This episode features a new segment, Courage Over Everything. In this segment, I drop one final gem on courage before signing off.

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I also dig into my courage toolbox to help another challenged caller determine if he should tell his best friend that he loves him and ask for more from the friendship.  He wants to be honest but also doesn’t want his friend to get scared and leave.

If you’re feeling this episode, don’t forget to rate, review, subscribe and share. If you’ve got feedback or suggestions, drop a line at info@candacedoby.com. Need help? Submit your question to the show.

Sponsors:

Concept Citron: Thank you to Concept Citron for supporting The Courage Hotline. Concept Citron is a design agency in Quebec Canada that offers playful designs for branding, logos, website design, illustrations and much more. Visit Concept Citron to get your design project started today.

Where confidence and money differ, however, is in the fact that confidence always has to be built. You can’t get it from an inheritance or find it lying on the ground. You can’t borrow it from a friend or win it in a lottery.

Confidence comes from repeated physical and/or psychological labor a person exerts to build up their abilities to the point where they can trust, or rely, on those abilities.

Building confidence always takes work. And fortunately, there are a lot of ways to work it up.

Here are 9 effective ways to build the confidence you need to pursue the things you want. 

Practice.

If you meditate for two minutes on the activities you’re really confident about doing — tying your shoe, cooking a favorite food, riding a bike — you’ll probably realize that you’ve practiced those actions over and over. You’ve tied a shoe everyday for years and you’ve likely ridden a bike over a thousand times. Practice is an important way to building up technical skill, experience and resilience for any activity, whether simple or hard. Practice allows you to use what you have, recognize what you need and develop what you want. And, each time you choose passivity over practice, you lose an opportunity to build confidence.

Observe/Model Confident People. 

Take a look around. Find people who you believe to be confident, and watch them. Really. Observing how someone confidently responds to a situation that you may later encounter could increase your propensity to respond in a similar way. This means confidence is contagious.

Strike a Power Pose.

If you don’t have real life confident people you can model to help you raise your confidence level, try imitating a superhero like Wonder Woman. Superheroes have super poses where they spread their legs apart slightly beyond shoulder width, push their chests out and place their fists on their hips. You usually see characters strike this pose right before facing an enemy or immediately after defeating one. Social psychologist Amy Cuddy says that posing in a posture that people mentally associate with being powerful can help them feel and behave more assertively.

Remember Strengths and Wins.

Your brain is hardwired to pay extra special attention to negative emotions and experiences. It’s why you may immediately think back to a prior negative outcome when you consider repeating the same action later. Your fear wants to shield you from all kinds of harm, including physical and social. Ruminating on negative experiences, though, does nothing to help you build confidence. What helps, instead, is putting in some extra mental work to remember your strengths and wins. According to authors of Confidence Code for Girls, remembering your strengths and past accomplishments activates the brain’s pleasure center and keeps the brain’s fear center calm. It may be helpful to create and keep a confidence notebook close by so you can access your strengths and previous wins more quickly.

Utilize Positive Visualization.

Can you think back to the time you learned a new skill, aced a test or won an award? Do you remember what you heard, felt and saw during those positive, confident moments? Or, can you project yourself into a future scenario where you are confident, calm and in control? The power of positive visualization comes from using all of your senses to connect to your confidence. It’s part of a process of training your mind to think positively. Done repeatedly, positive visualization can help you take your confidence to an entirely new level.

Compare Yourself Only to Former Versions of Yourself.

Rihanna may have said it best: the biggest mistake you can make is to compare yourself with someone else. When you measure yourself against a friend (or foe) who appears to be more successful than you, you simultaneously depreciate your effort, dismiss your progress and diminish your ambition. It’s basically a blow to your confidence, rather than a boost. But, if you want to elevate your confidence through comparison, try sizing yourself up to former versions of yourself. There are points in your past when you were hoping to be where you are right now.

Have a Conversation with Fear.

This may sound a bit strange, but questioning fear, even if momentarily, suspends its power and allows the voice of your inner confidence to emerge. Your appeal to fear may sound something like this: Fear, I appreciate you wanting to protect me from embarrassment, rejection and failure. But, why do you always have to think the worst? The pause that comes next is filled with opportunity to disrupt fear’s over-protectiveness and uncover its irrationality. And, at the same time, it is making room for your confidence to expand.

Get Feedback. 

Getting genuine, affirming feedback from people in your circle can help boost your confidence level. Psychologist Albert Bandura revealed through research that confidence can be influenced by verbal persuasion.  Trust is a main portal through which people can be persuaded. So, surrounding yourself with trustworthy people — people who are familiar and/or similar to you — and listening to their encouraging words can take your confidence level up a few notches.

