Hi Ladies,
As you all probably know our aim at ‘Women in Work’ is to encourage strong,
confident women to learn the skills to reach their career goals and stride
above any limitations they may face while doing so. While our conferences and
events allow convocations and networking opportunities to take place, we also
want a strong social media presence to keep empowering you all every day during
this academic year. One segment of this is our blog, each month, along with
other posts, we aim to produce a book review for books aimed at all the great
things we stand for as a society. We hope these reviews will inspire you to
take a look at these books and others to motivate you to achieve all your goals
whether they be academic or not.
So this academic year we are kicking things off with a review of ‘The
Confidence Code’ by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman.[1]
I’ve decided to start with this book as it tries to explore the science behind
confidence and uses examples of successful woman and science experiments to try
and get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding confidence and have we can
fully achieve it. Spoiler alert: it seems to be all down to our perceptions of
ourselves rather than science, however, like confidence, self-esteem is also
rather hard to just achieve. For this reason, I really liked all the background
research and personal antidotes throughout the book as I feel reading real
examples motivates us and shows us that anyone can achieve a strong self-esteem
and therefore grasp the elusive skill of confidence.
The book starts out by saying, ‘Life on confidence can be a remarkable
thing’.[2] This
introduction highlights how worthwhile working on confidence can be in the long
term and all the amazing things having a bit of confidence can achieve. They
support these claims by giving examples of strong women such as Malala
Yousafzai, who had the confidence to keep fighting for her rights for her
education.
The book then goes on to look at a different aspect of confidence. First
by analysing current science experiments on the topic of brain activity and
confidence and comparing these to strong influential women to come to
conclusions on how confidence can be achieved and developed.
Quite a lot of the points made throughout the book compare female brains
and personalities to that of men. Personally, I did not enjoy all these
comparison as it seemed to play into conventional stereotypes of women.
Furthermore, I feel that both women and men struggle with confidence so
these simple and general comparisons aren’t needed to motivate the women
reading this book. However, the book does allow a glimpse into society and the
intergradient ideas about the genders which a lot of industries and careers
have and this gives the reader a lot more motivation to fight these
stereotypes.
Overall, I feel it is important to recognise how society is conditioned
to believe these between men and women so we can fight it and break glass
ceilings. However, this book spends a whole chapter comparing men and women
with included stats and figures, and personally I feel this is not needed, I
feel that as a society self-motivation without comparison is much better for
confidence and that when trying to better yourself and your future the only
person you should compare yourself to is yourself.
Later on, the book moves away from these comparisons, thankfully, and
focuses on the building blocks to build confidence ‘the confidence cousins’.[3] These
are… ‘self-esteem, optimism, self-compassion and self-efficacy’.[4] I
liked this section of the book as the authors go into details about each
‘confidence cousin’ and how having a grasps on all of these aspects can build
your own confidence easily and successfully.[5] They
concluded this chapter with the quite ‘Confidence is the stuff that turns thoughts
into actions’.[6]
I loved this quote as it is exactly why we are such confidence campaigners here
at Women in Work – we don’t just want you to have dreams we want to be able to
support you in gaining the skills and confidence to go out and achieve them.
Another significant chapter, which builds on this, is Chapter Six, this
chapter focuses on how to ‘make your thoughts an ally’.[7] It
enforces the importance of positive thinking and goes into detail on how
confidence is more than just working on yourself but also learning how to
included others in your confidence so they too can build theirs. [8] The
chapter focuses on skills such as ‘being grateful, thinking small and the
balance of power in a convocation’ to make you seem effortlessly confident and
help others feel comfortable and secure around you.[9]
In conclusion I feel this this book is more factual then it is
motivating but there are elements within that do give women, looking to build
their confidence, a point in the right direction and the building blocks to do
so. So if you are looking for a starting point in developing your confidence
yourself this book summarises the context of confidence perfectly and gives a
lot of real world examples to how their methods and tips work within different
industries. This book has a focus on women working within the STEM and business
industry too so it is helpful for researching breaking glass ceilings in those
areas.
Anyway ladies, I hope you all enjoyed this first book review – if any of
you do read the book feel free to message us and tell us what you think, cannot
wait for all the exciting things we have coming up this year!
XOXO
[1] Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, ‘The Confidence Code’, Harper
Collins Publishers, (New York, 2014).
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