Episode 150: Who Do You Think You Are?
/Show transcript:
Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.
This is the first show after my hiatus…I was itching to bring you something as soon as I could in the new year. I am not entirely finished with the project that’s consumed my time over the last several months, so this show isn’t entirely new. I produced much of it about four years ago but you’ll hear some things in here that you haven’t heard before.
And I’m working on getting a bunch of new shows ready for you.
In this episode, we look at that invisible issue that runs beneath so many women’s lives: confidence – or the lack of it, and what that means for our careers.
“You see a man in a job interview and he answers off the cuff of his sleeve, he doesn’t think, oh my gosh, I might not able to do that, or could I do that?”
And why it can be so hard for women to value what they bring to the table – especially when they’re negotiating…
“The times when I’ve had to ask for things it’s seemed so hard, it’s almost unthinkable that I would be able to ask for something and that I deserved it.”
Coming up – two women from different backgrounds on cultivating confidence and a sense of self-worth.
I’m a bit obsessed with confidence, mainly because I’ve never had much. You can see it written in my school reports right from when I was 7 up to 18 – lacks confidence. I’ve cultivated more of it over the years, but that voice in my head that tells me I’m not good enough, that I can’t do something – it’s never really gone away. And I know it’s sometimes held me back at work.
Denise Barreto is the opposite of me. I first talked to her a few years ago for a show I did on starting your own business. And I wanted to talk to her for this show because I remember how confident she seemed during our conversation. She struck me as having an enviable amount of confidence. Denise runs her own business near Chicago. It’s called Relationships Matter Now and it does strategic planning and marketing.
She says the confidence I hear comes from the fact she feels so competent at her job. So has she never heard that internal voice bringing her down?
“So when you’re talking about that voice, I don’t hear that voice when I’m going to speak in front of a crowd or when I’m walking into a room of executives or I’m walking into a room of elected officials and I’m about to tell them what they need to do – that voice is nonexistent. Perhaps in other situations, like I’m right now in a rough point in my marriage, and that that I hear voice isn’t about my competence or whatever it’s about, am I enough for my husband, have I done enough for him? Am I beautiful enough for him to keep his, you know I mean? Those kinds of things, but I think that’s a very different conversation, and I would say both on a personal and professional level all those things start when we’re children and the things that we’re told and we believe deeply about ourselves start when we’re children.”
Denise’s mother died when she was four. She and her sister were raised by her dad. She knows she missed a lot in losing her mother. But she says one advantage of having her father as the main caregiver was that she saw self-assurance in action every day…
“I gotta say first of all when you grow up with a man at the head of the household I think that’s a whole different dynamic than women. Men seem to be bullheaded confident right? A guy, there’s never a stretch thing for a guy, a guy will go for it. And so I do think that had a big impact on me - my dad wasn’t super-educated but he got out there and he had a really good job and when things didn’t work out he figured out a way to take care of things, so I think that influenced me a lot, and I gotta say losing…I think mothers are very nurturing and they kind of build into the emotional piece of a child, and I missed that, so I think one of the things I’m learning as an adult is that I just never felt things. I may have felt them but I just didn’t allow myself to because I was following the model of my dad, who, I don’t know if he ever felt things because there was no indication of that.”
Her dad faced a lot of challenges growing up, and as an adult…
“My dad grew up in the southern part of the United States under Jim Crow. So my dad is not your picture of confidence, OK. I would see white men humiliate my dad at the gas station driving through Indiana as a kid, and think to myself there’s no way anyone’s ever going to talk to me like that. So there are a lot of intersections and layers that we’re talking about. But you know my dad was born in Alabama in the 1930s…that’s not exactly a very confident time for black people in this country. So the confidence and instilling of my sense of confidence and self all came from him being a man.”
Maybe some of you have read the book The Confidence Code. There’s a part where an African-American lawyer comments that a lot of black women her age went into the adult world with quite a bit of confidence. Because she says they’ve nearly all been raised by mothers who worked, women who supported families, sometimes single-handedly…so they don’t question the need to get out there and lead.
I wanted to know if Denise saw that with the women she works with…
“Most of the work I do I’m the only black woman there, it’s few and far between that I see a lot of black women, but I say definitely the confidence is there and I think too that black women have a tremendous shell that we put up because again this narrative that we hear that we’re not worthy of compassion and feminism and that goes way back in America even to slavery times, I mean we have always had to be strong and that has cultivated the ‘angry black woman’, and I think in general many of us do a lot of protecting ourselves and a lot of wall building in order to keep from letting folks in.”
Still, she says, it’s rare she encounters any woman with quite the self-belief of the average man.
