Speaker 1: 0:12

Welcome back to another episode and a new season of transformative change, feeling great to be back again and we're gonna jump straight into it. The topic today is the topic of confidence and or the lack thereof. Welcome to transformative change, the cross functional podcast, where we discuss various topics. Transformative change is really about inflicting and driving a positive change in this world. We choose different topics to provide you with the tools that you can use in your everyday life, professional and private, to be a part of this change. So confidence, it is a very interesting thing.

Speaker 1: 1:06

Confidence Some people. Immediately you look at them and you think they have it. But what is really confidence? Is it just acting securely, without a hesitation of down, being able to answer questions rapidly or quickly? Somebody's, that's not confidence. Does that mean that they are not competent? Personally, I don't think so, but what I've noticed in society is that there's a tendency of people that might not have all of the knowledge portraying themselves as extremely confident, giving straight answers and being very well to the point. I've noticed throughout my career as well and I like doing presentations, I like standing on stage and I like talking, and I've studied this quite much. You can fake confidence. You can stand on a stage and say something sound very confident, but you can be completely wrong, even in meetings. I've also noticed that some people are completely wrong in what they say, but they say it with such conviction and confidence that people believe them. Very smart people, on the other hand, I've seen as well they may struggle with confidence and I think I see this quite often working much with experts in different domains, because the more you know, you also know that there are limitations.

Speaker 1: 2:48

Intelligent individuals are often very aware on the vastness of knowledge and their own limitation and their awareness can make them more cautious and less confident Because they understand there's always more to learn and ways that they could be wrong. We also know that many smart people they have a tendency of striving for perfectionism. They set very high standards for themselves and anything less than perfection might be viewed as a failure. This can lead to the lack of confidence when they fall short or have unrealistic standards. We also know that if you are very aware of the situation, if you have a high understanding of the problem, you also know that the solution you thought of initially might not be the right one. You might overthink the solution. You have a tendency, as a very intelligent individual to overanalyze and overthink different situations. So you get some sort of decision parallelism, because you could do that or you could do this, or you keep doubting your solutions Because what if? Are there areas I don't know? You can foresee different problems and look or think 10 steps ahead in all the complexity and problems and this is something I usually meet that smart individuals have a tendency of not getting to action, because what if you're acting the wrong way? So you can always analyze a little bit more.

Speaker 1: 4:33

And also then is the topic around the imposter syndrome. It's a very common phenomenon where individuals doubt their own accomplishments and having a persistent fear of being exposed as a fraud, regardless of how competent you actually are. What we see is highly intelligent and successful people often suffer from this imposter syndrome, Feeling they don't deserve success or you might just be lucky to be there. So this usually comes with the more intelligent you are, because you're aware of so many different things and you see, oh, there are other people better than me. And that also comes to another interesting part about the confidence.

Speaker 1: 5:22

Highly intelligent individuals have a tendency of comparing themselves with others who they perceive as more successful or competent in certain areas, and that can diminish your own confidence. So if you, for instance, are a developer, a researcher, there's always going to be someone that's better than you. Even if you are considered one of the best in the world, there's always going to be someone at certain stages that are better than you. So if you compare yourself with others, this happens and you can also see other people that you know doesn't have the same understanding or the same potential as you do. You can see that they are more successful. Then you are Basically. They are out there, they are talking to other people, they are being published or they're seen in media, there are articles written around them and you feel like they don't know as much as I do. So you compare yourself with others, which makes you doubt as well.

Speaker 1: 6:37

And then being intelligent also, we have seen there are social factors involved in this. So sometimes intelligent people might feel a little bit out of place or misunderstood by their peers, leading to social self-isolation or difficulties in finding like-minded individuals, and this, of course, can impact your self-esteem and confidence in social situations. This is so interesting because this means that if you are an individual that are considered very knowledgeable or very intelligent, you struggle because you know so much, and this type of communication is then hard for you. It's hard for you to put words on it or sound confident, because it's always this what if? What if I'm wrong? What if somebody else knows better than me? What if I'm a fraud? And this makes smart people, knowledgeable people, doubt themselves. And now probably you can see where I'm getting to.

Speaker 1: 7:59

If you have these doubts, if you have issues potentially with your self-esteem, if you feel out of place, is it easy for you then to sound confident? Is it easy for you to instill the confidence in the words you have towards your stakeholders, towards your friends, towards your family? Probably not, because looking and sounding confident isn't the same thing as being right. But as humans, for some reason, we feel more safe when somebody is standing in front of us, being 100% secure in what they are saying. It's important to remember that being knowledgeable and intelligent is not the same thing as being confident or sounding confident. This then creates a problem for us, because when we are not the expert, when we are not the most knowledgeable around the topic, who are we going to listen to? Most likely, we will listen to the person that sounds the most confident that their suggestion is the right one.

Speaker 1: 9:38

Between there two people coming in, you are sitting as a decision maker in an organization. First it comes a very slick person. He is very good at speaking. He is very confident in his communication. He just looks and sounds like he knows exactly what he is talking about. Every time you have a question, he has an answer. I didn't say he has the right answer. And then there comes a person into that room. Every time you ask a question there is a. Well, it depends. You could do it this way, and then that person goes into a lot of details, or you can do it this way, followed by more details. Who would you trust the most? Most of the time, I'm pretty sure the majority of us would trust a confident person because we want the answers. It sounds like that person knows what he is talking about. Might not be the case.

