Self-Confidence

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Cultivate Strong Ties

Confidence through relationships

Gentleness is invincible.

– MARCUS AURELIUS

Self-confidence first comes from others. This statement might seem paradoxical. It is not. Human infants are extraordinarily fragile and dependent. In their first months of life, they are unable to live on their own. The fact of their survival is proof that they have been cared for by others. Their confidence is first and foremost a confidence in their caregivers: self-confidence begins as confidence in others.

It is because we are born at a relatively early stage of foetal development that we need others so much. Embryologists tell us that embryonic cells would require about twenty months to reach maturity. Aristotle had already made the observation that we are born incomplete. It’s as though nature had failed to finish its task, propelling us into existence weaker and more unready than any other mammal. We are born not knowing how to walk, a skill that takes a year on average for us to learn. A colt, on the other hand, needs only a few hours, and sometimes only a few minutes, before it starts to gambol. And we should have self-confidence?

We compensate for this natural deficiency through culture – family, mutual assistance, and education. Thanks to the artistry of human relations, we eventually finish the work that nature left in draft form, and we acquire the confidence that nature withheld from us.

Little by little, children gain confidence in themselves, thanks to the ties they have developed with others, the care that has been lavished on them, the attention focused on them, the unconditional love they receive. Small children don’t feel that this love is given to them for the things they attempt or succeed at. They are loved for what they are and not for what they do. This is the most solid base for the self-confidence they will later acquire. Being loved and looked at in this way gives us strength throughout our life.

Our struggle to achieve self-confidence starts by overcoming what Freud called infantile anxiety. When an adolescent is eager to go out and discover the big wide world, when an adult is confident and manages to get his or her projects up and running, it’s primarily because they were lucky enough to develop early on, in the course of what Boris Cyrulnik calls their ‘precocious interactions’, the inner sense of security that psychologists have determined is so important.

While self-esteem is based on our assessment of our own value, self-confidence is tied to our capacity for action, our ability to venture forth despite our doubts, to take risks in a complex world. To find the courage to adventure into the outside world, you have to have an inner assurance.

In his masterly essay on the ‘mirror stage’, Jacques Lacan describes the moment at which a child first becomes conscious of himself. When children are still at the toddler stage – the average age is between six and eighteen months – they recognise themselves in the mirror. But what exactly happens that first time? The child is in the arms of an adult, who holds him up to the mirror. No sooner has the child recognised himself than he turns toward the adult and asks him with searching eyes, Is this me? Is it really me? The adult answers with a smile, a look, or a few soothing words. The adult reassures the child: Yes, that’s really you. The philosophical implications of this first encounter are enormous – the other is there from the outset between me and myself. I am conscious of myself only through that other person. The child has confidence in what he sees in the mirror only because he has confidence in the other. It’s in the eyes of others that he seeks this inner reassurance; it’s in the eyes of others that he seeks himself.

The same experiment has been tried with rhesus monkeys, which are closely related to us genetically. Their intelligence is apparent in that they quickly start using the mirror to inspect parts of their bodies they can’t see otherwise, like their backs and buttocks. But on first encountering a mirror, they don’t turn toward other rhesus monkeys in the room; they don’t look questioningly at each other. Rhesus monkeys are undoubtedly social animals and learn much from each other, but during their developmental phase they are not as dependent on the bonds between them as humans are; they are not relationship-based creatures to the same extent. Without others, we could not develop our humanity; without others, we could not become what we are.

Look at feral children, those children who have been abandoned at birth and raised by animals (bears, wolves, pigs …), only to be found and reintroduced into human society at a later stage. As François Truffaut’s The Wild Child dramatises (in a film based on real events), these children’s lack of attachment to other humans obstructs their development. They are as frightened as hunted animals, unable to learn human speech, seemingly irrecoverable to humanity. In the very best cases, using great patience and gentleness, the professionals who look after these children have managed to nurture fragile bonds with them and guide them toward limited progress. But their self-confidence always remains precarious, vanishing at the slightest obstacle. In the language of modern psychology, these wild children suffer from a lack of ‘attachment’ to other humans. They never bonded with others during their early childhood. They had no one to protect them, reassure them, speak to them, look at them. Deprived of the inner sense of security that comes from these attachments, they are unable to muster the minimal confidence they would need in order to see the world and other people as anything but hostile.

According to such psychiatrists as John Bowlby and Boris Cyrulnik, if a little boy of two is able to say hello to a stranger who comes into his house, smile at him, approach him, and address or touch him, it’s because his sense of inner security is strong enough to deal with this unfamiliar situation. The people he has attached to have given him enough confidence for him to move away from them and approach the stranger.

The education process has been successful when the ‘student’ no longer needs his teachers, when he has enough self-assurance to leave his teachers behind. By taking a few steps toward the stranger who enters his house, the little boy is already starting to learn to be on his own. Others have shown him confidence, and it’s now his turn to act and show he merits it. In order to set off on his own, he draws on the love and attention given him by his family and those around him.

The first years are decisive, but luckily we can build relationships that give us confidence at any age. If we did not have the good fortune to grow up in a nurturing emotional environment, it’s never too late to form the bonds that we lacked early on. But it does require knowing oneself well enough to realise that these bonds are missing and need to be compensated for.

