The Confidence Code Read Online Free

should,” agreed Mo. “I can get down on myself about missing a shot, even though I know I worked for it—it’s still an adjustment to say, ‘All right, just let the play go—move on to the next play.’ Even at thirty, and after eight seasons at WNBA, that’s something that I still have to work on.”
    “I feel like with women, you still want to please people,” sighed Crystal. “I feel like that’s what happened to me last year, in my playing. That’s my problem, sometimes I just want to please people.”
    Mo shrugged. “If you have a male attitude and that type of swagger and confidence in yourself, you play better.”
    Honestly, none of this was what we had been expecting or hoping to hear. How . . .  messy , that even in our perfectly imagined habitat of female basketball stars, the essence of confidence was still elusive—or at least still battered by the same familiar forces. Monique and Crystal had looked so . . . purely confident out there on the court. But after thirty minutes of talk we’d uncovered overthinking, people pleasing, and an inability to let go of defeats—three traits we had already realized belonged on a confidence blacklist.
    If clean confidence couldn’t be found in professional sports, where was it? We decided to explore a realm in which women are routinely pushed well beyond their comfort zones, in direct competition with men.
    Officer Michaela Bilotta had just graduated with honors from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis and was one of fourteen members of her class chosen to join the prestigious Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team. The EOD is responsible for dealing with and deactivating chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons in areas of conflict, and its members routinely deploy with Special Operations Forces. To be chosen, you have to be the best. When we congratulated Bilotta on her new post she immediately deflected our praise, calling it “part chance.” We pointed out how she had just, unwittingly, refused to own her achievement. She offered a half smile.
    “I think it definitely took me longer than it would have for some other people to admit that I was worthy of it,” Bilotta confessed. “Even though from the outside, I can look in and think, you did all the work and you earned your spot.” She paused. We were sitting with her in her parents’ basement, which, we noticed, was overflowing with sports gear, trophies, and academic plaques—the souvenirs of raising five determined girls. No clues that would have suggested a childhood that didn’t nurture self-belief. “I just doubted it,” she said, shaking her head. “I wondered, ‘how did this happen? I got so lucky.’   ”
    Luck. What could be more divorced from luck than passing all of the clearly defined, objectively measured physical and mental and intellectual hurdles that the military neatly lays out for someone like Michaela Bilotta? How was it that she couldn’t see that what she had accomplished wasn’t just a fluke?
    Of course, we know exactly how she feels. We too have been masters at attributing our successes to the vagaries of fate. Katty still entertains the notion that her public profile in America is thanks to her English accent, which must, she suspects, give her a few extra IQ points every time she opens her mouth. Claire spent years telling people she was “just lucky”—in the right place at the right time—when asked how she became a CNN correspondent covering the collapse of communism in Moscow when she was still in her twenties.
    “For years I really believed that it was all luck. Even as I write this I have to fight that urge. What I’ve realized only recently is that by refusing to take credit for what I had achieved, I wasn’t nurturing the confidence I needed for my next career steps,” she admits. “I was literally quaking when it came time for me to go back to Washington and cover the White House. At the time, I thought to myself, ‘I’ll never