Recite Affirmations.

If you don’t have trustworthy people in your circle that you can listen to to help you boost your confidence, try talking to yourself. Regularly reciting affirmations — statements that inspire, motivate and help create something you want — can help you condition your thinking to be positive and confident. Affirmations have been shown to help people focus away from negative experiences, and you can easily develop your own. You’ll just want to ensure that your affirmations are positive, personal and written in the present tense.

The Takeaway:

Confidence isn’t something you wait for someone to hand to you. You have to put in the regular work to build it up yourself.  The good news is that there are several ways to develop and strengthen your confidence.  

What helps you feel confident? Do you use strategies that are not listed here? 

Adolescence, the awkward transition period between childhood and adulthood, gives girls a choice to assert or conceal themselves, and the latter may be easier to do when girls’ body and personality changes intersect with oppressive norms and gender stereotyping perpetuated in social circles and the media. Their fear of standing out or being inadequate is enough to mute their voices and dilute their uniqueness … unless they’ve developed courage as a behavioral response.

Courage is considered the foundational virtue of every other virtue. Aristotle called courage “the first human virtue.” Poet Maya Angelou declared, “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.” And author C.S. Lewis said that courage is “the form of every virtue at the testing point.”

According to research, courage is generally accepted to be:

(a) a willing, intentional act, (b) involving substantial danger, difficulty, or risk to the actor, (c) primarily motivated to bring about a noble, good or morally worthy purpose.

With courage, girls can act freely—despite risk and fear—to be, defend and expand themselves.

Benefits Of Courage

Authenticity of Self. Authenticity is a turning away from “theyness” and a turning toward “youness.” This isn’t an easy task for an adolescent girl whose developing brains is consumed with social learning and is sensitive to peer opinion. She craves what mass culture tells her she needs and wants harmony in her relationships, even if it requires her to hush her own voice. Courage, though, allows her to be herself—her whole, authentic, fully functioning self. It allows her to develop her own style, dance to her own beat and, if necessary, settle into the discomfort of being different. Cooper Woodard, expert in Developmental Psychology, uncovered that, “The (courageous) choice of authenticity, over time, creates an honest acceptance of the self and autonomous thinking that is not governed by others or culture.” When a girl accepts herself, she gives permission to others to do the same.

Defense of Self. When girls display moral courage, they confront the fear of social disapproval to stand up for what is right in the face of opposition. This could mean that they seek to enforce ethical integrity or human rights for themselves or other people. Standing up to a bully on another person’s behalf, voicing opinions and reporting a wrong doing to a person of authority illustrates moral courage. Researcher Nelson H. Goud stated, “Not taking a stand, though, results in feelings of a failure of integrity … and guilt.” Moral courage, which is important in every situation, begins at an early age and is cultivated at home and at school.

Expansion of Self. Expanding the self includes increasing ability, awareness and independence. Courage is the virtue that allows girls to endure, persevere past and overcome fear in order to discover and exercise their individuality and gain fuller access to themselves. Courage helps girls meet and talk to new people, try physical activities they deem difficult and take a leap of faith toward a goal in the presence of doubt. Goud said, “It is the quality of courage that allows a person to step into the uncertainty of the unknown as [s]he chooses [her]self.” Without courage, fear goes unchecked, leading girls to play it safe and small so they don’t risk embarrassment or failure.

Courage allows girls to face the uncertainties of growing up and make decisions that are healthy and empowering for them. Building confidence, competence and connection are paths for developing courage.

Development Of Courage

Building Confidence. An important way girls can build confidence is through modeling. Girls need positive role models around them who illustrate perseverance, assertiveness, authenticity and strength. They need to see adults who base their self-worth on internal values instead of external labels and standards. What girls should see in role models is a “possible self.” Observing adults courageously respond to situations that girls may later encounter can increase the likelihood that they (girls) responds in a similarly courageous way. This means courage is contagious. Role models can help girls build confidence by encouraging them to take small gradual risks. Building on the success of each risk taken helps girls develop a breadth of responses to potential threats.

Building Competence. Building skills comes from repeated and successful practice. Similar to building confidence, girls should practice taking risks and habituating themselves to fear. Repeated exposure to situations that elicit fear and require action have been shown to lead to the development of courage in an individual. Mentors can play an important role in helping girls build competence by creating specific tasks that are meant to build their personal resources, like self-efficacy—the belief in one’s ability to succeed. For example, mentors can coach and position girls to meet new people until the girls feel they’ve gained the confidence and skills to do it on their own. While seeking out (repeated) experiences is important to building competence, so too is reflecting inward. After girls respond to fearful situations, they should assess the rightness of their responses and consider how to repeat or edit them in the future.

