In July 2007, the Irish golfer Padraig Harrington won one of golf’s most coveted competitions, the British Open. The story of how he did this, one of the most remarkable finishes in golfing history, illustrates one of the ways confidence works.
The Claret Jug – the Open’s famous prize – was within Harrington’s grasp as he teed off at the penultimate hole of the tournament. He had a one-shot lead on his arch-rival, Sergio García. He was entirely in the zone – “I am literally the most confident person at that point in time,” he said later. Then, something strange happened – a twinge of doubt came out of nowhere at the top of his back swing and he sliced the ball into the murky waters of the notorious Barry Burn river.
But, still in the lead and his confidence intact, Harrington squared up at the 18th tee. Disaster. He lashed another ball into the Barry Burn. His confidence collapsed: “I’ve never experienced this reaction in my life… I wanted to give up… I had thrown it away.”
Harrington barely remembers the first 50 yards he trudged up the fairway of the final hole to take yet another penalty shot. But luckily, he had his caddy, Ronan Flood, by his side for that walk. Flood kept repeating to Harrington that he was the best chipper and putter (the two strokes he needed to stay in the tournament) in the world. “One shot at a time, you’re the best chip and putter in the world. One shot at a time, you’re the best chip and putter in the world.” Over and over, he repeated it.
As they approached the ball for Harrington to take what would be his penultimate shot, an attempt to salvage his tournament, Harrington’s confidence had shifted again. He positioned himself above the fateful ball: “I stood there, really excited about it, and I fired it in there, nice and low. I don’t think I’ve ever been more in the zone than in that chip shot in my life. It’s really easy to hit a great shot when you’re feeling good… it’s really difficult to hit a great shot when you’re feeling bad. I should have been feeling the lowest ebb at this point.”
His caddy’s constant, almost mechanical, repetition of his conviction that Harrington would do it had somehow reinflated the confidence bubble, and he went on to beat García and take the Claret Jug.
But that’s not the end of the story, according to one of Harrington’s close acquaintances, to whom I spoke in Dublin. After the first, delirious celebration on the green, the champion and his caddy parted for several hours of ceremony and press interviews. They were reunited at the end of the evening in the limousine, taking them back to their hotel. Padraig looked over at his caddy:
“You know, Ronan, I thought I’d blown the Open – and so did everyone else in the world – except Ronan Flood.”
Flood started to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Harrington asked, puzzled.
Flood replied: “I thought you’d blown it too – I didn’t think you had a chance!”
Flood was just saying the words on the fairway to try to rein in Harrington’s mind, away from thoughts of great prizes and great failure, to a limited funnel of thoughts linked to a specific set of actions that he knew he could execute. The words we say to ourselves shape our attention, which controls our emotions, and the result is confidence – or lack of it. The caddy’s astute understanding of this process meant that he could get Harrington back on mental track, despite his own fears that Harrington had blown it.
Research backs up the lesson of this story, that the words you say to yourself shape your confidence and, hence, your performance, no matter how fake or cliched those words might feel.
Cycling on a stationary bike until you are too exhausted to continue is a standard test of endurance and fitness. In one study, young, fit men and women did this, and cycled for an average of 10 minutes before having to stop. Half of them were then taken aside by the researchers and taught to use confidence-enhancing self-talk phrases, such as “you’re doing well”, “… feeling good”, or “push through this” and then applied them during a second exhaustion test. Just as “just saying the words” worked for Padraig Harrington, simply repeating these confident phrases led to the self-talk group boosting their endurance by 18%, from around 10.5 to 13 minutes. They also felt less strain during the exercise than the other group, whose endurance time didn’t change at all.
Confidence is the colloquial term for self-efficacy – the belief that you can successfully do a particular thing. It is this link to action that differentiates confidence from self-esteem (how good you feel about yourself) or optimism (belief that things will turn out OK). When you anticipate success, your brain releases a neurotransmitter called dopamine, the chemical messenger that fuels reward and pleasure in the reward network deep in the centre of the brain, according to research at Michigan University in 2015. Researchers at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, showed in 2016 that feeling confident about your decisions activates reward networks in the brain, while lack of confidence leads to increases of activity in brain regions linked to negative emotions such as anxiety.
