The Confidence Game
Do you believe in yourself? You’ll make faster decisions if you do.
If you liked reading this, please click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack. Thanks!
(See the actual survey for yourself)
I love to play tennis, and one of the best parts of my game is my serve. Well, not really. My serve is great when I’m confident that I’m serving well. As soon as I start to doubt myself, or worry about my serve, it goes wrong and becomes the weakest part of my game. I know the mechanics of serving very well, it’s not about the motion or the fundamentals. For me, serving is a confidence game.
Many decisions are confidence games as well. Here are a few examples:
When you start selling a new product, it can be hard to ask for a premium price. You have never sold it before, so you don’t know what it’s worth. After you’ve sold that product dozens or hundreds of times, it becomes easy to ask for a premium price because you know what it’s worth. In all these sales the product is the same! The difference is confidence.
If you’re hiring for a role you’ve hired for many times in the past, you are likely confident in your process and judgment to hire the best person. However, if you’re hiring for a new role you start to second guess both the process and your judgment. The process is mostly the same in both cases! The difference is confidence.
It’s easy to conflate confidence with experience. Having more experience often leads to confidence, but not always! If you have a lot of experience with failures it might not generate any confidence. Likewise, you might get very confident after only a little experience. They are similar but not the same.
Confidence is tricky, because it doesn’t change the decisions you make. It just makes it easier and faster to make those decisions! If we weren’t humans with emotions and doubt we might be able to make decisions based purely on the facts, but as humans confidence plays a large role.
Even worse, you know the decisions where you have confidence and those where you do not. It is frustrating to know you can make a certain set of decisions so easily, while struggling with others. You know it should be just as easy to make both decisions, but it’s not. Your reasoning starts to conflict with your emotions and the result is frustration.
If confidence plays such a large role, it would seem like the solution is simple: Be confident! But that’s not how it works, is it? Confidence is something we earn through experience, and pretending that we have it just makes the lack of confidence even worse. Acting like you have confidence is like playing a role, you might convince others but you are never the role you are playing.
So, what is the solution? We need to build confidence! That might take a long time, but luckily there are a few short cuts.
Short Cut 1. Start Small
Whenever possible, start with making small decisions and work your way up to larger decisions. Going back to our example of selling a new product, you can start with a low price for the first sale. After closing that first sale, charge more for the second sale, etc. Instead of going for a high price out of the gate, work your way up to asking for a high price by raising the price as your confidence rises. It only takes a handful of sales with increasing prices to gain confidence.
Short Cut 2. Lean On Someone Else
If you lack confidence, find someone who doesn’t and lean on them. Going back to our hiring example, if you haven’t hired for a given role find someone who has! Add them to your interview committee and lean on their experience and confidence to make a faster decision. Eventually, you will have confidence in your own ability to hire for that same role. It might only take one hire to get there.
These short cuts sound very obvious, and they are. Confidence is a simple game, but it’s extremely hard to master. Even knowing how it works, our egos get in the way. I’ve been a CEO for most of the past twenty years and it’s still hard for me to acknowledge that I struggle with decisions where I lack confidence.
There is a reason that narcissism is so common among business leaders, as narcissists are always confident in everything they do. That confidence allows them to make more decisions faster, and while much of their confidence is misplaced that speed and decisiveness becomes a competitive advantage. They are often wrong, but they move fast.
Personally, I use that fact as motivation. I’m not going to let a narcissist win just because I lack confidence in myself. I’m going to build confidence faster, make better decisions and eventually win. While I might not have confidence in every decision I make, I can have confidence in the fact that I won’t let them win.
And that’s what it takes to win the confidence game: Having confidence in yourself, even when you have to earn it.
For more on Making Decisions, see: