You Can’t Fake It When It Comes to Confidence
From Carol Kinsey Goman, Ph.D.:
Think about a time when you needed to project confidence but felt uncertain or insecure. How did you handle it? Did you try to hide these feelings and just “fake it ’til you make it?”
If you did, it probably didn’t work.
The problem is that attempting to suppress genuine emotions requires so much conscious effort that it is rarely successful. Whenever you attempt to conceal any strong feeling and fake another, your body almost always “leaks” nonverbal cues that are picked up consciously or subconsciously by your audience. Stanford University’s research on emotional suppression shows why it’s so difficult to hide your true feelings: Subjects instructed to conceal their emotions reported feeling ill at ease, distracted and preoccupied. And this was validated by a steady rise in their blood pressure. But another, quite unexpected and (for our purposes) much more important finding showed a corresponding blood pressure rise in those listening to the subjects. The stress of suppression wasn’t just palpable; it was contagious.
But if faking confidence doesn’t work, what does? Here are three proven techniques:
- Become an actor
Years ago, when I was a member of a repertory theater group, I learned that acting isn’t about suppression, pretending, or faking. It is about finding an authentic place. During the late 1800s, an approach to acting was developed by a Russian actor, director and coach, Constantin Stanislavsky. Called Method acting (or more simply, the Method) it was adopted by a new school of realistic actors including Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, and Robert DeNiro.
The Method held that an actor’s main responsibility was to be believed, and to reach this level of “believable truth,” Stanislavsky employed methods such as “emotional memory” which drew on real but past emotions. For example, to prepare for a role that involves fear, an actor would remember something that had frightened him or her in the past, and bring that memory into the current role to make it emotionally valid.
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