Confidence and anxiety are therefore competing rivals for your actions and attention. Anxiety inclines you to retreat in avoidance of failure, while confidence is a bridge to the future that impels you forward in anticipation of reward. Most of us are slightly overconfident – men more so than women – in relation to our true abilities. And that mood-lifting, anxiety-reducing state of mind inclines us to do stuff that increases the chances of outcomes or encounters that do indeed lead to opportunity and reward, and therefore acts as a virtuous positive feedback loop.
So, confidence begets more confidence, and this is why the results of a 2020 mid-pandemic survey of 2,000 people in the UK aged 16-25 are particularly disturbing. The survey, by the Prince’s Trust, found that 41% of respondents felt that their future goals now seemed “impossible to achieve” and 38% that they now felt they would “never succeed in life”. This is a more extreme example of a more general finding, that 18-25-year-olds who live through an economic recession believe less strongly that they can get ahead through hard work.
Such a dramatic drop in the confidence of nearly half a generation could reverberate for decades in the social, economic and political fabric of Britain, and elsewhere. Confidence in a population predicts many things, including academic achievement. And the economic effects are likely to be strong, too: between 2000 and 2014, for example, across 13 EU countries, including the UK, Germany, France and Spain, the confidence of individual consumers and company executives strongly predicted the unemployment rate in each member state.
The belief that you can do something therefore not only motivates you to do that thing, it also lifts your mood and lowers your anxiety, which is one way confidence works – by helping you achieve small and big goals. It also helps to explain why mental health is such a major challenge during restrictive lockdowns.
We know that lifting confidence improves performance, because many studies have shown it experimentally. For example, in 2008, researchers at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, made students more or less confident about their physical strength by randomly telling some that they were stronger, and others that they were weaker, compared with others – irrespective of their true strength, measured using a handgrip dynamometer, a metal lever which you squeeze tight against a resisting spring. The results were striking: the high-confidence group held the grip for 30% longer than the low-confidence group. They also felt less pain and discomfort in their hands.
Researchers in Grenoble used the same method with people aged between 52 and 91, first asking them how old they felt. On average, they felt 8% more youthful than their real age. All the participants then did the handgrip test, which in itself is a good indicator of general vitality in older people. The average grip was around 26kg. The researchers then boosted the confidence of half the group, telling them that their score was better than 80% of people their age. They told the others nothing, and both groups then took the grip test a second time. The tired hands of those told nothing scored one kilo less than on their first attempt. The raised-confidence group score, however, was one kilo more. Strikingly, the feedback-induced confidence also made them feel younger: one 60-year-old said he felt like a 53-year-old and a 90-year-old felt 10 years younger, while the other group felt no different.
Nowhere is confidence more needed than when we face change, such as in the aftermath of pandemic. Many people are grappling with life-changing decisions, often forced upon them, about their careers, education, or where to live. There are two potential states of mind in which we can approach such decisions – deliberative, where we try to select a goal or course of action, weighing up the pros and cons of each; and implemental, where we have already selected our goal and are now working out what steps to take to achieve it.
The will-I, won’t-I, deliberative mindset widens our attention – for example, making it more likely that our eyes will detect a peripheral object on a background picture. It also opens our attention to a broad range of potential good and bad future possibilities and remembered past experiences. Because of this, not only does it open up creative possibilities for ourselves, it also lets in anxious, negative thoughts and memories which tend to diminish confidence. So it is very important to avoid chronic indecision and too much deliberation, and to keep it under tight control so that you can enjoy its benefits without becoming paralysed by it.
On the other hand, focusing on solving the problem of how to achieve an already chosen goal narrows our attention to specific actions and so reduces the chance of anxiety-arousing thoughts and memories entering our consciousness. Women in particular benefit from the confidence-enhancing effects of the implemental mindset, Cologne University researchers reported.
Though under-confidence depletes our potential, extreme overconfidence – a feature of male more than female behaviour – can have big downsides, too. For example, experienced professional financial traders made poorer choices than students because of their overconfidence in their hunches, a 2006 Nottingham University study showed, while overconfidence increases the chances of leaders taking military action and starting wars, because it makes them overly optimistic about their own military strength and their chances of success.
But in spite of its downsides, confidence is a precious mental resource that we all need as we re-enter a dramatically changed post-pandemic world. The words we say to ourselves will help harness our anxieties by focusing our attention on achievable goals, just as they did for Padraig Harrington.
• Prof Ian Robertson is the author of How Confidence Works (Transworld, £20). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
• The Science of Confidence, a Guardian Masterclass with Prof Ian Robertson, is on Tuesday 20 July. Book a ticket here
