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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,