Speaker 1: 10:39

So how do we remove this bias within us to only be appalled, be drawn in by this type of confidence? It is hard. But we also need to push ourselves and be aware about this bias, and this is why I found it so interesting about confidence. Should we focus more on removing this bias or give people better tools in presentation, in building this type of aura of confidence and also trying to talk about because what it boils down to end of the day is communication Because we might not have the tools to evaluate properly the responses we are getting and if we are put in this situation, that can be dangerous. Why can that be dangerous, you might ask? Well, there is this Dunning-Kruger effect, which basically says that the less you feel competent in the area, there is this curve that initially, when you get to know a topic, you feel like you know everything, but the more you know, the less your confidence is, and then it starts building up the more and more you know. So what we can say from this Dunning-Kruger effect is this cognitive bias can explain why some individuals who are less knowledgeable or less competent in a certain area might exhibit excessive confidence.

Speaker 1: 12:19

A few of the underlying reasons that we then need to understand is that this comes from one lack of self-awareness. People with limited knowledge or competence in specific domain may not be sufficiently self-aware to accurately assess their own skills. This lack of awareness can lead to an overestimation of their abilities. There can also be this misunderstanding of the competence. So those that have limited knowledge might not fully understand what competence in a particular area entails Because they don't know what they don't know. They may mistakenly believe that they are more skilled than they actually are. And this is something we encounter constantly People in different areas that have no awareness on how big the area is or all the pitfalls, so they don't understand what competence within the area actually means.

Speaker 1: 13:22

Or they think that only the technical part, for instance, is what's going to solve the problem when it's so much bigger. Because they haven't done it, they haven't seen it, so how would they know? But they're very confident in that particular moment that they know everything. They just haven't been exposed to it. Then Could we really blame them? And how do we then make sure they're aware in a good way? And then the cognitive bias part of the Dunning-Kruger effect is our brains are processing shortcuts. That leads to errors in judgments. These biases can skew self-perception and enhance confidence unjustifiably. And there might also be the reason of feedback and the social environment that these types of individuals operate in. So if an individual is not regularly and accurately informed about their performance so this might be how we actually work with it they might not have an opportunity to correct their misperceptions. Sometimes the social or work environment might not provide the necessary feedback to dispel over confidence. So part of actually working with this is to enhance the feedback culture. Where we are, if it's private or if it's professional, feedback always helps to course adjust. Make sure that we are focusing on the right things.

Speaker 1: 14:56

What we have to also understand is that confidence in itself might be a defensive mechanism for some people, because being overconfident may mask insecurities or the lack of knowledge. It's very hard to actually say I don't know. I would say, particularly in a professional setting, if you say I don't know if you are having problem with self-esteem or if you're worried that you might lose your job, for instance, or you're put in a position where you don't know how to operate. Saying I don't know is probably one of the hardest things you can do, but it's so refreshing when people actually do so. Overconfidence may mask the insecurities that lie beneath or the lack of knowledge. Projecting confidence can sometimes be used to avoid criticism or to cover up a lack of understanding. So it's important to understand that this comes from a place of protection, from defense. So it's important to note that this effect that we've been talking about now, that didn't trigger is just one explanation or, potentially, people not being knowledgeable enough in a certain area can be overly confident.

Speaker 1: 16:29

We can't use it for all situations and there might be more underlying factors, but what we can point out in all of this is that this is a problem. It is very hard to have conversation or drive change when there are people that are not knowledgeable about the problem you're trying to solve, but they act as if and this comes from a place. So we need to address it. But we also need to address it in a way that's not harmful for the other individual, because, end of the day, we want people to follow and drive this transformative change in society. So we need to bring in the experts, but we need to find some sort of a middle ground, because what happens when you have confidence? You take decisions even though you don't have. There are some good things to it as well Getting to action now I'm not saying the right action is easier when somebody feel confident and project confidence in taking decisions. Having an expert that's extremely knowledgeable but gets stuck in all the details, the best way of halting a project, the best way of not getting to results, is overthinking the situation, getting stuck in mapping all the different options, that everything is still theory and still it's put into practice. And for, especially, organizations driving change, at some times you need to say, okay, we have all the information that we need in order to take a decision.

Speaker 1: 18:11

I read this really interesting study at one point, which was a doctor and they were trying to diagnose a certain condition and they were given different pieces of information. They were given a one summary, half a page, one page, three pages, 10 pages. The big difference here was they were given more and more information and then we're trying to estimate how confident they were in setting the right diagnosis. The interesting part from this study showed that they were able to diagnose it correctly with just one page of information in. I think it was 90% of the cases. The 10 pages of information, of course, led to a little bit like 91, 92% confidence in making that diagnosis. However, putting all of that information and doing that was a longer period of time. So they also overestimated how correct they were, because they were asked to.

Speaker 1: 19:13

How likely is it that you are correct With 10 pages of information? Almost all of the doctors thought they were correct, but with only one page, there was a lower percentage. So the more information you have doesn't necessarily make you more right all of the time just a little bit, but you have a tendency of overestimating how right you are with less information. Sometimes taking actions gives you new information. So we need to also find a middle ground around being too confident with too little information or knowledge or not being confident enough to take a decision when you know your area. That was the episode around confidence. Thank you so much for listening into the first episode of the new season and I hope you liked it and I'll see all of you soon again.