Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © Allary Éditions, 2018

Translation copyright © Willard Wood, 2019

Cover design by Jack Smyth

Charles Pépin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008324018

Ebook Edition © January 2020 ISBN: 9780008324025

Version: 2020-11-16

Dedication

For Victoria, Marcel, and Georgia

Because I only have to look at you to feel confidence. In myself. In life. And most of all in you.

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Contents

6  Introduction

7  1. Cultivate Strong Ties

8 2. Go into Training

9  3. Listen to Yourself

10  4. Expose Yourself to Wonder

11  5. Decide

12  6. Get Your Hands Dirty

13  7. Swing into Action

14  8. Admire

15  9. Stay True to Your Desire

16  10. Trust the Mystery

17  Conclusion

18  Works Contributing to This Book

19  Index

20  About the Author

21  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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Introduction

The stabilisers came off this morning. All of four years old, she hops on her bike and takes off under a blue sky. Her father runs alongside, one hand at her back, the other gripping the bicycle seat. She pedals faster and faster, clutching the handlebars. Her father encourages her: ‘Don’t stop pedalling,’ he says. ‘Look straight ahead. You’re doing great!’ He lets go of the seat. The child picks up speed. She maintains her balance, rolling along without her father’s help. When she realises this, she shouts with joy and speeds ahead. She feels buoyant and free: she has confidence.

But what does she have confidence in, exactly?

In her own abilities? In her father? In this moment of family happiness?

Self-confidence, we sense, is the result of alchemy. It arises from a combination of factors. The routes leading us to it are various, but once we’ve acquired it, it supports each of us in the same way. There is only one self-confidence, but there are a number of ways to get there.

Madonna belongs on the stage: she is an artist who has been able to reinvent herself all her life. Yet she was a shy child, scarred by the loss of her mother when she was only five. So how did she find the strength to make her mark?

Patrick Edlinger was one of the pioneers of free climbing. When he free soloed a route, his gestures were so fluid that he seemed to dance above the void. He moved from one handhold to the next with extraordinary grace. What was his secret?

Landing on an aircraft carrier at night, a pilot faces an ultra-short runway at speeds of 180 mph, with extremely limited visibility. How does he master his fear?

With traffic whizzing by all around him, an emergency services doctor has to pick out which of the trauma cases and which of their traumas need treatment first. How does he avoid making mistakes?

And what about musicians who improvise in front of large crowds? Tennis players who keep their nerve during match point? Students who are at their best on exam day? All these men and women who have the courage to listen to their inner voice and put their lives on the line, where do they get their self-confidence? What is it that they all have in common?

The little girl on her bike can point us in the right direction. There are three places from which she gets her confidence.

First, from her father. She doesn’t take off alone, she does it with her father, and thanks to her father. Self-confidence is confidence in someone else.

Then there is her own capability. She has absorbed her father’s advice about how to pedal, how to hold the handlebars. She has acquired a skill, without which nothing would be possible. Self-confidence is confidence in one’s own abilities.

But there’s more. Her bubbling joy as she gathers speed is more than just the satisfaction of knowing how to bicycle. It is a deeper, more encompassing joy, which resonates with gratitude toward life. Self-confidence is confidence in life.

These three drivers of self-confidence will recur, in various forms and to varying degrees, again and again: confidence in others, confidence in one’s own capabilities, and confidence in life. That’s how it all starts, maybe – when you go at it with the freshness of a child, confident without even knowing what you have confidence in.

‘Confidence is the childish ability to walk toward something unfamiliar as though recognising it,’ Christian Bobin has written. We know more about risks and dangers than when we first hopped on our bikes as children. Our greater understanding makes us more anxious. But it shouldn’t blunt our boldness, our ability to go for it. Having confidence in ourselves requires us to keep the heart that we had as children – a child’s soul in the mind of an adult.

All this is forced on us by the times we live in. In traditional societies, every person had his place. You didn’t need self-confidence when everything was settled for you at birth, when there was nothing to be conquered. But modern life, on the other hand, makes us free agents, responsible for our own fate. It’s our job to get our projects going, to prove our worth, and to build our happiness – our job to invent our own lives. This requires self-confidence.

Yet things are more complicated than they once were. Self-confidence has never been more important, and it’s never been so hard to acquire. Fixing a car engine or building a ladder might once have been a balm to a man’s wounds. Feeding one’s family entirely with the produce from one’s own vegetable garden might once have filled a person’s heart with pride. But spending all day in meetings or responding to emails doesn’t play the same role. We’ve lost direct contact with things. Our systems of production are so complicated that we no longer know what it is we do. We follow protocols and processes, but we have a hard time pinpointing our profession. Being as superconnected as we are puts us all at a remove from basic doing, and leaves us with few concrete opportunities to develop confidence. We need to find a base on which to build our confidence, both personally and collectively.

The journeys taken by Madonna, Patrick Edlinger, George Sand, John Lennon, Serena Williams and others will give us insight. We aren’t born confident; we become confident. Self-confidence is always something that has to be worked at patiently. It is also something that, once we gain a certain level of effortless command, can give us profound joy.

To probe the mystery of self-confidence, we will look to ancient wisdom and modern philosophers, among them Emerson, Nietzsche, and Bergson. These thinkers often approach the subject indirectly – it’s when they are thinking about freedom, audacity, or individuality that they talk about confidence. We’ll also look farther afield, to psychologists like Boris Cyrulnik and psychoanalysts like Jacques Lacan, and to the writings of researchers and teachers. We’ll also examine the experiences of athletes, fighter pilots, and emergency room doctors, the words of poets, and the visions of great mystics.

