Most of us would say that deep down we struggle with self-esteem. We don’t ask questions, we beat ourselves up, and we miss out on opportunities because when it comes down to it we suspect that we’re just not good enough.
I think this is true for almost all humans, but the writers of The Confidence Gap put forward a pretty compelling argument that women typically feel this even more than men, and that it limits them in a variety of insidious ways. It’s a really complex issue, so when the organisers of Girl Geek Dinners Melbourne asked me to speak on the topic of the Confidence Gap, I wondered how I could contribute to the discussion in any meaningful way.
You can listen to the full talk below, but the cliff notes are that in my 20s I realised that poor self-esteem was limiting me in all sorts of ways. I couldn’t really control the negative voice in my head, but I could start behaving like a confident person and hopefully achieve the same results. So I spent some time modelling people I felt had the whole confidence thing figured out, and looking for the differences between their behaviour and mine. And the difference was clear and startling. The two big differences were: They asked questions and didn’t worry about sounding stupid They went out looking for new opportunities and experiences and didn’t worry about failing. They knew that if they worked hard they’d succeed. I realised I had a whole lifetime of opposing behaviour, so I set two simple rules for myself, and determined to follow them no matter how I felt. They
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