Fake it ‘till you make it | Claire Shannon-Vermillion | TEDxYouth@FIS
[Music] good evening everyone now I'd like to start my speech slightly differently like to start with a short activity for everyone so if I could have everyone in the audience put their hands out in front of them everyone now once you also look at your hands see if your hands are shaking for most of you your hands probably aren't shaking and you're kind of confused but bear with me I do have a point here and for some of you your hands might be shaking because you're nervous or drink too much coffee this morning but if you're not nervous and your hands are shaking then you might be like me you might just have shaky hands can I put your hands down now thank you I have incredibly shaky hands and they've been like that my whole life just an unlucky janeck draw my dad grandfather great-grandfather as far back as we can remember it's all been the same we all have shaky hands now usually my shaky hands don't bother me I mean you know the reason I failed art a couple times and have practically illegible handwriting but what does bother me is the fact that they make me seem nervous more nervous than I usually am and the reason I came to realize that this bothers me so much is because confidence it's such an important and vital trait in today's society that we don't want to seem less confident than we actually are so I'm gonna start by talking about the importance of confidence now usually we've we view confidence as a strength rather than a weakness I mean if you're in a job interview and they ask you if your weaknesses you're probably not gonna say oh I'm confident and it's likely that if I asked everyone in this room we would all agree that confidence is indeed important we tend to equate confidence with six high self-esteem therefore we believe our confidence of support for health happiness and future endeavors and as unfortunate as it might be when we view people were less confident we tend to correlate this to lower self-esteem and even less success maybe now even most psychological studies agree that confidence does indeed correlate to success one study done by Zachary stylist in Sydney Felker showed that people who are more confident were more likely to be successful when doing a set of simple tests and activities showing this clear correlation between confidence and success we also tend to believe confidence is a characteristic in many leadership positions whether it's from politics to business I mean CEOs and politicians are quite confident people in fact even CEOs and major companies such as shri nazim the CEO for the center of executive excellence agrees that confidence is vital in being an effective CEO but now let's take it down to a smaller scale confidence is important in our day-to-day lives whether we're meeting new friends or giving a presentation in front of group of people or giving a TED talk confidence is important to be successful in any of these activities so we know that confidence is such an important trait but according to a recent poll only 60% of people actually feel as if they're adequately confident and I know that number may seem large but if 40% of people do not believe they're adequately confident then obviously there's gap we need a bridge and perhaps I have a solution but it won't be the solution everyone's looking for now I know you've all seen the articles from The Cosmopolitan to the New York Times 5 easy ways to be more confident or 6 steps to become a more confident person I promise that's not what I'm here to reiterate I'm gonna start with the personal story we're gonna go back in time to 2012 when I first moved to Beijing China I was in a new place a new city a new house a new country I didn't even speak the language on top of all of that what was most nerve-racking of all for me was my first day of middle school as a short shy kid I was absolutely terrified I mean my hands were shaking more than they normally are I was so scared but what I will never forget about that day is what my homeroom teacher said to me he said fake confidence and real confidence are the same thing and I have to admit as a young kid I kind of brush this aside as the obnoxious ramblings of my older teacher but that saying has stuck with me to this day it's essentially a rendition of the old saying fake it till you make it the idea that fake confidence and real confidence are the same thing may seem trivial to begin with but the more we think about it the more they are indeed the same thing I mean confidence is essentially a state of mind the behavioral equivalent of the Emperor's New Clothes if you walk the walk everyone will hear you talking the talk if you act like you belong everyone thinks you do in the same way that when you smile you feel your mood lift and project happiness according to what we call status enhancement theory people gain influence acting dominant confident and competent one study put participants into groups of four and asked them to solve a set of mathematical reasoning problems I don't pretty boring but the essential finding of that study was that people who are perceived to be more confident and dominant we're also perceived to be more competent regardless of their mathematical abilities were really up to par and if they could actually solve those mathematical reasoning problems so essentially people can't tell the difference between your perceived confidence your actual confidence and your fake confidence now what we have to think about how exactly can we act confident how do we fake our confidence so let's think about how we perceive confident people what characteristics they have we usually perceive them physically as standing up straight their shoulders back their chin up being charismatic friendly loud proud being well-kept and even well dressed so in order to become confident we can emulate the characteristics that we observe in the confident people thereby faking our confidence and luckily for us there's nothing stopping us we can walk into a room with our head held high their shoulders back we can stand tall we can speak loudly clearly you know articulate we can smile at the people we meet we can make new friends we can dress for the job we want not the job we have so to speak and if we work at these characteristics if we emulate these characteristics imitate these characteristics that we observe we can become more confident if you don't want to take my word for it Aristotle once said men acquire equality by constantly acting a certain way and Aristotle is a pretty reliable guy but there's no doubt this is going to be difficult as unfortunately I can't show you all some five magic power poses we can do every morning it will all become super confident as that would be too easy and that's not how it works confidence is a skill not a skill you're born with a skill you have to work towards and I believe that confidence is an important skill and once ago that we all should and we all can work towards improving or achieving in conclusion we can fake it till we make it thank you [Applause] [Music]