Self-confidence is so central to our existence that it can’t be encompassed by a single discipline. We won’t learn to understand how it works by studying it in a laboratory. Instead, we’ll have to observe it in real life, watch its birth and development, adopt its rhythm and follow its movement, its hesitations and swerves. We’ll have to run alongside it just as you run alongside a child – a child who almost falls, catches herself, and then takes off.

1

Cultivate Strong Ties

Confidence through relationships

Gentleness is invincible.

– MARCUS AURELIUS

Self-confidence first comes from others. This statement might seem paradoxical. It is not. Human infants are extraordinarily fragile and dependent. In their first months of life, they are unable to live on their own. The fact of their survival is proof that they have been cared for by others. Their confidence is first and foremost a confidence in their caregivers: self-confidence begins as confidence in others.

It is because we are born at a relatively early stage of foetal development that we need others so much. Embryologists tell us that embryonic cells would require about twenty months to reach maturity. Aristotle had already made the observation that we are born incomplete. It’s as though nature had failed to finish its task, propelling us into existence weaker and more unready than any other mammal. We are born not knowing how to walk, a skill that takes a year on average for us to learn. A colt, on the other hand, needs only a few hours, and sometimes only a few minutes, before it starts to gambol. And we should have self-confidence?

We compensate for this natural deficiency through culture – family, mutual assistance, and education. Thanks to the artistry of human relations, we eventually finish the work that nature left in draft form, and we acquire the confidence that nature withheld from us.

Little by little, children gain confidence in themselves, thanks to the ties they have developed with others, the care that has been lavished on them, the attention focused on them, the unconditional love they receive. Small children don’t feel that this love is given to them for the things they attempt or succeed at. They are loved for what they are and not for what they do. This is the most solid base for the self-confidence they will later acquire. Being loved and looked at in this way gives us strength throughout our life.

Our struggle to achieve self-confidence starts by overcoming what Freud called infantile anxiety. When an adolescent is eager to go out and discover the big wide world, when an adult is confident and manages to get his or her projects up and running, it’s primarily because they were lucky enough to develop early on, in the course of what Boris Cyrulnik calls their ‘precocious interactions’, the inner sense of security that psychologists have determined is so important.

While self-esteem is based on our assessment of our own value, self-confidence is tied to our capacity for action, our ability to venture forth despite our doubts, to take risks in a complex world. To find the courage to adventure into the outside world, you have to have an inner assurance.

In his masterly essay on the ‘mirror stage’, Jacques Lacan describes the moment at which a child first becomes conscious of himself. When children are still at the toddler stage – the average age is between six and eighteen months – they recognise themselves in the mirror. But what exactly happens that first time? The child is in the arms of an adult, who holds him up to the mirror. No sooner has the child recognised himself than he turns toward the adult and asks him with searching eyes, Is this me? Is it really me? The adult answers with a smile, a look, or a few soothing words. The adult reassures the child: Yes, that’s really you. The philosophical implications of this first encounter are enormous – the other is there from the outset between me and myself. I am conscious of myself only through that other person. The child has confidence in what he sees in the mirror only because he has confidence in the other. It’s in the eyes of others that he seeks this inner reassurance; it’s in the eyes of others that he seeks himself.

The same experiment has been tried with rhesus monkeys, which are closely related to us genetically. Their intelligence is apparent in that they quickly start using the mirror to inspect parts of their bodies they can’t see otherwise, like their backs and buttocks. But on first encountering a mirror, they don’t turn toward other rhesus monkeys in the room; they don’t look questioningly at each other. Rhesus monkeys are undoubtedly social animals and learn much from each other, but during their developmental phase they are not as dependent on the bonds between them as humans are; they are not relationship-based creatures to the same extent. Without others, we could not develop our humanity; without others, we could not become what we are.

Look at feral children, those children who have been abandoned at birth and raised by animals (bears, wolves, pigs …), only to be found and reintroduced into human society at a later stage. As François Truffaut’s The Wild Child dramatises (in a film based on real events), these children’s lack of attachment to other humans obstructs their development. They are as frightened as hunted animals, unable to learn human speech, seemingly irrecoverable to humanity. In the very best cases, using great patience and gentleness, the professionals who look after these children have managed to nurture fragile bonds with them and guide them toward limited progress. But their self-confidence always remains precarious, vanishing at the slightest obstacle. In the language of modern psychology, these wild children suffer from a lack of ‘attachment’ to other humans. They never bonded with others during their early childhood. They had no one to protect them, reassure them, speak to them, look at them. Deprived of the inner sense of security that comes from these attachments, they are unable to muster the minimal confidence they would need in order to see the world and other people as anything but hostile.

According to such psychiatrists as John Bowlby and Boris Cyrulnik, if a little boy of two is able to say hello to a stranger who comes into his house, smile at him, approach him, and address or touch him, it’s because his sense of inner security is strong enough to deal with this unfamiliar situation. The people he has attached to have given him enough confidence for him to move away from them and approach the stranger.

The education process has been successful when the ‘student’ no longer needs his teachers, when he has enough self-assurance to leave his teachers behind. By taking a few steps toward the stranger who enters his house, the little boy is already starting to learn to be on his own. Others have shown him confidence, and it’s now his turn to act and show he merits it. In order to set off on his own, he draws on the love and attention given him by his family and those around him.

The first years are decisive, but luckily we can build relationships that give us confidence at any age. If we did not have the good fortune to grow up in a nurturing emotional environment, it’s never too late to form the bonds that we lacked early on. But it does require knowing oneself well enough to realise that these bonds are missing and need to be compensated for.

