Lean In

my academic potential. Very comforting.
    I buckled down, worked harder, and by the end of the semester, I learned how to write five-page papers. But no matter how well I did academically, I always felt like I was about to getcaught for not really knowing anything. It wasn’t until I heard the Phi Beta Kappa speech about self-doubt that it struck me: the real issue was not that I felt like a fraud, but that I could feel something deeply and profoundly and be completely wrong.
    I should have understood that this kind of self-doubt was more common for females from growing up with my brother. David is two years younger than I am and one of the people in the world whom I respect and love the most. At home, he splits child care duties with his wife fifty-fifty; at work, he’s a pediatric neurosurgeon whose days are filled with heart-wrenching life-and-death decisions. Although we had the same upbringing, David has always been more confident. Once, back in high school, we both had Saturday night dates who canceled on us in the late afternoon. I spent the rest of the weekend moping around the house, wondering what was wrong with me. David laughed off the rejection, announcing, “That girl missed out on a great thing,” and went off to play basketball with his friends. Luckily, I had my younger sister, wise and empathetic way beyond her years, to console me.
    A few years later, David joined me at college. When I was a senior and he was a sophomore, we took a class in European intellectual history together. My roommate, Carrie, also took the class, which was a huge help since she was a comparative literature major. Carrie went to all of the lectures and read all ten of the assigned books—in the original languages (and by then, I knew what those were). I went to almost all of the lectures and read all of the books—in English. David went to two lectures, read one book, and then marched himself up to our room to get tutored for the final exam. We all sat together for the test, scribbling furiously for three hours in our little blue books. When we walked out, we asked one another how it went. I was upset. I had forgotten to connect the Freudian id to Schopenhauer’s conception of the will. Carrie, too, was concerned and confessed that she hadn’t adequately explained Kant’s distinction between the sublime and the beautiful. Weturned to my brother. How did he feel about the test? “I got the flat one,” he announced. “The flat one?” we asked. “Yeah,” he said, “the flat A.”
    He was right. He did get the flat one. Actually, we all got flat A’s on the exam. My brother was not overconfident. Carrie and I were overly insecure.
    These experiences taught me that I needed to make both an intellectual and an emotional adjustment. I learned over time that while it was hard to shake feelings of self-doubt, I could understand that there was a distortion. I would never possess my brother’s effortless confidence, but I could challenge the notion that I was constantly headed for failure. When I felt like I was not capable of doing something, I’d remind myself that I did not fail all of my exams in college. Or even one. I learned to undistort the distortion.
    We all know supremely confident people who have no right to feel that way. We also all know people who could do so much more if only they believed in themselves. Like so many things, a lack of confidence can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don’t know how to convince anyone to believe deep down that she is the best person for the job, not even myself. To this day, I joke that I wish I could spend a few hours feeling as self-confident as my brother. It must feel so, so good—like receiving a cosmic flat one every day.
    When I don’t feel confident, one tactic I’ve learned is that it sometimes helps to fake it. I discovered this when I was an aerobics instructor in the 1980s (which meant a silver leotard, leg warmers, and a shiny headband, all of which went perfectly with my big hair). Influenced by the gospel of Jane Fonda, aerobics also meant smiling solidly for a full hour. Some days, the smile came naturally. Other days, I was in a lousy mood and had to fake it. Yet after an hour of forced smiling, I often felt cheerful.
    Many of us have experienced being angry with someone and then having to pretend everything’s great in public. Myhusband, Dave, and I have our moments, and just when we are getting into it, it will be time to go to a friend’s