The Confidence Code Read Online Free Page A

learn to report on politics. I don’t know anything about it.’   ” Preoccupied and insecure about whether she would measure up, she should have relied on what she had already achieved to give her a psychological boost.
    The more we surveyed the landscape looking for pockets of flourishing confidence, the more we uncovered evidence of a shortage. The confidence gap is a chasm, stretching across professions, income levels, and generations, showing up in many guises, and in places where you least expect it.
    At a conference we moderated at the State Department, former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton spoke openly about the fear she felt when she decided to run for the Senate in 2000, after eight years as First Lady, decades as a political spouse, and a successful legal career. “It’s hard to face public failure. I realized I was scared to lose,” she told us. That caught us off guard. “I was finally pushed,” she said, “by a high school women’s basketball coach, who told me, ‘Sure, you might lose. So what? Dare to compete, Mrs. Clinton. Dare to compete.’   ”
    Elaine Chao dared to compete. She was the country’s first Chinese-American cabinet secretary. For eight years, she served President George W. Bush as labor secretary, the only cabinet member to stay with the president through his entire administration. There wasn’t much in her background to predict such lofty heights. Chao was born in Taiwan; she came to the United States on a freight ship at the age of eight, after her father finally managed to get together enough money to pay the fare. Her rise reads like a classic tale of hard work, risk, and ironclad confidence.
    But when we asked Chao if she ever doubted her abilities during those years in office, she was wonderfully candid, and funny. “Constantly,” she replied. “I’m Asian American, are you kidding? My fear was that the newspapers would have blaring headlines like: ‘Elaine Chao Failed, Disgraced Whole Family.’   ”
    We’d figured, and hoped, that the younger generation might have markedly different tales to tell. But their stories are eerily similar. It is hard to imagine a more successful Gen-Y’er than Clara Shih, for example. The thirty-one-year-old tech entrepreneur founded the successful social media company Hearsay Social in 2010. She joined the board of Starbucks at the tender age of twenty-nine. She’s one of the few female CEOs in the still techno-macho world of Silicon Valley. Although she hasn’t let the confidence gap stop her from racking up a string of impressive achievements, even she admits that it has tripped her up. “At Stanford, I found the computer science major very difficult. I really had to work hard, especially in the upper-level courses,” Shih told us. “Yet, somehow, I was convinced that others found it easy. At times I felt like an imposter.” Shih even considered dropping out and switching to an easier major. On graduation day, she was astonished to learn she’d finished first in her class.
    “I realized I had deserved to be there all along and that some of the geeky guys who talked a big game weren’t necessarily smarter.”
    Tia Cudahy, a Washington, DC, lawyer who always appears calm, upbeat, and utterly in charge, told us that she’d recently formed a partnership with a colleague to do some outside consulting, something she’d long wanted to try. Lo and behold, they got a contract right away. “In my mind, though, I immediately jumped to what I couldn’t do—what parts of the job I didn’t feel qualified for,” she told us. She almost turned down the contract but managed to battle her doubts.
    We were talking to Tia over drinks, thankfully, because we could at least laugh—after we had sighed in recognition. It’s all such a waste of time and energy, these bouts of self-doubt we all engage in. Why do we do it?
    Confidence Served with Crème Brûlée
    The six-foot-tall, silver-haired woman headed toward us in a