Madonna Louise Ciccone was at first a shy child who lacked self-confidence. She lost her mother to breast cancer at the age of five and resented that her father remarried almost immediately and had a new set of children. She had trouble finding her place in the family circle. She studied piano and ballet from a young age but felt she wasn’t much good at either, that she had to work hard for modest results. But in adolescence, after her stepmother enrolled her in a Catholic school in Detroit, she met Christopher Flynn, a dance teacher who changed her life. While she was rehearsing for the end-of-year show, he said something to her that no one had ever said before, or at least not in so many words: that she was beautiful and talented, and that she had enormous charisma. Years later, Madonna explained that these words changed her life. Before, she hadn’t believed in herself. Now, she could see herself as a dancer in New York; she felt herself being born as an individual. At the end-of-year production, she surprised everyone – her teacher most of all – by dancing with extraordinary energy, and half naked! Madonna was born. Before Christopher Flynn, she’d had other piano and dance teachers. They had taught her many things, given her insight into movement and technique. But none had ever given her the gift of confidence.

I remember a concert that Madonna gave in Nice, France, when I was not yet eighteen. I was fascinated by her stage presence, her way of singing and dancing, her freedom. I remember the giant screen and her face in close-up when she sang ‘Like a Prayer’. Drops of sweat dripped into her eyes. In the look she gave the audience, in her smile, there seemed to be enormous gratitude. Naturally, Madonna was a highly skilled and experienced performer. The woman striding across the stage in every direction already had years of concerts behind her. But charisma can’t be attributed entirely to skill. There’s something more, an element of grace that the charismatic person must have. It’s in the eyes of others that the charismatic person seeks her own truth; she relates to others through constant reinvention. At the time, I didn’t understand very well what I was seeing on that giant screen. Today when I think back to Madonna’s vibrant smile, I believe she was finding in the audience’s response, in their energy, in their love even, that same confidence she had seen long before in the eyes of her dance teacher.

Madonna didn’t grow up in an environment that gave her security, but she found a way to compensate for it later.

If we have had the good fortune, in our early years, to experience warm and nurturing personal ties, later encounters that reinforce our confidence will still be important. But they will be experienced in a different way: through them we will relive, at decisive moments, the grace of someone’s early confidence in us.

Yannick Noah, the great French tennis star, was greatly loved by his parents, Zacharie and Marie-Claire. Deeply in love with each other, they lavished affection on their son. When Yannick was eleven, he met African-American tennis champion Arthur Ashe, who was then ranked fourth in the world and had stopped for a layover in Yaounde, Cameroon, on a tour of Africa. Yannick was lucky enough to hit a few balls with Ashe, who was so struck by the youngster’s level of play that at the end of the session he gave him his racket. The next day, as Ashe was waiting in the airport to board his plane, the young tennis player ran up to him breathlessly holding out an Arthur Ashe poster for the champion to sign. Ashe did more than give the boy an autograph. He wrote, ‘See you at Wimbledon!’ As Yannick Noah would tell the world a few years later, having won the men’s singles title at the French Open, those four words were an invaluable gift. They galvanised him and stayed with him. They allowed him to believe in his own star; they helped him become a tennis player on a level with Arthur Ashe.

With Madonna and Yannick Noah, we see that sometimes it only takes a few heartfelt words from a teacher or a friend to instill self-confidence, and that these words from the heart can give a person confidence for a lifetime.

Others can also give us confidence, without making a big speech or offering words of encouragement, just by trusting us with a mission.

Once I was visiting a corporation to give a talk on ‘The Mystery of Confidence’. A woman came up to me afterward to say that, on returning to work after taking her maternity leave, she had lost all her self-confidence but that she had eventually regained it. It had all started because of her misery at having to leave her toddler behind. She felt brittle and on edge, and she thought she wasn’t up to performing her job, with all its many responsibilities. A few days after her return, her boss called her into his office. She expected the worst. To her surprise, he appointed her to take on a project of crucial importance. No one had ever given her so much responsibility. She immediately regained her self-confidence.

Aristotle gives a very unusual and accurate definition of friendship. A friend, says the author of The Nichomachean Ethics, is someone who makes us better. When he or she is around, we feel good, we make progress, we become more intelligent or more sensitive, we open ourselves up to new aspects of the world and of ourselves, aspects we had not previously known. A friend, says Aristotle, is a person who helps us ‘actualise our own power’. Thanks to our friend, or more accurately, thanks to the relation that we have with our friend, we develop ‘in action’ such talents that had only been latent or ‘in potential’ before. The friendship relation is therefore the occasion for our growth and development. The friend need not be motivated by pure generosity or listen endlessly to our complaints. If our relation to that person is good for us, for our talent, if it allows us to make progress, then that person is our friend: a friend to the life inside us. From this perspective, our piano or dance or drawing teacher, or the sports champion we happen to meet, or our boss at work, can be our friend, on condition that he or she gives us the opportunity to develop, to make progress.

When we spend time with a martial-arts teacher, a sports coach, a yoga instructor – all possible friends in Aristotle’s sense – we gain confidence in ourselves, and not just because we are acquiring skills. Sensitive to the positive attention of another, in the company of someone who wants good for us, we rediscover our truth as relational beings. It isn’t our piano teacher or our martial arts instructor as such who gives us confidence but the relationship that we have with that person. The relationship is experienced as a series of regular meetings that punctuate the progress we are making. Each time, we feel the other’s satisfaction at seeing us improve, we feel the ability that person has to motivate us, to support us when we run into difficulties. Little by little, our mentor’s confidence in us becomes our own. That is how confidence works, and it’s the human way, properly speaking, to learn.

A good teacher instills confidence in us by making us repeat correct actions, by making us practice our scales. Then he invites us to act on what we have learned: he shows confidence in us. When someone makes us confident, these two facets are always intertwined.