Madonna Louise Ciccone was at first a shy child who lacked self-confidence. She lost her mother to breast cancer at the age of five and resented that her father remarried almost immediately and had a new set of children. She had trouble finding her place in the family circle. She studied piano and ballet from a young age but felt she wasn’t much good at either, that she had to work hard for modest results. But in adolescence, after her stepmother enrolled her in a Catholic school in Detroit, she met Christopher Flynn, a dance teacher who changed her life. While she was rehearsing for the end-of-year show, he said something to her that no one had ever said before, or at least not in so many words: that she was beautiful and talented, and that she had enormous charisma. Years later, Madonna explained that these words changed her life. Before, she hadn’t believed in herself. Now, she could see herself as a dancer in New York; she felt herself being born as an individual. At the end-of-year production, she surprised everyone – her teacher most of all – by dancing with extraordinary energy, and half naked! Madonna was born. Before Christopher Flynn, she’d had other piano and dance teachers. They had taught her many things, given her insight into movement and technique. But none had ever given her the gift of confidence.

I remember a concert that Madonna gave in Nice, France, when I was not yet eighteen. I was fascinated by her stage presence, her way of singing and dancing, her freedom. I remember the giant screen and her face in close-up when she sang ‘Like a Prayer’. Drops of sweat dripped into her eyes. In the look she gave the audience, in her smile, there seemed to be enormous gratitude. Naturally, Madonna was a highly skilled and experienced performer. The woman striding across the stage in every direction already had years of concerts behind her. But charisma can’t be attributed entirely to skill. There’s something more, an element of grace that the charismatic person must have. It’s in the eyes of others that the charismatic person seeks her own truth; she relates to others through constant reinvention. At the time, I didn’t understand very well what I was seeing on that giant screen. Today when I think back to Madonna’s vibrant smile, I believe she was finding in the audience’s response, in their energy, in their love even, that same confidence she had seen long before in the eyes of her dance teacher.

Madonna didn’t grow up in an environment that gave her security, but she found a way to compensate for it later.

If we have had the good fortune, in our early years, to experience warm and nurturing personal ties, later encounters that reinforce our confidence will still be important. But they will be experienced in a different way: through them we will relive, at decisive moments, the grace of someone’s early confidence in us.

Yannick Noah, the great French tennis star, was greatly loved by his parents, Zacharie and Marie-Claire. Deeply in love with each other, they lavished affection on their son. When Yannick was eleven, he met African-American tennis champion Arthur Ashe, who was then ranked fourth in the world and had stopped for a layover in Yaounde, Cameroon, on a tour of Africa. Yannick was lucky enough to hit a few balls with Ashe, who was so struck by the youngster’s level of play that at the end of the session he gave him his racket. The next day, as Ashe was waiting in the airport to board his plane, the young tennis player ran up to him breathlessly holding out an Arthur Ashe poster for the champion to sign. Ashe did more than give the boy an autograph. He wrote, ‘See you at Wimbledon!’ As Yannick Noah would tell the world a few years later, having won the men’s singles title at the French Open, those four words were an invaluable gift. They galvanised him and stayed with him. They allowed him to believe in his own star; they helped him become a tennis player on a level with Arthur Ashe.

With Madonna and Yannick Noah, we see that sometimes it only takes a few heartfelt words from a teacher or a friend to instill self-confidence, and that these words from the heart can give a person confidence for a lifetime.

Others can also give us confidence, without making a big speech or offering words of encouragement, just by trusting us with a mission.

Once I was visiting a corporation to give a talk on ‘The Mystery of Confidence’. A woman came up to me afterward to say that, on returning to work after taking her maternity leave, she had lost all her self-confidence but that she had eventually regained it. It had all started because of her misery at having to leave her toddler behind. She felt brittle and on edge, and she thought she wasn’t up to performing her job, with all its many responsibilities. A few days after her return, her boss called her into his office. She expected the worst. To her surprise, he appointed her to take on a project of crucial importance. No one had ever given her so much responsibility. She immediately regained her self-confidence.

Aristotle gives a very unusual and accurate definition of friendship. A friend, says the author of The Nichomachean Ethics, is someone who makes us better. When he or she is around, we feel good, we make progress, we become more intelligent or more sensitive, we open ourselves up to new aspects of the world and of ourselves, aspects we had not previously known. A friend, says Aristotle, is a person who helps us ‘actualise our own power’. Thanks to our friend, or more accurately, thanks to the relation that we have with our friend, we develop ‘in action’ such talents that had only been latent or ‘in potential’ before. The friendship relation is therefore the occasion for our growth and development. The friend need not be motivated by pure generosity or listen endlessly to our complaints. If our relation to that person is good for us, for our talent, if it allows us to make progress, then that person is our friend: a friend to the life inside us. From this perspective, our piano or dance or drawing teacher, or the sports champion we happen to meet, or our boss at work, can be our friend, on condition that he or she gives us the opportunity to develop, to make progress.

When we spend time with a martial-arts teacher, a sports coach, a yoga instructor – all possible friends in Aristotle’s sense – we gain confidence in ourselves, and not just because we are acquiring skills. Sensitive to the positive attention of another, in the company of someone who wants good for us, we rediscover our truth as relational beings. It isn’t our piano teacher or our martial arts instructor as such who gives us confidence but the relationship that we have with that person. The relationship is experienced as a series of regular meetings that punctuate the progress we are making. Each time, we feel the other’s satisfaction at seeing us improve, we feel the ability that person has to motivate us, to support us when we run into difficulties. Little by little, our mentor’s confidence in us becomes our own. That is how confidence works, and it’s the human way, properly speaking, to learn.

A good teacher instills confidence in us by making us repeat correct actions, by making us practice our scales. Then he invites us to act on what we have learned: he shows confidence in us. When someone makes us confident, these two facets are always intertwined.