Building Connection. Making connections with people is one thing, but making connections with the right people is another. It is important for girls to surround themselves with friends who are confident, supportive, accepting and motivating. Friends’ feedback and verbal motivation has the ability to persuade girls to take courageous action. Girls want to include themselves in circles where courage is the norm and where they can align what they think with how they feel. In this case, not fitting in has more to do with a girl’s inability to choose courage or authenticity rather than a girl’s inability to achieve beauty standards.

The Takeaway

It’s not easy being an adolescent girl faced with social pressure and gender stereotyping, but developing courage during this complicated stage sets the stage for self-awareness and self-definition that can have a lasting impact on her well-being.

If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive. -Audre Lorde

Trust yourself. Think for yourself. Act for yourself. Speak for yourself. Be yourself. Imitation is suicide. – Marva Collins

I spent several moments in front of the bathroom mirror with my hair pulled tightly back, angling my head from left to right, imagining how I’d look with a short, coily style. I hopped up on the counter to get a closer look at my new growth and to try to determine its pattern. I held pictures of beautiful, natural women next to my face to decide if I could pull it off.

I was 19 when I considered cutting my hair—not just a trim-the-dead-ends, layered or angled-bob cut, though. No. I opted for a full-blown-shave-all-the-permed-hair-and-leave-a-teeny-weeny-afro cut. For 13 years, I rocked a silky, past-the-shoulder mane that many people mistook for an Indian hair weave. It was pretty, but it was plain. And I began to discover, as a sophomore in college, that I wasn’t. My mouth was sassy. My perspective was unique. My actions were bold. And a short crop, I decided, was a more accurate reflection of me. I presented the big chop idea to close friends and family members, hoping to build excitement about how well the new do would suit me.

At first when they laughed, I thought it was the I-can’t-believe-it-but-go-ahead-with-your-bad-self chuckle, but their wrinkled foreheads and folded arms led me to the more accurate conclusion.

They weren’t thrilled.

My closest friends quickly criticized me. My brother lamented that I would look like a boy and my parents, who supported me in most things, stressed that I wouldn’t be able to get a good job after college. My dad, being from the old school, also reminded me that a woman’s hair was her glory.

“But…”
“Girl, but nothing. You need to leave this alone.”
“But, I would look good!”
“No, you would look crazy. Your hair is beautiful as it is now. Why go messing with it?
“Because it’s not me.”
“It’s been you for the past however long. You just up and changed?”

Incapable of defending my bright idea against such opposition, despite several attempts to, I retreated back into my comfortable corner feeling safe, yet dejected, and overwhelmingly confused about what the heck happened. So, I opened an internal investigation to figure out why I had ended up in the corner instead of the barber’s chair. Here’s what I learned.

Social expectation causes psychological pressure. We are all part of social groups that we derive meaning from and a sense of belonging to. This is social identity. These groups can be friends, family, co-workers, teammates, classmates or some other mate. When faced with a decision, social expectations can impact a person’s behavior. In my case, friends and family opposed my desire to chop my hair and cautioned me against following through. To avoid rejection from the people I loved and respected, I acted, under psychological pressure, counter to my own belief. Conforming my behavior to the expectations of the group placated them, but it agitated me.

Sacrificing authenticity to gain or maintain the favor of others can create emotional labor. We (out)grow. We develop. We gain more clarity about who we are. Sometimes social expectations don’t align with inner convictions, leaving us to decide whether to uphold our beliefs or subordinate them. This elicits a test of character laced with anxiety, especially if we have low self-confidence or weak self-efficacy. Psychologist Albert Bandura defined the term self-efficacy as one’s belief in one’s self to accomplish a task. I didn’t have enough confidence to defy the expectations of others to express my authenticity (through a drastically new hairstyle). Fear won.

Fear is contagious. Social forces can either have a positive or negative effect on courageous behavior. When we don’t exactly know what decision to make, we can turn to our social group for direction. If members of the group express fear, it becomes easier for us to express fear. The same is true for courage. I may have been less likely relegated to a corner to sulk in defeat if my social group reacted differently, positively, to my idea. Instead, they projected their fears onto me and I accepted them as my own.

For two years, I thought about a short, coily crop. Within that time, I took small risks to build my confidence to finally do it. I cut my permed hair shorter. I let more time lapse between visits to the hairdresser so I could get a better idea about my natural pattern. I often let my hair air-dry to give it a more textured look.

