7
Acting to gain confidence
The secret of action is to start in on it.
– ALAIN
A young man is preparing for a night of love. He is nervous: it’s his first time. The woman lying at his side has made a deep impression on him. He has been dreaming of her for a long time, and he imagines that she must be experienced. The time is now. But he himself has no experience. Where then will his confidence come from? From action, first of all. From very real caresses and kisses. This reality is something he is holding, cupped in his hand, pressed against his lips. It’s by starting to enter into the game of caresses, then by making love, that he will really gain confidence in himself. And not before! His confidence comes from his relationship with the woman beside him, from the bond that he has woven with her. If he pretends to be a man of experience, he runs the risk of being shut inside himself, of finding no support in his relationship and being unable to perform. If, however, he admits that it’s his first time, he can let himself be guided by her: his confidence will come from her. And though coming from her, it will become his. This is the natural process by which self-confidence arises: a gradual appropriation that action alone makes possible. I wish so much I had known this at the time …
How many virginal young men make a botch of their first time because they are obsessed with performance, caught up in their interior monologue, counting solely on themselves to make it happen! Failure is their punishment for not having had enough confidence in their relationship, not having given themselves over to it enough, in the present moment. Failure is their punishment for having located their confidence in the ‘self’. When we act in the world, we are not alone. And if there’s one realm where we truly need to remember this, it’s in the realm of sex. In our sexual lives more than anywhere else, only action liberates us.
Psychologists, teachers, coaches, athletes, and theoreticians of ‘positive psychology’ all agree in saying that self-confidence develops through action. But a misunderstanding often slips in behind that generally agreed notion. While self-confidence may be gained through action, it is not a pure confidence in ‘self’, separate from the world, as though we were monads with essential qualities needing to be developed in action. It is a confidence in the encounter between oneself and the world. An encounter that we do not entirely control, which will hold surprises for us and be rich in lessons learned. Through action, we discover new opportunities in the real world and unsuspected resources that our action helps uncover. As our action brings us in contact with others, the solution may come from them, or in the end prove simpler than we imagined, or we could even have a stroke of luck! You need to have confidence not just in your ‘self’, but in the encounter between yourself and others, between yourself and the world – which only taking action can set in motion.
This nuance is decisive, and it can be liberating. When I am paralysed by a lack of confidence, the fact that I need to ‘go for it’ may strike me as a paradoxical instruction. Maybe taking action will help me gain confidence, but how, if I lack self-confidence, do I gear myself up to act? I may feel less weighed down and find the impetus to act if I understand that I have to have confidence not just in myself but in the encounter between the world and me, in the consequences that will flow from that encounter. These will sometimes be lucky, sometimes less so, and often unexpected.
Defending a philosophy of confidence inevitably brings up the first principle of Stoic wisdom: not everything is dependent on us. There are things that depend on us and things that don’t. The Stoic world view, from Marcus Aurelius to Seneca, is founded on this distinction. We must act, of course, as much as possible on the things that depend on us, but being self-confident means that we must also have confidence in the things that don’t depend on us and that our actions may set in motion. Often when we lack confidence, when we put too much pressure on ourselves, it’s our understanding of the world that’s at fault. We have forgotten the Stoics’ insight and are assuming that everything depends on us. There is no surer way of ‘botching’ one’s first time.
Let us take inspiration from men and women of action, adventurers, pioneers, entrepreneurs. Even when they have spent a long time thinking before they start, they have confidence in action itself and in all that it sets in motion in the real world, directly or indirectly. They know that their action will have the power to reconfigure the world around them, create new opportunities that they will have to seize. Even if they make every effort to control the things that depend on them, they know how much does not depend on them, which may emerge as a hindrance or a help. They are ready. Though they may have drawn up a detailed course for themselves, a fine-grained business plan, they know that action will in and of itself modify the parameters. They may need to alter their route to avoid a storm or take advantage of better-than-expected weather conditions. They may have to launch a new product that will correct the flaws of the first, or they may have to double down on the first one they launched. They have to stay attuned to how others and the world around them react. That is the true spirit of enterprise: to have the ability to predict and enjoy doing it, but also to embrace all that remains unpredictable.