While working on this book, I met a quite unusual mountain climber, Érik Decamp. A graduate of the prestigious École Polytechnique, he had climbed some of the highest peaks in the world, including Ganesh IV in the Himalayas and Shishapangma in Tibet, with his wife, the well-known climber Catherine Destivelle. But he was also an alpine guide, that is, a professional in the field of self-confidence. To practise this profession, you need to have confidence in yourself and you need to be able to impart it to others, to the clients you are guiding. To help a person overcome his fear, Érik Decamp uses a strategy that might seem risky but that often proves very effective. When someone seems particularly nervous during the preparation and training before departure, Érik Decamp will sometimes pick them to lead the climb. Often that is enough to free the person of their anxiety. Because the guide shows trust in them, the nervous climber suddenly feels stronger. Érik Decamp begins by instilling confidence in his client, through his advice, his explanations, and by rehearsing various moves and protocols until they became second nature. Then he shows that he trusts the climber by asking them to lead off. With the others roped in behind them, the designated leader has to show that they are worthy of the confidence that has been placed in them.

This was the central precept of Maria Montessori’s pedagogical programme, which was based on kindliness and trust – and is still successfully being practised today. ‘Never help a child perform a task that he feels capable of accomplishing himself,’ was the mantra constantly repeated by the great Italian physician and teacher. In other words: trust the student as soon as possible. And placing your trust in a student means not doing the task for them, it means letting them do it themselves. We can now understand better why our children are annoyed when, on the pretext of showing them, but often just to make things go faster, we help them do something they can perfectly well do on their own. They are right to be unhappy about it: we have shown that we don’t fully trust them.

Every parent, every instructor, every teacher, every friend in Aristotle’s sense, should keep in mind this two-pronged method of making someone confident: first instill confidence, then show confidence. First, give them a sense of security, then make them a little insecure. We need both sides to be able to go out into the world. And often, these two dimensions are mingled in the gaze that others train on us: seeing the confidence in their eyes, we feel ourselves to be stronger.

I often experience this in my role as a philosophy teacher and lecturer. Carried away on a flood of words, or deep into a chain of digressions, I can sometimes lose the thread of my argument and come perilously close to having my confidence desert me. But the fact of seeing interest or curiosity in the eyes of my audience is usually enough to get me back on track. Or else I might look at a philosophical text that I have just handed out to my students and find its meaning hopelessly obscure. But as soon as I feel, through the questions they ask, how much confidence they place in me, the text becomes much clearer. Érik Decamp told me he has the same experience: as an expedition sets off, the confidence that others have in him reinforces his own. Given that we are animals who depend very much on our relationships, there is nothing surprising here. The two of us, Érik Decamp and I, are like the beginning mountain climber who Érik steadies by giving him responsibility: when we feel the confidence that someone else places in us, we rediscover ‘our own’ confidence. Confidence is a gift that others give us, and one that we willingly accept. When my students ask me a difficult question, I offer them a similar gift in return: I tell them that they know the answer. I show that I have confidence in them, and that is usually enough to make them come back quickly with an interesting response.

We sometimes hear that a co-worker, a family member, or someone in the neighborhood lacks self-confidence, as though this confidence were purely an internal matter, something that they had failed to generate on their own. But if no one has ever taken the trouble to give them confidence or placed trust in them, it’s not surprising that they suffer from anxiety. People are puzzled that these acquaintances of theirs lack self-assurance, given their abilities. But this is to forget that we are creatures that exist within relationships, not isolated skill-accumulating monads, and that our confidence grows out of the kinds of bonds we have developed with others.

This truth about relational confidence helps us to better understand the suffering of certain oppressed minorities. Often, the best way to oppress them has been to destroy the bonds between individuals by every means possible, and even to remove the possibility of forming interpersonal solidarity. The accounts of former black slaves, and survivors of the Nazi camps, illustrate this unequivocally: nothing is more effective in breaking men than breaking the bonds between them, separating families, pitting one against another, and creating a climate of pervasive distrust and denunciation.

In his powerful book The Fire Next Time, published in 1963, African-American writer James Baldwin exposes this implacable mechanism of oppression and at the same time confirms that the only way to resist it and maintain one’s confidence is to know the value of one’s ties to others, to find in them the strength to fight: ‘Yes, it does indeed mean something – something unspeakable – to be born, in a white country, […] black. You very soon, without knowing it, give up all hope of communion. Black people, mainly, look down or look up but do not look at each other, not at you, and white people, mainly, look away. And the universe is simply a sounding drum; there is no way, no way whatever, so it seemed then and has sometimes seemed since, to get through a life, to love your wife and children, or your friends, or your mother and father, or to be loved. The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass, and trees, but other people, has […] made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can.’

The psychoanalyst and writer Anne Dufourmantelle, author of Power of Gentleness and L’Éloge du risque (In Praise of Risk), who died tragically in 2017 while rescuing two children from drowning, made the radical statement that ‘there’s no such thing as a lack of self-confidence’. Listening to the patients on her couch as they tried to find words for their pain, she understood that their anxiety was primarily a lack of confidence in others, the disastrous consequence of a childhood cut off from the precious sense of inner security. The survivors of these unhappy childhoods were so deprived of security and of people who placed trust in them that they were unable to have confidence in themselves. When Anne Dufourmantelle says that ‘there’s no such thing as a lack of self-confidence’, she means that her patients’ anxiety derives from a lack of confidence in others. Self-confidence and a confidence in one’s relationships therefore refer to one and the same thing.

This is similarly illustrated by paranoiacs: they have no confidence in themselves, nor do they have confidence in others. Being suspicious of everything that comes from the people around them, from the media, from the world in general, they suffer from ‘inner insecurity’. Consumed by their general mistrust, they can find no basis for having confidence in themselves.