“There’s no stretch job for a guy, when he goes for a job and I hear this all the time because I do a lot of organizational development. You see a man in a job interview and he answers off the cuff of his sleeve, he doesn’t think to, oh my gosh I might not able to do that, or could I do that? He declares he can do that and figures it out later, whereas we are so much more realistic, we are more tuned into our talents and we’re more self-aware than they can be.”
But that self-awareness can undermine us as we question ourselves and sometimes miss out on opportunities.
Denise isn’t someone to let an opportunity pass her by. And she wants her teenage daughter to have the same can-do attitude.
“I like when people say I’m pushy, that means I’m persuasive, right? So how do we help our girls take those things and not have them be albatrosses around their neck but really building blocks for their confidence. Because that’s a word that’s great on your resume, right? Persuasive?”
Stacey Vanek Smith is co-host of the Indicator podcast from NPR’s Planet Money, and she’s also a friend of mine. We used to work together at another show. She’s highly accomplished but you’ll never hear her say it. You will hear her play down her achievements.
“I deal with my insecurity by undercutting myself and my work – and that’s how I deal with my lack of confidence…by being honest about it or talking about it but you know I’m not sure that is always the best way…I guess every woman who does creative work or work of any kind is insecure about it on some level. I don’t know, I’ve been thinking about it a lot about how I handle it and , trying to stop myself when someone says, Oh, I liked your piece, not being like, oh, you know, oh, I was disappointed in that, just being like, thank you. It’s really hard.”
She first noticed the gulf between her attitude and that of some of the men around her when she was at journalism school.
“I mean I tended to be in the much more in the female camp of a more modest approach…I’m doing this internship, I’m just getting coffee…but I like the work they do…and I’m also working on this piece I’m excited about for class. And the guys would be like, oh, yeah, I’ve got this amazing internship and I’ve got this amazing piece I’m doing in class. And I remember thinking – I was almost embarrassed for them. But as I went on in my career I noticed that that actually works. It works. When people are like, ‘I’m awesome’, even if it’s so obviously coming from a place of deep insecurity, people believe it – it’s shocking to me. People can get very far in their careers on that kind of confidence and chutzpah.”
Meanwhile women (and men) who think it’s more seemly to let their work speak for them can find they’re missing out on promotions or projects.
Stacey’s seen this happen several times over the years. A young guy with bags of confidence – or at least bravado – comes in and competes for a job with a woman who already works at the company. And the woman may be more qualified, but the bosses often overlook her…
“’Cause it’s like the woman feels sort of dreary and unexciting, she’s been there so many years plugging away…the guy is the lightening bolt – he’s so exciting! And I will see these sort of swaggery, confident guys blow in and take these jobs. And it’s hard. Like it’s a hard thing to watch.”
I’ve been that dreary, dependable woman. But the swagger isn’t something either of us can emulate. When Stacey is going for a job or a promotion she cannot bring herself to be that guy, talking up her work.
“I tend to also focus on how hard I work, and not on how glorious the product is, because again that feels concrete to me, it feels like something I can prove, whereas the gloriousness of the product feels subjective. I feel like I can’t back it up.”
I think that’s the crux of the problem right there. That when it comes down to it, women like us don’t have that core belief in our value that seems to come naturally to so many men.
But letting other people know you lack confidence can backfire, as I discovered in the days when Stacey and I were working for the same organization. To me, my lack of confidence was such an integral part of me I didn’t even think about it. But one day, I was forced to.
AM-T: One of the best pieces of career advice I ever got from an editor – in fact, Liza Tucker, why not say her name out loud? I got assigned a story one day and I thought it was really silly. And I conveyed the fact I wasn’t really sure I could do a great job on it. And I remember feeling really insecure about it and sort of rolling my eyes and thinking, this is such a dumb story. But I went off and made the calls and turned it around on deadline and it turned out to be fine. And as with so many stories it turned out there was something interesting, and they were perfectly happy with it. But the next day Liza called me at my desk and said I don’t know why you were so under confident about that story yesterday but you should never show your editor that you’re un- confident because it gives people a reason to not have confidence in you. By showing that I was insecure about something I was telegraphing to my bosses that maybe I couldn’t be trusted to pull it off.
“Right, and I also feel like when you get into that mentality it’s really hard to fight for more. To tell yourself like, I really deserve more, I should be getting this promotion or this raise, and the times when I’ve actually asked for things it’s been really hard, it’s almost unthinkable that I would be able to ask for something and that I deserved it was very hard for me to get my head around. And I usually have had to in my career get to a place of feeling anger or resentment or something like that before I feel like I can ask for something…I don’t feel comfortable necessarily in myself to say I feel like I deserve this.”
AM-T: “No, I completely agree. But it was you who encouraged me to ask for a raise in a certain job situation that I would never have asked for. Because I was feeling so low and despondent after not getting this job. You were the one who said to me, they still want you, you should ask for X amount, which was 20% more than what I was getting…and if you hadn’t told me that I wouldn’t have gone into that conversation…and asked for exactly that, and I was ready to walk if they didn’t give it to me…and they did. And I never would have done that if I hadn’t had that conversation with you.”