From outside, many entrepreneurs and adventurers seem to be carved from a solid block of confidence. Up close, it turns out that many of them don’t hide their doubts or their past failures. But they have confidence in action, in all that can happen once an encounter with the world occurs. They know, just as Marcus Aurelius did, that the outcome of the encounter doesn’t depend solely on them. And they are not in any way resigned to this inevitability: they welcome it.
I’ve often noticed that entrepreneurial men and women like to play the go-between, even when they have no direct interest in the outcome, just because they think that a particular match-up could be interesting, make something happen. They like to bet on what’s still uncertain, to start something going that may have a bright future. They know, as all bold people do, that luck can be provoked.
A young executive asks for a meeting with his boss to increase the scope of his responsibilities; a young filmmaker knocks on the door of a director she admires to show him her work; these men and women who have the courage to take the first step – let’s not mistake their boldness. If they take action, it’s not necessarily because they have confidence in ‘themselves’, prior to taking action. More than anything, they have confidence in action itself.
Before she became one of the most widely read novelists of her time and won more than fifty literary prizes, Isabel Allende grew up in Chile where, the moment she mentioned her ambition, people told her it was impossible because she was a girl. Yes, she might be the niece of President Allende, but she was still a girl. She grew up in a man’s world with a strong sense of that world’s unfairness and without a single female example to inspire her. As a young journalist, she was assigned to interview the poet Pablo Neruda, and she had the audacity not to stick to the prepared questions. She gave free rein to her spontaneous inspiration. Neruda, she says, interrupted her with these words: ‘Look, you lie all the time, you make things up, you put things in people’s mouths that they haven’t said. These are faults in journalism, but they are virtues in literature. So you’d do better, young lady, to devote yourself to writing fiction.’ She might never have become a novelist had it not been for this encounter. And yet, she hesitated about whether to conduct the interview at all. She didn’t feel legitimate. So she didn’t go into the interview with any great feeling of confidence. Yet it’s because she went ahead with it that she found her freedom. It was during the interview that she gained confidence. Actors who suffer from stage fright have the same experience time after time: their confidence comes when they go onstage. Not before.
If we fail, or if we are less successful than we’d hoped, at least we will have succeeded in trying. I see this every day among my students: failing to try leads gradually to a loss of confidence. I sometimes invite them to get up and speak, in a more or less impromptu mode, on a very difficult subject. Those who make a stab at it gradually gain confidence in themselves, even if they don’t fully overcome the difficulties of the exercise. To the other students, they seem like the ones who have tried, who have made a start. This is already something to be proud of. By trying, they have found that they are capable of new ideas, of intuitions they hadn’t expected. They don’t need to be successful at the exercise in order to draw satisfaction from it. On the other hand, those who continue to hang back never gain self-confidence. By not going for it, not grappling with the real world, they never get the chance to find the thing that might free them from being blocked. They fall into a vicious circle: by not taking action, they deprive themselves of action’s liberating qualities, and their anxiety does nothing but grow.
When we understand the benefits of action, we are no longer tempted to define it as the simple outcome of thought. We are the product of centuries of Platonism and Western rationalism, which have valued the work of the intellect and the contemplative mind over direct action. Hence our difficulty in recognising the primary power of action. It’s true that thought must often precede action, but it doesn’t follow that action is of less value than thought. Otherwise, we’d never be able to find the confidence we need when it comes time to act: we’d continue to tremble each time our thought failed to dispel every uncertainty, which it will never do. Action is never a question of putting into practice a project that has been thoroughly planned. It is the encounter of a person with no great confidence in himself and a world that is only partly predictable. The truth of action can therefore not be found in the thinking that precedes it: it can only reside in the action itself. ‘The secret of action,’ as the French philosopher Alain said more than once, ‘is to start in on it!’
