5.2 Sources of Confidence
Research has shown four major sources of confidence (Bandura 1986, 1997, 2004; Bandura and Locke 2003). These sources can promote or undermine your confidence and its influence on your life and career. The first source of confidence is a history of prior success. This confidence refers to the degree in which you have experienced success in a given domain or task. As students are shaped by changes and challenges, they go through a self‐appraisal process that includes comparing themselves to others and to standards that have become more demanding. The second source of confidence is observing others. Role models and peers can affect your confidence. In your personal life, observing parents, siblings, other family members, and friends with their struggles or coping mechanisms, successes and achievements, can affect your confidence. In the medical field, observing fellow medical students, residents, and physicians can have the same influence. This is mirrored in an academic setting through observing fellow students, professors, and researchers. Your peers and mentors can promote thinking skills, provide constructive feedback, and share struggles as well as coping mechanisms to change your sense of self‐efficacy and confidence.
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
– Eleanor Roosevelt (1939)
The third source of confidence is persuasion, which entails the efforts to ensure that you can be successful. Verbal encouragement and constructive feedback are most often received from your role model or mentor in your personal life or profession. Unrealistic expectations from peers or role models can affect the level of confidence that you achieve. At this time, it becomes important for you to utilize self‐confidence techniques or to seek feedback from others whom you trust, while not allowing unrealistic expectations to jeopardize your ability or level of confidence. The final source of confidence reviewed by Bandura (1997) consists of emotional experiences and physiological responses. Feelings of stress, anxiety, and pressure can undermine your confidence while feelings of enjoyment, interest, and engagement can promote self‐confidence.
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.
– Bernard M. Baruch (cited by Cerf 1948)
5.3 Influence of Confidence on Your Career
Life experiences and other sources of confidence can influence your career choice. Confidence and experiences during the first 12–15 years of education affect the choice of career and the time spent in that career. Finding an interest, developing skills in that interest, managing a mentor‐mentee relationship, and receiving recognition on your skill set is a common method in which people build confidence toward an aspiring career. However, maintaining a successful career depends on maintaining and maturing your confidence. By building confidence, you can fully realize and approach your potential (Holgate 2012). An appropriate level of self‐confidence allows for you to know what you are expected to deliver. This can allow you to plan carefully and work toward an overall goal within the realm of your potentials. Other characteristics such as determination, persistence, tenacity, modesty, and optimism can allow you to defend your work and move forward regardless of what obstacles may develop.
During the initial period of development in a new endeavor, setting reasonable goals and an achievable vision while surrounding yourself with positive people who assist in expanding skills and experiences can allow you to achieve recognition and rewards. This serves both to create and nurture your confidence in your respected field.
5.4 Confidence Spectrum
Confidence in yourself and in your skills allows you to push your limits, achieve more than you otherwise could, and have the increased drive to continue to pursue your goals. However, inappropriately low or high levels of confidence can negatively affect your perceptions and achievements and create unpleasant results.
Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong.
– Peter T. Mcintyre (cited by Friesen 2014)
5.4.1 Low Confidence and Insecurity
Early on, the development of confidence may be affected by experiences, feelings, and/or mentors and peers. Low levels of confidence precipitate into insecurity, self‐doubt, and stress. These feelings can hinder your ability to concentrate, underestimate your abilities, quit activities or projects, and undervalue your achievements. People with a lack of self‐confidence also tend to neglect their potentials by believing that their good work was a matter of luck and not their skills or experience. This phenomenon of under‐confidence due to successes being attributed to luck is known as impostor syndrome. Clance and Imes (1978) found that women with imposter syndrome, who had notable professional and academic accomplishments, felt that they were not intellectually strong and that they had fooled everyone who believed in their success. People with imposter syndrome may begin to misjudge their strengths and weaknesses by relying on their weaknesses and undermining any of their strengths. Insecure individuals can get passed over for promotions and miss chances to publish their research findings or gain new work experiences. They also miss opportunities for career development and promotions, or participating on committees that could help further their careers.
Be careful not to mistake insecurity and inadequacy for humility! Humility has nothing to do with the insecure and inadequate! Just like arrogance has nothing to do with greatness!
– C. JoyBell C. (2014)
5.4.2 Overconfidence
False confidence may also have consequences in your personal life and career. Such feelings can precipitate into a sense of entitlement, arrogance, negligence, prejudice, and presumption. Such feelings hinder your ability to be productive, cause you to overestimate your achievements and skills, and can cause you to participate in activities and projects that you may not qualify for. The overconfident also tend to overestimate their past and present successes, leading to poor decision‐making, ignorance or avoidance of constructive criticism, failure to use critical thought, and an overestimation of accuracy and depth of knowledge. People with overconfidence tend to believe that all of their achievements and successes are due to their own entitlement and not due to other factors such as their environment. They begin to misjudge their strengths and weaknesses by believing they have more strengths than weaknesses, negatively impacting any future growth. They tend to oversee opportunities to learn, assuming they know the best methods and practices. An overconfident academician may apply for fellowships, scholarships, grants, and positions without preparation or the necessary skill set or experiences. They may also submit papers or research presentations prematurely, alienate their colleagues, or receive negative feedback or letters of recommendation from their supervisors.
Confidence turns into pride only when you are in denial of your mistakes.
– Criss Jami (2015)
5.5 Dunning‐Kruger Effect
The Dunning‐Kruger effect is the cognitive bias in which people perform poorly on a task but lack the metacognitive capacity to properly evaluate their performance (Figure 5.1). The 1999 study predicted and demonstrated that incompetent individuals would dramatically overestimate their ability and performance relative to the objective criteria (Kruger and Dunning 1999). This