There is consequently one action that will help us to develop confidence in ourselves and at the same time have confidence in others: let us venture out, let us establish relations with different and inspiring people, let us choose teachers and friends who help us grow, who awaken us and reveal us to ourselves. Let us look for relationships that are good for us, that increase our sense of security and thereby free us. And let’s remember the little two-year-old: he walks up to the guest who has just entered his house. He advances toward the unknown. He is afraid, obviously. A stranger has just appeared in his house. But he approaches him anyway. He walks forward with his fear. He has confidence in himself, just as he has confidence in the stranger and in the familiar faces around him. This confidence is not genetically or biologically determined. It is developed, little by little, in the intertwining bonds that have enveloped him since birth and reassured him, just like the towels we wrap around infants when they come out of the bath. We sometimes give their little bodies an energetic rub, as if to remind them that we are there, that we are taking care of them, that they are not alone. These attentions give them confidence. This, more than anything, is what they need. Later, when we encourage them to eat by themselves or take their first steps, we will show that we trust them. No one can develop self-confidence all on his or her own. Self-confidence is first and foremost about love and friendship.

2

Go into Training

Confidence through practice

Give me a fulcrum, and with my lever I will move the earth.

– ARCHIMEDES

As an adolescent, Madonna shook off her inhibitions thanks to the words of her dance teacher. But she already danced well, having studied the art for years. And it was because he had noticed her talent for dance that the teacher singled her out for particular praise. We have stressed the relational component of self-confidence, but we mustn’t forget that it also has a great deal to do with skill.

The father of Venus and Serena Williams set his daughters on the path to success. He gave them confidence in the best way: he told them he believed in them, said they would rise above their social circumstances thanks to tennis, emerge from poverty and become the best tennis players in the world. But he didn’t just show confidence in them. He trained them long and hard from the moment they were old enough to hold a racket. The residents of Compton, California, found it fascinating to watch the Williams sisters training: they spent their life on the tennis court, with their father and a basket of balls. Even the gang members in Compton respected the Williams sisters and made sure that no one disrupted their practice. Their father taught them an aggressive style of tennis, starting with a powerful serve and heavy strokes from deep in the back court. He coached them to use an attacking strategy, where the point is decided in two or three volleys, a kind of tennis that hadn’t existed in the women’s game before. He made them hit the same stroke again and again, train and train some more, with a particular focus on serving – and Serena was the first woman to hit a serve that clocked at over 124 mph. The sisters did in fact become the best tennis players in the world, one after another claiming the number one spot in the World Tennis Association rankings. Serena Williams became the best women’s tennis player of all time, racking up thirty-nine Grand Slam titles, twenty-three of them in women’s singles events (beating Steffi Graf’s record), and fourteen in doubles including one when she was two months’ pregnant! In the history of tennis, she is the only female player to have thrice won a Grand Slam title after saving match point in the finals. It takes astonishing confidence not to falter in the finals of a major tournament when you are facing match point.

This confidence came from her tennis skills, a product of her intense training. But it doesn’t just come down to skill. Thanks to repeating the same gestures over and over, they had become second nature to her. Her extreme skill in the end coloured her personality: in Serena Williams’s case, expertise seems to have transformed into confidence. Does this always happen?

In a book that has become a worldwide success, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell attacks the idea of innate talent and argues for the seductive ‘10,000-hour rule’, popularising an idea originally developed by the psychologist Anders Ericsson. Examining the careers of a group of violinists who trained together at the Berlin Academy of Music, Ericsson wondered what accounted for the differences between what were all excellent musicians. The very best became first violinists in prestigious orchestras or soloists with international careers; the very good ones became professional musicians; and the rest ‘only’ became music teachers. He asked them all the same question: ‘Since the time when you first took up the violin, how many hours have you played?’

The results surprised him. By the age of twenty, none of those who would go on to become ‘just’ music teachers had played his or her instrument for more than 4,000 hours. All those who would become highly qualified professional musicians had played and practised on their instrument for about 8,000 hours. And the highest achievers, those who would become stars in the violin world, had all played for more than 10,000 hours. There wasn’t a single exception. Anders Ericsson then repeated his research with pianists and came up with similar results: professional pianists had about 8,000 hours of playing under their belts, while virtuosos had at least 10,000 hours. He didn’t find a single case of a musician who became a virtuoso without passing the 10,000-hour mark (which works out to roughly three hours a day for ten years).

I am a great fan of the saxophone improvisations of Sonny Rollins: they strike me as a symbol of pure confidence. Sonny Rollins ventures down paths that no one else has explored and creates heavenly, dream-like ballads of astonishing freedom. Recently, I came across an interview with Rollins where he described playing the saxophone at some points in his life for up to seventeen hours a day. His confidence was achieved with a huge amount of work. He had to practise scales on his instrument and master its techniques before he could improvise with such freedom. Among great artists, confidence comes first and foremost from constant, devoted, almost obsessional practice.

But the results of Anders Ericsson’s study should not be interpreted in a simplistic way. Not everyone is going to become a virtuoso just by sticking to his instrument for 10,000 hours. You need to take pleasure in the activity, which has to align with your aspirations, and have a basic predisposition for music. And you need to give those 10,000 hours your attention, be truly present to your art. Other factors probably enter into it as well. The study is interesting all the same because, through its different gradations, it shows how a skill can gradually be incorporated to become genuine confidence. After 8,000 hours, my capabilities are at the point where I can become a professional. Once I have passed the 10,000-hour mark, I can entertain the ambition of becoming one of the best in the world in my field. When Serena Williams became the number-one female player in the under-ten age group, she in fact had 10,000 hours of playing behind her.

