But Habig and Burnett are in the minority. "You can't show doubt," insists Kevin Price of AccuCode. "You've got to portray yourself as absolutely certain that you can do what you say you'll do. Even if you doubt that yourself, you've got to make it seem like you don't." Most entrepreneurs interviewed agreed with that argument, and many acknowledged faking confidence at one time or another -- particularly in their early sales careers. They described the practice as harmless, like using training wheels just long enough to gain psychic balance.
That was certainly the case for Price, who started AccuCode because he needed a job. "I wasn't confident," he says, "and in many ways I wasn't qualified." Price admits that for the first three years he often faked confidence in front of customers, "and then one day I realized I was no longer faking it," he says. "I was sitting in a room of people that had more years of industry experience than I did, that were supposed to be more technically qualified than I was, but I knew more than they did. Those years gave me a chance to grow into my expertise so that now I no longer have to fake anything."
How do you build confidence?
"Both champion athletes and CEOs are good at mentally drawing upon their past successes to step into uncharted territory," says Chris Carmichael, founder and chairman of Carmichael Training Systems, in Colorado Springs, Colo., and the longtime coach of three-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong. "When I'm working with an athlete, I'll have them do a mental recall of what they've accomplished. If you do it right, the athlete starts to swell with confidence."
Success, of course, derives from a combination of things: experience, mastery, native talent, propitious external factors, and luck. Most entrepreneurs we interviewed said they develop confidence through mastery and experience, principally in domains that are important to their jobs. They read business books. They attend conferences and seminars. They take classes in negotiating and salesmanship and public speaking (although many CEOs appear to view fear of public speaking as a charming flaw, like not being able to carry a tune).
They also consult with peer groups, mentors, and coaches of various stripes. Jeff Sinelli began modeling his leadership style on Genghis Khan after launching the Genghis Grill restaurant chain in Dallas. He supplements the wisdom of the Mongolian marauder with advice from his pastor ("he's very business savvy"), a business coach ("he found out what makes me dynamic and what my gifts are"), a psychologist ("we talk on the phone once a month about business, family, girlfriends, everything"), and a growing gallery of mentors that includes restaurant magnate Norman Brinker.
Some people seek to develop expertise in numerous disciplines, intent on becoming a human Swiss Army knife that can handle any task the business world throws at them. The confidence that helped Brent Habig launch Tigris Consulting "was in my ability to do a variety of things," he says. Proficient at programming, project management, recruiting, and accounting, he knew that whenever a problem arose, he could "jump in and solve it myself," he says.
Psychologist Ros Taylor, founder of London-based consultancy Ros Taylor Ltd., has created a whole grab bag of exercises for developing confidence. Many of those techniques received widespread exposure in England when she served as the key presenter and adviser on Confidence Lab, a popular BBC program in which 12 shrinking violets set out to reinvent themselves in seven days using tools such as art therapy and salsa lessons. Taylor believes that a wide-ranging confidence can be built virtually from scratch -- and that it can be built quickly. "People learn to drive within a week," says Taylor. "They learn French in a week if they're rushing off. They live and breathe these skills. I think it's exactly the same with confidence."
The skills that Taylor promotes are in such areas as making good first impressions, improving posture, and thinking positive thoughts. She asks clients to concoct 30-second commercials about themselves, to compile lists of self-descriptive adjectives, and to practice asking open-ended questions for conversation starters. It may sound a little too easy, but Taylor points to the Confidence Lab graduates who, within just nine months of the show's airing, had asked for and received promotions, landed prestigious new jobs, and -- in two cases -- launched companies.
"Psychologically, action precedes change," insists Taylor. "If you start doing things in a more confident fashion, it feeds back to your nervous system that you might actually be confident. All these people went through profound cognitive shifts about what they could do internally."
Is there such a thing as general confidence?
No, there is not. For Kagan, that point is the postulate for everything else he has to say about the subject. "Individuals have confidence in specific domains," he says flatly. "I am very confident about my knowledge of child development. I have no confidence in my knowledge of how computers work. You don't have general confidence."
Yet some factors that contribute to confidence have nothing to do with particular talents or fields of expertise. A belief in God is one. Environment is another: many entrepreneurs stress the salutary effects of familiar, controllable surroundings. That's one reason that Stephen Rosa, founder and CEO of Advertising Ventures, in Providence, purposely built his business just across a bridge from the street where he was raised. "It keeps me grounded," says Rosa. "It's comforting to see the rooftop of the house I grew up in."