“I don’t think I have trouble seeing the value of women around me…and it’s interesting that you bring this up because I feel like I have to have some kind of crazy leverage to ask for something…I have to feel like I’m ready to walk, I don’t feel like I can just ask for something because - I have to have another job offer or feel so unhappy I’m ready to leave. I feel like, I don’t feel like I am enough leverage, I guess, I feel…like I have to say, ‘or else, dot, dot, dot’.
I had a male colleague who spent all his time griping about raises. I’m sure he made a lot more money than I did. On the one hand I found it irritating and I’m not sure it was effective to the degree he was always talking about how he deserved a raise. On the other hand he really thought he deserved a raise all the time, he really thought he deserved more money all the time, and I was jealous of that.”
Me too. Because if you truly believe you deserve it you can ask for it with no qualms. Otherwise, asking can be fraught with anxiety.
And as Denise said near the beginning of the show, this confidence thing goes back to our childhoods. A lot of this comes down to nurture and the messages we get from the world around us about what women ‘should’ be like…
“I grew up in a very traditional house, my mom’s a homemaker, my father had a super demanding job, and I grew up in Idaho which is a very traditional place. And a lot of my aspirations as a young girl were to marry someone who was really successful…not that I didn’t have my own ambitions, I wanted to be a writer, but I always imagined the ultimate success being basically to be Kate Middleton, to marry someone really awesome and have that sort of success by proxy. To me what that says is like, I saw men’s success as important and of value and women’s value as finding a man who was successful…of course ironically enough I’m not married and have actually…
AM-T: “…had a really good career…”
“Yeah, I was thinking of the Gloria Steinem quote, so many of us have become the men we always wanted to marry. That was going through my head. I mean looking back on the kind of kid I was, I was super ambitious, super ambitious. I worked really hard in school, I wanted to get out of Idaho, I wanted to see the world, I’d always had those ambitions. But I think if you’d asked me directly I probably would have denied it.”
And years later, long after she dropped the supportive wife idea, she’s still a bit ambivalent about her worth…
“Do I think I’m an equal worker? I do, I really do. But I think there’s part of me that doesn’t think that…there’s part of me that thinks mmm, maybe I should get paid a little less, just a little…I think if I were on an absolute equal footing with a male colleague who had the same years of experience, everything, if I found out he were making say 10% more than me I’d be annoyed, but I wouldn’t be outraged. If I were making 10% more than him I would be, like, very puzzled. I think that would bother me more.”
It’s complicated.
One thing that builds confidence on one level is simply becoming good at what you do.
AM-T: “But it’s not that kind of confidence problem a lot of us suffer from, it’s the much deeper thing about your value in the world. And I don’t know how you get over that. You can gain confidence at a task by doing it over and over again and that’s a lovely thing to have cultivated…but that ‘who do you think you are?’ voice inside…I don’t know how you usurp that voice.”
“God, that’s so true. It is the ‘who do you think you are’. And I have to say, the way I handle that now is I get a little bit excited when I notice something like that…basically if I notice that something is making me uncomfortable, like I feel like I’m not speaking up enough, or I’m not enough part of a project…or I’m not getting promoted fast enough or paid enough or whatever it is, there is something thrilling about that discomfort, there is something exciting to me, because once it’s not sitting well, then eventually I know I’ll do something about it…I feel like that is this really beautiful tension point, that discomfort – like wait, I think I’m worth more. Like if you really did believe you should be paid less, it wouldn’t bother you to learn that you were paid less…but the fact that it bothers you, that is the beginning of change I think.”
Still, she sometimes asks herself, what would life be like if she believed in herself more…
“The real danger of the who-do-you-think-you-are message is that, it’s not like, oh, I wonder if I deserve that, should I ask for that? It’s the stuff you don’t even think of asking for. It’s the stuff that feels so far out of the realm of reality or the realm of anything you’d ever get…that’s what I sometimes think about.
Like I wonder, if I had no questions about my value, like I wonder what I would be doing? Would we all just be like Richard Branson? Maybe, I mean maybe. There’d be so many airlines…”
Stacey Vanek Smith.
Stacey is the author a new book called Machiavelli for Women – it’s coming out in the summer of 2020 and I will have her back on the show then.
Thanks to her and Denise Barreto for being my guests on this episode.
That’s The Broad Experience for this time.
If you have an idea for an upcoming show feel free to share it with me – quite a few of the shows you’ve heard have come from listeners. And I’m always glad to hear from you.
You can reach me at ashley at the broad experience dot com or on Twitter or Facebook.
I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening. See you next time.