Malcolm Gladwell took Anders Ericsson’s study and made it into a general law, as well as a bestseller with a whiff of demagoguery about it. He suggests that in any given field, you need only practise for 10,000 hours in order to acquire mastery of your art and full confidence in yourself. He analysed many instances in great detail, including Mozart and the Beatles, showing that in every case true excellence was achieved only after crossing the 10,000-hour threshold. It’s true, of course, that Mozart could follow a score and play to tempo even before he knew how to read or write. And it’s true that he started composing at the age of six. But his first masterpiece, according to Gladwell – his Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat Major, K.271 – was written in Salzburg in 1777. Mozart was twenty-one at the time and already had 10,000 hours of composing to his credit.

Re-examining the history of the Beatles prior to their wildly successful United States tour in 1964, Gladwell counts how many hours John Lennon and Paul McCartney spent onstage playing music. He tells how in 1960, when they were a schoolboys’ rock and roll band, they were lucky enough to be asked to play at a club in Hamburg. The sets at the Hamburg club lasted eight hours at a stretch, and sometimes all night. This was playing on a different scale from the band’s practices in Liverpool, which had lasted an hour at most and often involved repeating the same few songs over and over. In Gladwell’s telling, the Hamburg club gave the Beatles a chance to really train, and it was there that they gained confidence in themselves, especially in their ability to perform together onstage. The many hours of playing allowed them to learn their instruments thoroughly, to expand their repertoire, and to explore their vocal range. It was also there that they learned to read their public and bring it to a pitch of excitement. The Hamburg experience made them a great band. When they landed in the United States in 1964, they had already spent – according to Gladwell’s detailed calculations – some 12,000 hours onstage. That’s what allowed them to win the hearts of Americans.

Clearly, Anders Ericsson’s findings are not strictly speaking scientific: his theory that excellence can be achieved in any field with 10,000 hours of practice is neither verifiable nor refutable. And when Gladwell uses the work of neuroscientist Daniel Levitin to support the thesis that 10,000 hours is the time it takes the brain to master any discipline, he seems to be reaching for scientific validation. There are many reasons to be wary of this thesis. But I have to admit I find it quite seductive. It makes us realise that even among geniuses, confidence takes time to achieve. It develops in tandem with growing competence that, as it becomes integrated in stages and incorporated, has a liberating effect. Confidence is not innate but something that is largely acquired.

‘Genius,’ as Thomas Edison put it, ‘is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration.’ We shouldn’t forget this when we start to have doubts about ourselves. Often, when our confidence is at a low ebb, we start to think that we lack talent, that we aren’t good at what we do, when in fact it’s just a matter of not having trained enough. Whenever doubt starts to gain the upper hand, whenever we’re afraid that we won’t measure up, the best thing to do is to bolster our confidence by actively developing our skills, rather than invoking some hypothetical lack of talent. Gladwell’s unusual book reminds us of this: Mozart was perhaps an inspired genius, but he also perspired a great deal. He even perspired considerably more than many musicians less inspired than he. Keeping this in mind can help us draw strength from his example.

But Gladwell is only interested in a very localised confidence, focused on the skill on which 10,000 hours of practice have been devoted. True self-confidence, on the other hand, is much broader in extent. It goes beyond the mastery of a single discipline, even if that mastery contributes to it.

Through her skill at tennis and the great success it has brought her, Serena Williams has acquired a sense of confidence that is not limited to the tennis court. When she makes her voice heard nowadays, it is no longer just as a high-ranking sports figure but as a woman, a mother, a citizen, and a feminist. And her voice finds a wide audience.

In 2016, she published an open letter denouncing sexism in sports and the persistent inequality between the sexes. Here is an excerpt: ‘What others marked as flaws or disadvantages about myself – my race, my gender – I embraced as fuel for my success. I never let anything or anyone define me or my potential … Women have to break down many barriers on the road to success. One of those barriers is the way we are constantly reminded we are not men, as if it is a flaw. People call me one of the ‘world’s greatest female athletes’. Do they say LeBron is one of the world’s best male athletes? Is Tiger? Federer? Why not? We should never let this go unchallenged. We should always be judged by our achievements, not by our gender.’

Serena’s confidence is also a transformation of her prowess. By training for all those years, day after day, by hitting balls for hours, she didn’t just train at tennis. On a daily basis, she showed her strength of will, her hunger for achievement, her ability to overcome obstacles. The confidence that now allows her to take courageous positions is the fruit of that experience. As she developed her skill at hitting serves, as she worked on her forehand and her backhand, she became aware of her own power and her drive for life. On the tennis court and everywhere else. By playing tennis, she discovered her own truth, she reached deep within herself and found remarkable resources.

By developing our range within a discipline, we are fortunately able to gain a broader self-confidence. Our experience in that discipline, whatever it may be, can then serve as a fulcrum. ‘Give me a fulcrum, and with my lever I can move the earth,’ said Archimedes. Because our self-confidence plays an important role in how we act, how we engage with the world, everything that anchors us to reality can serve as a base, a springboard.

‘All consciousness is consciousness of something,’ said the German philosopher Edmund Husserl. He meant that we become conscious of ourselves by being conscious of something other than ourselves. For example, because I am conscious of the taste of coffee in my mouth and of the cup I’m holding in my hand, I am conscious of myself. But I am not conscious of myself in a pure, abstract, or disembodied way.

