparably fucking up. This was time-consuming and seemed annoying to other people, particularly my bosses. Additionally, my hair, which I had always liked well enough, had recently changed texture, and I had begun avoiding mirrors. Was my problem confidence? Sure, I thought, why not? Confidence is capacious; it can always be at least one of your problems. “Trace problems in any personal, professional, or political relationship,” Dver had written in her book, Confidence Is a Choice, “and you’ll find a lack of confidence at the core.” I read in a how-to manual I’d gotten from the library that with increased confidence, a “good life” could be transformed into “a great one,” but who’s to say there is a ceiling? Confidence is indeed like fitness, in that it is endless. “I work on it all the time,” Lucy Baker told me. “And I am confident, but if I didn’t work on it, I wouldn’t be.” Even critics of confidence can’t quite come out against it. The individual benefits are real. It gets you stuff, including, perhaps, happiness. “Would anyone genuinely want to position themselves against making young women feel more comfortable in their own skins, endowing mothers with self-esteem, or helping older women feel confident in the workplace?,” write Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill in Confidence Culture, which takes issue not so much with confidence itself but with its cultural prominence as an imperative for women: If confidence is indeed “at the root” of everything, then everything is at least a little bit your fault. Not coincidentally, Orgad dates the rise of this phenomenon, what she and Gill call “confidence culture,” to the immediate aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis and the ongoing dismantling of social safety nets. “We see this individualized injunction to resolve what is a structural issue,” she told me. “The proposed response to social and economic injuries is nearly always exactly the same,” she and Gill write: “to work on increasing one’s self-confidence.” This is true regardless of your issue, and no matter what else is wrong in the world. “You need to be more self-reliant. You can’t depend on others. You need to do it yourself. If you’re a success, great, if you’re a failure, that’s your fault,” Darren Baker tells me, unpacking the subtext. “They’re very neoliberal values.” There is, of course, one other obvious problem with celebrating confidence as a free-floating virtue: We have to live in the world that it creates. I thought about the former and future president of the United States, who had run, in part, on the narrative that he had been a great business person. That one investigation after another revealed that he had not, in fact, been a great business person didn’t seem to matter. He was great because he said he was. For several years, high-powered rich people had been mesmerized by Elizabeth Holmes and her nonworking blood test. Certainty is appealing, obviously. “But there’s also a lot of evidence we really like humility in other people,” cautions Tenelle Porter, an assistant professor of psychology at Rowan University who studies human fallibility. This is not an argument against confidence, so much as for tempering it. “I think humility and confidence need one another,” she says. “It takes some confidence to admit when you don’t know something, or to admit that you’ve got something wrong.” The ability to interrogate your blind spots — or at least, be generally aware that you have blind spots — ought to be an asset. We could fetishize humility, the same way we do confidence. We could fetishize collaboration and celebrate mentorship, or empathy, or intellectual curiosity, and we would benefit from it, not just personally, but as a society. We do not. Baker, my confidence coach, believes confidence has three basic tenets: You have to know yourself, you have to like yourself, and you have to trust yourself. To this end, she prescribed me three exercises. The first is a journaling exercise called “Who am I?” I am supposed to write about what I like and hate and who I love and what I eat and the history of how I got this way. I write that I love noodles and hate being rushed. In the second exercise, I am supposed to make a list of all my negative thoughts, and then keep adding to it. I write that I am a lazy failure with bad hair. I am supposed to go through the list and write down the opposite. “In order to push out that negative voice, you’ve got to fill your head with something slightly different,” Baker had advised me, even if it isn’t always “uber positive.” I write that my hair is fine. [Image: https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Vox_Confidence_Spot_2_Final_Stapleton.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] The third exercise is a simple worksheet I am supposed to use for the next month to track moments of low confidence and their potential triggers. I check my email, and there isn’t any, which suggests to me that I have professionally disappeared and may never work again. On the worksheet, I write “no email.” The potential trigger is “no email.” The worksheet asks who I am with when I have this thought. I write down: alone. I had been assured that I could fix myself and reprogram my brain, thus improving my experience of the world, and probably the world’s experience of me. Confidence, Anderson had speculated, was soothing to other people: When you’re scared or anxious, “it’s reassuring to be right next to someone who’s saying, no, we can do this, we can emerge out of this muck.” I understood, because I wanted people to tell me I’d emerge out of this muck all the time. In a vacuum, unencumbered by its usage, confidence is just one of many qualities a person could possess. I told Darren Baker that I believed I would be happier and more professionally successful if I had more of it, and having met me twice over the internet, he agreed that this was possible. If I could overhaul myself to need less from other people, and plough forward alone, without encouragement or validation, that would probably be good for my future prospects. “But I also think the question is, do you really want to be that person?” he countered. “Is that good for society?” I did not especially want to be that person — self-doubt is one of my most developed traits, in my opinion, and I’d hate to see it wasted. I appreciated many things about myself, none of which were ease or certainty, though I can appreciate these traits in other people. Confidence, Alyssa Dver at the American Confidence Institute had told me, had to do with “being certain about who you are, relative to your values, wants, and needs.” In this sense, I might be, in fact, developing new confidence: the confidence to double down on my actual strengths and principles, including my enthusiastic openness to the possibility that I was wrong. I need other people and their opinions. I want to be honest. I do not value the performance of being an authoritative ass. Am I, in fact, confident? I couldn’t possibly be sure.

What really matters

My nail-biting quest for confidence