Ask AltoTRY · 10 MIN
Confidence Evidence Bank
TAIU
Somewhere to keep what you have actually done, for the days you cannot remember it.
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Tool 17 · Develop yourself
Is this competence, or is this fear?
A guided 20 to 25 minutes conversation, here in TAIU. An audit, not encouragement. Nobody here is going to tell you to back yourself.
Where has somebody less able than you gone and done the thing instead?
Confidence is a claim about the future. It can be checked.
Sometimes the honest finding is that the doubt is accurate. That is useful, and it is not the same as a deficiency.
What you'll look at
- 01Something recent you did not put yourself forward for
- 02What you have actually done in that territory
- 03Something you took on without hesitating
- 04What you say when something goes well
A note from Mark
Confidence is a claim about the future. Like any claim, it can be checked against a record, and most people never check theirs.
The interesting thing is that almost nobody is uniformly confident. The same person will be immovable about one part of their work and oddly deferential about another, and the deferential part is usually where the money is.
I am always more interested in what somebody does than in how they feel. Not applying is a behaviour. Undercharging is a behaviour. You can audit a behaviour.
And the audit has to run both ways. If I only ever find that people are better than they think, I am not auditing anything, I am flattering them. Sometimes the honest answer is that you have not done this before and the caution is correct. That is worth knowing too, because it tells you what to go and get.
Read my full view ↓
Nobody was ever talked into confidence. They were argued into it by evidence, or they went and made some.
What you'll get
This will not sort you into a personality type.It will give you answers about your own life that you can test.
01
Earned confidence
02
Where you undersell
03
Where the gap is real
04
What it costs
+
Your TAIU handover: a summary of what the conversation found, written so you can take it with you.
See everything included ↓
- 01What you came here with
- 02Where your confidence is earned
- 03Where you are underselling
- 04Where you may be overconfident
- 05Where the gap is real
- 06What the evidence actually says
- 07What you attribute success to
- 08Where the doubt comes from
- 09How it shows in behaviour
- 10What it has cost
- 11The rival explanation
- 12What deserves protecting
- 13The credible alternative
- 14What, if anything, should change
- 15What remains unresolved
- 16Where this goes next
When you finish
Bring it back to your tree.
Your tree is where TAIU keeps a picture of your whole life, in parts like work, money and health.
This session works on the whole of you, not one part of your life. Nothing is scored. At the end, you are asked once which part of your life this touched most. You can answer none.
The conversation writes this summary for you. Keep the sheet, print it or paste it into My Tree. Nothing from the conversation is stored by TAIU.
- Session
- Date
- The part of life this belongs to
- What we found
- The alternative we tested
- What deserves protecting
- What should change, if anything
- Next actions
- What to notice or find out
- What remains unresolved
What now?
01 · Save it
Where your confidence is earned, with the evidence attached.
02 · Test it
Write the record out plainly, with dates and read it as though it belonged to somebody else.
See more ↓
What I would do
- 01
Build the record before discussing the feeling. Feelings without a record cannot be audited.
- 02
Separate doubt that fits a genuine gap from doubt that has survived years of evidence.
- 03
Look for overconfidence too. An audit that only finds hidden strengths is flattery.
- 04
Watch how successes get explained. Attribution tells you more than self-assessment.
- 05
Put a number on the cost. Confidence problems become real when they have a price.
Test it
- 01
Take the last thing that went well and try explaining it without mentioning luck, timing or another person.
- 02
Find the area where you never hesitate and check whether the record actually supports it.
- 03
Name the last opportunity somebody less able took because you did not.
The alternative
The expected finding is that you are more capable than you think and should say so more often. Sometimes true. Two other results are just as likely. The first is that your caution is well calibrated in the specific area you are worried about, and the useful move is to close the gap rather than to feel better about it. The second is that the problem is not belief at all but behaviour: people who describe themselves as confident and still never ask for the thing have a habit problem, not a self-esteem problem. And in some cases the audit finds the reverse, which is uncomfortable and more valuable than any amount of encouragement.
Think about this
- Something recent you did not put yourself forward for.
- What you have actually done in that area, listed plainly.
- Something you took on with no hesitation at all.
- What you say when something goes well.
- Where a less able person went and did the thing instead of you.
Take this to Ask Mark
You have done the exercise. Now look again at what it found.
This looks at what you found and helps you understand it. It is not another exercise to repeat.
Take this to Ask Mark →Want to go further?
READ · RESEARCH
Self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavioural change
Albert Bandura
If you have ever described yourself as not a confident person, read this and then rewrite the sentence with a context attached. The result is usually much more accurate and much more useful.
Read more ↗
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READ · BOOK
Peak
Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool
Best for when the honest answer is that you need practice rather than belief.
Read more ↗
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Recommended by the TAIU community
What helped you?
If you've read, watched, listened to or tried something that helped you think about this differently, we'd like to hear about it.
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Finished the exercise?
What did this uncover?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Before you start
Reading, if you would rather understand the question first.
Further thinking
Self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavioural change
Albert Bandura
The trouble with overconfidence
Don Moore and Paul Healy
Peak
Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool
See the thinking ↓
Article
Self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavioural change
Albert Bandura
The paper that broke confidence into pieces. Bandura's argument is that belief in your capability is built for a specific domain, mostly out of things you have already done and that it transfers far less than people assume. That is why a person can chair a board and dread a party without either being a contradiction. It also names the strongest source of confidence, which is not encouragement but mastery experience.
Article
The trouble with overconfidence
Don Moore and Paul Healy
Moore and Healy separate three things people muddle together: overestimating your ability, overplacing yourself relative to others and being too certain you are right. The useful part is their finding that people tend to be overconfident on hard tasks and underconfident on easy ones, which predicts exactly the pattern where somebody is falsely modest about what they do daily and dangerously certain about what they have never done.
Book
Peak
Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool
Ericsson spent his career studying how people become genuinely good at things, and the answer is boringly specific: structured practice at the edge of your current ability, with feedback. It belongs here as a corrective. Where an exercise finds that low confidence is an accurate reading of a real gap, this describes what closing the gap actually involves, and it is not a mindset.
Book
Dare to Lead, and the Living Into Our Values work
Brené Brown
The useful part is not the list of values at the back. It is the exercise that follows it, where you have to write down what living that value looks like in behaviour and what its opposite looks like when you are tired and under pressure. Most people find the second list easier to write, which is the point.