The same goes for self-confidence. In order to feel confidence in ourselves, we must first feel confidence based on specific actions. To paraphrase Husserl, we could say that ‘all self-confidence is confidence in the accomplishment of something’. We need concrete experiences, specific skills, and real successes in order to have confidence in ourselves. So let’s not hesitate to celebrate our successes, even the small ones – they are so many stages along the way to full-blown self-confidence. We sense this when we congratulate our children: we are inviting them each time to have a little more confidence in themselves.

During childhood, we developed confidence in our ability to put one foot in front of another, to write in cursive, to ride a bike. As adults, we might have confidence in our ability to read a score, to find our way around a foreign city, to start a conversation, to express our disagreement, to formulate what it is that we want, to speak in public …

And then one day, we have confidence in ourselves.

That’s what I call the leap in self-confidence. All the other actions we take are so many paths leading to this leap and making it possible, so many opportunities for experiencing this metamorphosis. There is no point, as it happens, in wanting to hasten its arrival: we don’t gain more confidence in ourselves by seeking it out insistently. You have to practise your scales patiently, with your curiosity aroused. And one day, almost without realising it, you start to improvise.

By what miracle does a particular capability lead to true confidence? There are in fact skills that exist behind a wall, that never morph into self-confidence. Serena Williams is a model of one kind, but there are many excellent tennis players who aren’t able to assert themselves beyond the tennis court. Psychologists are aware of the problem: our confidence is often compartmentalised, limited to a skill set that we have mastered. Or worse, sometimes we do not even have confidence in ourselves in the field where we’ve gained mastery. We have mastered it, but we are trembling inside. What is the best way to turn competence into confidence?

The first step is to take pleasure in developing that competence. I see this with my students every day: there is nothing like pleasure to help a student develop his or her abilities and acquire confidence. Those who find a kind of enjoyment in staking out the parameters of a problem and constructing their arguments make much better progress than those who think that serious work has to be performed with a serious attitude. Those who relish the process escape the strict logic of competence and are quicker to have confidence in themselves. The reason is simple: taking pleasure in what they are doing lets them step back and be more relaxed. If they make a mistake, at least they will have had fun. And, in fact, they make fewer mistakes when they are enjoying the work they do. The pleasure we feel in such circumstances is an indication that the field of study suits us, that we stand to gain by delving deeper into it. It’s reassuring to know that we are pursuing a path that is congenial to us.

Competence is therefore more likely to turn into confidence when it helps us to a greater knowledge of ourselves, our resources and characteristics, our tastes and distastes … No lasting self-confidence is possible unless we know ourselves, unless we are ploughing a furrow that corresponds to our own nature. In learning to play tennis, Serena Williams discovered what she was capable of, what her strengths and her weaknesses were, what kind of woman she was. She understood she was the kind of person who becomes her truest self in moments of adversity.

As soon as our skill or ability tells us something about ourselves, we are no longer locked within the strict logic of competence. When our ability is compartmentalised, it doesn’t help us overcome our anxieties. If we develop a skill thinking that it will give us a broad power over the unexpected, we run the risk of having our confidence shaken when something truly unexpected happens. Life is all too good at confounding our forecasts. If we increase our mastery with the illusion that it will give us total control, we are setting ourselves up for disappointments that will undermine our confidence. We have to develop our mastery while recalling that we will not be able to master everything, that things never repeat themselves identically.

‘We never step twice into the same river,’ says a fragment from the teachings of Heraclitus. Even if our skill level is very high, the second time something happens is never an exact repetition of the first. A surgeon may have a thorough knowledge of the actions he needs to perform, the tools, the timing, but he must deal each time with a new human body, identical overall but individual in its particulars and therefore different. His skill allows him to deal with any novel aspects; it is layered and extensive enough that he can adapt to any unforeseen features of a case. Serena Williams may be extraordinarily skilled, but the first time she saved match point in the finals of a Grand Slam tournament, it was very much her first time doing it. And the two other times were not identical reconstructions of the first. If the surgeon and Serena Williams managed to come up with the right reaction, it’s because they could draw on their great skill. They performed actions that they had mastered perfectly. But they did more than that. They performed them without a tremor, although they were not simply repeating a gesture mechanically. They were able to be inventive, to adapt to the situation, even if minimally, and that’s what makes all the difference.

In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche imagines a grotesque character, the ‘Conscientious One’, to illustrate the difference between competence that walls a person off, and experience that gives freedom. In Nietzsche’s view, it all hinges on what we have ‘in the pit of our stomachs’ when we set out to develop competence. If we are driven solely by the ‘instinct of fear’, if we are working toward expertise because we are afraid of the unknown, then we will never draw true confidence from it. We will be skilful but not confident, like the sinister ‘Conscientious One’. An expert of sorts, a pathetic version of the researcher, he knows everything, absolutely everything, about the brain of the leech, but his great competence in his chosen field cuts him off from life, since nothing else interests him. His unusual expertise will eventually kill him, in a surreal scene that displays Nietzsche’s comic genius. Falling into a marsh swarming with leeches, the ‘Conscientious One’ will be sucked dry of his own blood, devoured by the very object of his expertise.

Fortunately, we can take the opposite approach to expertise, using what Nietzsche calls the ‘instinct of art’, a form of creativity that he contrasts with the ‘instinct of fear’. It will allow us to extend and develop the life within us, not run away from it. It will make us more alive, not less so. Our actions will be guided by curiosity, not the instinct to ball up into a cocoon. Naturally, we harbor both these instincts within us, the fear instinct and the art instinct. Each time that the art instinct wins out over the fear instinct, each time that our creativity wins out over our instinct to curl up into a ball, we make it more likely that competence will translate into confidence.