Then, for my 21^st birthday, without telling anyone, I gifted myself a haircut—not just a trim-the-dead-ends, layered or angled-bob cut. No. A full-blown-shaved-all-the-permed-hair-and-left-a-teeny-weeny-afro cut.

Victory.

Save

Save

“Aunt Kathleen, what is courage?”

She slowly leaned forward in the worn chair to decrease the space between her ears and my mouth, and she repeated the question to ensure she heard me correctly. Upon my confirmation, Aunt Kathleen reared back with an annoyed, confused look across her face. The question, which required thought energy and concentration, was obviously not something the 92 year old wanted to consider in the middle of her favorite show or ever. But my fixed stare and eager smile illustrated my anxiousness to hear her answer, and I could see that she didn’t want to disappoint her sweet niece who came to sit with her. If her eyes were any indication of the activity in her brain, she was searching for an answer. We sat quietly for a few moments until she broke the silence with a few disjointed words, and when she realized they didn’t make sense, she returned to searching. This was hard for her, and I began feeling embarrassed for asking. She couldn’t easily define courage.

But quite frankly, neither could ancient philosophers, social scientists, nor authors, though courage is widely recognized as an important virtue. Aristotle went as far as saying that “courage is the first of human virtues because it makes all others possible.”

So, it was not unusual that my aunt had difficulty expressing the complex construct. And when she finally found her words several moments later, it made perfect sense that she described courage in terms of what it is not, rather than what it is.

People without courage can’t see that they can do it.

The slight smile on her face afterwards suggested that she was pleased with her answer. I was too.

COURAGE AND SELF-CONFIDENCE

She had called out one of the most important components of courage: self-confidence. Several researchers, including Nelson Goud, Alizabeth Jetter, and Daniel Putman, found that confidence in one’s abilities was the major determining factor in how a person responded to fear, how much effort a person would exert and how long he or she would persevere in the face of challenges. Confidence gives a person a sense of control in the presence of fear and can help reduce it.

But before a person can be confident in her abilities, she must first know her abilities. Therefore self-knowledge is a prerequisite of self-confidence. Daniel Putman said, “We need to know when to stand up and when to flee, when to fight and when to surrender. This is a function … of knowing our own skills and abilities.” Appropriate confidence is a form of self-knowledge individuals can rely on.

FOUR WAYS TO BUILD SELF-CONFIDENCE

So, then, how can the people my aunt was talking about—people who “can’t see that they can do it”—build up their self-confidence and successfully conjure courage when challenges arise?

The Chew was back, so I couldn’t dare ask my aunt her thoughts. Luckily, research offers four suggestions.

Remind yourself of your strengths. There is an interesting law of emotion called hedonic asymmetry, which reveals that people do not process positive and negative information equally. Researcher Cliffard Nass pointed out in his book, “The Man Who Lied To His Computer,” that negative is more “noticeable, consequential and extreme in every respect as compared to positive.” Psychologist Nico Frijda noted that positive emotions always fade overtime—not matter how much love was created, money was earned or drugs were consumed. Keeping this law in mind, it isn’t difficult to see how weaknesses may get more of our attention and memory than strengths. Strengths can easily fade from awareness, so it’s important to constantly remind ourselves of them so that we can call upon them in challenging times.

Engage in risk-fitness. Can you train your way to confidence and courage? Kind of. Taking repeated and gradual risks helps habituate a person to fear and make it manageable. Think about a weight-lifting exercise like squats. The movement may feel awkward at first. The pain may be close to unbearable initially. However, the more you engage in the activity, the better your body acclimates. But that doesn’t mean the pain goes away. It means your body begins to know what to expect and accepts the pain as part of the process. Risk fitness works the same way. Start by taking small risks, in which the potential lost is minimal. Then, steadily increase the reps and weight. Building on successful attempts to face adversity and fear helps nurture courage.

Model. Observing how someone responds to a situation that you may later encounter could increase your propensity to respond in a similar way. So, according to researcher Nelson Goud, courage is contagious.

Hang around encouraging people. Psychologist Albert Bandura revealed through research that confidence can be influenced by verbal persuasion. Trust is a main portal through which people can be persuaded. So, surround yourself with trustworthy people—people who are familiar and/or similar to you, and listen to their encouraging words.

*****

The Chew had gone off, and I think Aunt Kathleen had had enough of me for that day. So, I peeled my legs away from the plastic couch cover, walked to the door and kissed my auntie good-bye.