[Part 3 will be the last, at least for a while, since the book must go back to the library. Here are Part 1 and Part 2.]
[The best state of mind to promote if you want to encourage someone to be successful is] a fully realistic assessment of the difficulty of the challenge ahead of him, and, at the same time, an unrealistically optimistic belief in his ability to overcome it.
This one is suprising, and no doubt controversial, yet resonates so well with my experience that I am compelled to write about it.[C]onventional wisdom tells us that self-awareness is a good thing; that people who have a realistic assessment of their strengths and weaknesses outperform those whose assessments are inflated.... [C]onventional wisdom is misguided. Current research suggests that accurate self-awareness rarely drives performance, and that in many circumstances, it actively retards performance. Only self-assurance drives performance, even when this self-assurance turns out to be unrealistic.
[For example, researchers] selected two groups of people, one a group of anxious and nervous types, the other more socially active, and measured the social skills of each group—how well did they remember names, how comfortable were they at introducing themselves to a stranger, and so on. To their surprise they found virtually no difference whatsoever in the actual skill levels of each group.... They then asked the members of each group to rate themselves on their social skills. Here the two groups differed dramatically. The anxious, nervous group assessed their skill levels accurately, whereas the more socially active group gave themselves inflated ratings. They thought they had more skills than they actually did.... Their overly positive view of themselves didn't trip them up; instead, it pushed them to apply the skills they imagined they possessed. [That reminds me of a school principal's statement to a friend of mine: "Your daughter is working above her ability." Sounds like nonsense, but Buckingham would understand.]
As the research reveals, people who have a slightly unrealistic confidence in their abilities outperform those whose self-assessments are more realistic. These overconfident optimists are also more persistent and more resilient when faced with obstacles—"I'm not giving up now because deep down I believe I have what it takes to succeed." So if you want a person to achieve his utmost and to persist in the face of resistance, reinforce his belief in his strengths, even overemphasize these strengths, give him an almost unreasonable confidence that he has what it takes to succeed.
Buckingham describes self-assurance, or self-efficacy, as a combination of self-confidence, optimism, positivity, and a feeling of being in control during an activity. At this point in the book, I was beginning to wonder about my disdain for the self-esteem movement as I saw it played out in schools, where more effort seemed to go into training children to chant variations on "I am great!" than into promoting actual accomplishment. But Buckingham quickly distances himself from that.
Self-efficacy is not the same as self-esteem. Self-esteem refers to your general feeling of worthiness, and, while having high sefl-esteem must, in some general sense, be a good thing, unfortunately a recent nationwide study sponsored by the American Psychological Society revealed that high self-esteem predicts nothing at all—not resilience, not persistence, not goal-setting, and certainly not achievement.
Self-efficacy is not a general feeling, but rather is always tied to a specific activiity. You might have feelings of high self-efficacy for selling comptuer software, or for administering injections safely, or for analyzing corporations' annual reports. And, in contrast to self-esteem, your level of self-efficacy for an activity does an excellent job of predicting your subsequent performance. It predicts how quickly you wil lbounce back from failure at the activity, how forcefully you will persevere at the activity when you meet obstacles or setbacks, how high your goals for that activity will be, and, most importnat of all, the likelihood you will actually achieve these goals. When it comes to performance, sefl-efficacy is one of the most powerful of mental states.
Although your self-efficacy is tied to specific activities, it does come in very handy when you are confronted by new challenges. According tto research..., how well you face new challenges is determined by your ability to transfer your self-efficacy from one activity to another. The best way to do this is to look deliberately for simliarities between the new challenge and previous challenges where you have succeeded in the past.
But here's the catch: Self-efficacy isn't enough. It can lead to nonchalance, overconfidence, and arrogance if not combined with sufficient challenge. Not, Buckingham emphasizes, in the areas of weakness, of but strength.
[D]on't try to bring [an overconfident person] down to earth by detailing his many weaknesses and telling him he'd better set about fixing them. At times this may be tempting, particularly with your most arrogant prima donna, but you must resist. You will be fueling his self-doubt, and although self-doubt may occasionally serve a purpose, it's unlikely to spawn excellent performance.... Instead, to combat nonchalance, build up the size of the challenge. Having detailed the outcomes you want, tell him how hard it's going to be to achieve them. Emphasize their scope, their complexity, thier "no one has ever pulled this off before" quality. Do whatever you can to get his attention and make him take his challenge seriously.
Lately a great deal of time and money has been focused on redesigning educational material in order to make it more relevant and accessible for kids—less boring tests, more fun-but-educational television shows and video games. The underlying theory is that kids will learn more from this kind of edutainment.... Unfortunetly, it's not true. [Shows like Sesame Street and Blue's Clues] don't seem to teach very much. In the Journal of Educational Psychology, in a paper titled "Television Is 'Easy' and Print Is 'Tough,'" researchers revealed their finding that "children...invested high cognitive effort and learned much from instructional media they considered difficult," i.e., written tests, "but invested less effort and learned less from the same information conveyed by media they believed to be easy" i.e., television shows.
What strikes me so about these ideas is how much they correspond to the most successful efforts of one of the most gifted choir directors it has ever been my privilege to observe. She worked incredibly hard with us, adults and children, with amazing results. She turned timid singers into soloists, morphed monotones into beautiful voices, taught children to sing difficult classical choral works, and brought our church choir to musical heights I've never seen in an all-amateur church choir, before or since. She excelled at holding the bar high and convincing us we could jump over it, using Buckingham's techniques—though I'm sure she's never heard of him. She praised us extravagantly, and made sure we knew how difficult the task was. As I gained more experience and sang in other choirs, I came to be suspicious of her praise, and to take it with a grain of salt, especially as it became obvious that even she didn't believe all she said. I even accused her of lying to us....
But now I'm wondering if this kind of prevarication is more akin to the "lies" parents must tell to raise healthy children. The world can be a dangerous, frightening place—but if we want our children to grow up confident, competent, and with sound minds able to deal with the terrors and dangers that come, we can't tell them much about that. If we let them grow up fearful, they won't learn well, and the world will be for them more dangerous still.
In any case, the system worked. Magnificently. When I was told the choir music was difficult, but that we would work hard on it and I would be able to do it—I did! And I loved it! In contrast, when we started singing pop-music "praise songs" instead of Bach, Handel, and Haydn, we hardly worked on them at all, because "they're easy." Well, I didn't find them easy. Still don't, though I'm getting better. The music has tricky rhythms that are very difficult to read, and no one ever seems to sing them the way they are written anyway. Being told to ignore the written music and sing "by ear" was like being dropped off a cliff and told to fly. If our director had taken the same approach she had with the "hard" music, telling us that it was difficult and would require hard work and a new way of thinking, but that we could and would be able to do it well—I'm certain I would have learned much faster and better.
Many will claim that my decided preference for the music of Bach, Handel, and Haydn over "praise songs" is the greatest factor in making the former easier to learn. I'll admit there's some truth to that. But what most of those who blithely assume it's the whole cause don't know is that when I began singing in choirs, traditional choral music was as foreign to me as praise songs, possibly more so. I'm now convinced that the "high confidence/high challenge" experience played a much greater part in the development of my musical preferences and abilities than I knew.
I'm curious. Have you had a coach, teacher, manager or mentor who used this approach with you? What was your experience?