Let’s not forget that in order to survive on this earth in the midst of the dangers that threaten us, we humans have had to act and react since the dawn of time. We are more the product of these millions of years of evolution than the few centuries of Platonism. We sense this when we take our courage in both hands and force ourselves to make an opening remark to a person we are interested in, or stand up to speak in public. Just the fact of going into action awakens our primitive self, our primordial combativeness, which plays so important a role in our confidence.
Too often, the psychologists, teachers, and coaches who stress the importance of action as a means of developing our self-confidence don’t put enough emphasis on the idea of action as an encounter with the world, with others, and with reality. Action is too closely associated with one’s will: as a simple means of testing one’s abilities, of developing one’s skills. It is sometimes seen as nothing more than a training ground for strengthening one’s will. But to act is to do more than to train; it is to come in contact with the world. There’s nothing to say that the world won’t be kinder to us than we expect. To act is to give oneself the chance of being pleasantly surprised, the chance to experience the world’s kindness.
In presenting self-confidence as a philosophy of action, I am proposing an existentialist, not an essentialist, view of it. From the essentialist’s perspective, having confidence in myself comes down to believing in an essential ‘me’, an indivisible core deep inside myself, an unchanging and all-important ego. Such an idea, spouted in video after video about self-confidence on YouTube, is problematic.
There is no evidence that such an essence of the self exists, that we contain such an essential and fixed ‘being’. If there is a point on which Freudian psychoanalysis, contemporary philosophy, the neurosciences, and positive psychology agree, it is that personal identity is multiple, plural, and changing. This is something that should reassure all the people who suffer from lack of self-confidence: the fixed and immutable ‘me’ does not exist! Also, we can’t ‘be’ nothing, since what we ‘are’ is in flux. Most often, our lapses in confidence originate in childhood traumas: we were underappreciated, publicly humiliated, treated as essentially mediocre. The classic philosophic distinction between being and becoming can in such cases be liberating. We are not: we are in the process of becoming. We don’t have confidence in ourselves? It doesn’t matter: let’s have confidence in what we are capable of becoming.
Seeing confidence in one’s ‘self’ as confidence in one’s essential being or deep nature also runs the risk of causing us to bypass much of the beauty of life.
Our lives are fascinating not because they allow us to unpack gradually the abilities of a ‘me’ in which everything is already contained at the outset, but because they give us the chance to invent ourselves and reinvent ourselves, to rebound from setbacks and embark on new courses, to discover unexpected potential within ourselves. And it’s a good thing too, or we wouldn’t be free. If life simply consisted of unfolding the possibilities of an essential self, then ‘essence’ would in fact precede ‘existence’. But in Sartre’s formulation ‘existence precedes essence’, meaning that prior to all else we exist. Our confidence has to be placed in that existence, not in some hypothetical essence, which for Sartre only takes shape on the day we die, when we can no longer add anything to our story.
To exist is to take the plunge, to go forward toward others and the world, toward the obstacles that we can turn into opportunities, as long as we are willing to change how we see things. So many things can happen once we get ourselves moving, and we can put so many forces into play once we are engaged, meet so many men and women who can help us, voluntarily or involuntarily, that even the expression ‘confidence in oneself’ sounds beside the point.
To act is to invite the self to take part in the swirl of existence, to step outside itself rather than persist in thinking it encompasses the pure essence of its value, to ‘burst’ outward rather than huddle in on itself. This is the meaning of the title of one of Sartre’s main works: The Transcendence of the Ego. The ego’s value is ‘transcendent’ in that it operates and is operated on outside the ego, through its capacity to act, to forge relations with others, to take part in the dance of life.
Don’t have confidence in yourself, then. Instead, have confidence in what your actions are capable of bringing about; in the point of contact they offer you with the world and with others. Have confidence in what depends on you, and confidence also in what doesn’t. Have confidence in the reality that is already being transformed by your actions. Have confidence in the luck that your actions can stir up. Have confidence in the men and women who you will meet and who will maybe give you ideas, advice, hope, strength, and – why not? – love.