Let us take Zarathustra’s advice, therefore: let us develop our abilities, but with the soul of an artist, and let us use our abilities as a springboard, not a palisade. Our skills, our areas of strength, reassure us, certainly, but let’s not forget the goal of this reassurance, which is to come out of our comfort zone and have confidence in ourselves. If we work on our abilities with the aim of finding complete reassurance, we will not be able to have true confidence in ourselves, for a reason that Nietzsche diagnosed with pitiless accuracy. Life is unpredictable, at times unfair, and, when you come right down to it, anxiety-producing. As long as we remain lucid, we will never live with complete reassurance.

Our competence, then, must be more than the ability to repeat what we already know how to do. It must become the field in which our creativity develops, the occasion for us to be present to our true selves. This change is possible only as the upshot of a long and slow process: mastery leads us gradually to the acceptance of a kind of ‘non-mastery’, of letting go. Thanks to everything we have learned, experienced, and integrated, we give ourselves the permission to have confidence in ourselves.

Serena Williams started playing tennis at the age of three: her feet, as she sat on the courtside bench, didn’t reach the ground. She learned the different tennis strokes, gradually hitting them better and better until her competence rose to a very high level. But when, in three separate finals, she had to save match point and did so without a tremor, she didn’t just have confidence in her strokes, she had confidence in herself. From repetition, her competence was incorporated into her and became second nature. The leap that I spoke of had occurred, and her competence had become confidence.

This leap remains somewhat mysterious. But there is one thing we do know about it: in order to accomplish that leap, we need to regularly re-immerse ourselves in our mastery so as to have the courage to take a step into ‘non-mastery’, reassure ourselves in our comfort zone so as to then be able to leave it.

Think of your comfort zone, your area of competence, as a circle. You go into it to soak up warmth. Then you leave it to explore the big world beyond. You come back to it to be reassured again. And so on. Compose yourself inside your comfort zone, only to re-emerge from it each time. Dancing. Moving forward. Enlarging both the circle of your comfort zone and the boundaries of your exploration. To a rhythm. This dance step, this two-step waltz, gives us a model for the way self-confidence operates. Each person has to know himself well enough to sense how often he will need to re-immerse himself in his comfort zone. The less security we received in childhood, the more often we will need to reassure ourselves. You must know yourself well to find the rhythm that works for you, your dance.

My students acquire various abilities: they master certain concepts that are part of the curriculum. As the time approaches for them to take the baccalaureate exam, they sometimes get nervous at the thought of all the topics we haven’t covered. They ask me to give lectures or distribute handouts on the skipped concepts. I urge them instead to review the ones they have already mastered. To reread the lectures they liked. To re-experience pleasure, which is the best ally of confidence. In a word, I tell them to re-immerse themselves in their comfort zone. And afterwards, but only afterwards, to go out and discover new concepts. I invite them to dance this two-step waltz.

I also advise them to get in training by writing short introductions or essays. ‘It’s by blacksmithing that you become a blacksmith,’ says a medieval proverb. Even Hephaestus, the god of blacksmiths, didn’t become a blacksmith overnight. Because of his ugliness, his parents threw him into the sea when he was born. He was rescued by nymphs, who raised him and, over the years, taught him the art of blacksmithing. Hephaestus, the god of the forge, had to put in at least 10,000 hours of practice! I ask my students to train, but I also warn them against the idea that by increasing their skills they will automatically get a better result – the topic they are given on the baccalaureate exam is likely not to resemble any topic that has come up before. This is one of the chief difficulties of being a teacher: you must instil competence in your students, while paradoxically teaching them to mistrust competence in and of itself.

The students who train with fear in their bellies, anxious to be prepared for any topic, will never achieve true self-confidence. They acquire abilities that will win them some success as scholars, but they will continue to lack self-confidence and trip up at some point or other. They will be more prone to panic on the day of the big exam, faced with an unexpected question. They put too much faith in their abilities and not enough in themselves.

On the other hand, there are students who train in the spirit of discovery and are less intent on scholarship per se. They are not as obsessed with being perfectly prepared and are more likely to try things, to respond to challenges. They aren’t looking to reassure themselves at all costs. They turn to their studies with a sense of pleasure, being creative about it. They don’t talk about topics in quite the same way as the others – there is excitement in their voices, and an active curiosity crowds out their anxiety. The results are striking. While the first group of students are terrified by the uncertainty that is part of any exam, the second think of it as fun. They are ready to deal with what’s served up to them. They understand that this is integral to human life.

Confidence is not the same thing as reassurance. To have confidence in yourself is to know that you can handle the unexpected, not to mistakenly believe that life is foreseeable. It’s true that there are situations where a high degree of competence reduces the risk of the unexpected almost to nothing, but in those cases you don’t really need confidence in yourself – competence is enough.

In his essay Oser faire confiance (Daring to Trust), the philosopher Emmanuel Delessert explains the difference between confidence and competence: ‘Having confidence in oneself does not mean being certain one can do something because one has already done it a thousand times – how sad! How limited! On the contrary, it means turning to that uncertain part of oneself – which has never yet been activated – and electing to call on it, to wake it up.’

To trust ourselves is to undertake something we haven’t ‘already done a thousand times’, something that we may never have tried before. When we succeed, it isn’t just our competence that gives us confidence: it’s ourselves.

‘The experience of others is a comb for a bald man,’ says a witty Chinese proverb. What does it mean? That only our own experiences count, not other people’s, because only our own experiences can give us confidence. Like ‘a comb for a bald man’, someone else’s experience isn’t much use to us. At most it adds a little to our competence. But what’s more important than our competence is the path we have travelled and how we’ve negotiated it, which is what makes up our true experience and our treasure. Along the way, we have learned about how we react to adversity, failure, or success; we’ve taken the measure of our talent, our desire, our ambition. We’ve gained in self-knowledge. No one can walk this road for us.

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