I’m going to guess that you, like me and just about everyone I know, would enjoy having more confidence. I’m not talking about the fake-it-til-you-make-it kind, or the blustery bravado that masks insecurities, like a college freshman draping a scarf across a lamp to set the mood. I mean genuine confidence: that unflappable sense of self that keeps you feeling capable of handling whatever comes your way. Or, as therapist Esther Perel put it in an interview with GQ, “Confidence is your ability to see yourself as a flawed person, and still hold yourself in high regard.”
Too bad confidence is such a slippery eel of a thing. Knowing you want more of it brings you face-to-face with the reality that you don’t have enough of it. Alan Watts coined this vicious cycle the “Backwards Law:” Trying to will yourself into a state of mind state often brings about its opposite. (Aldous Huxley, for his part, called this the Law of Reversed Effort.) It’s psychological quicksand. How are we supposed to get the things we want if we can’t go after them?
The answer, obviously, is a podcast. Which is why we’ve dedicated the entire second season of GQ’s Airplane Mode to conversations about confidence: what it is, why we lose it, and how we can all get more of it.
Over 10 episodes, starting January 14th (next Tuesday!), I’ll be talking to a wide variety of people for whom confidence is career-defining—and in some cases, life-preserving. Like Jill Heinerth, who has spent more than 30 years diving some of the world’s deepest caves in the world, and relies on confidence to keep her calm in the face of constant danger. And J.J. Redick, the NBA sharpshooter who finds his confidence in repetition. And Barry Michels, psychotherapist to Hollywood stars (all of whom, he says, deal with self-doubt).
Each episode, each conversation, will be a window into a different path to confidence. I can’t promise that hearing someone’s unique story about how they found (and are still continuing to find) their own faith in themselves will cure your own self-doubt. But it’s as good a place to start as any. (At least, it has been for me.)
And sure, maybe this seems like a direct pursuit of confidence, going against the logic of the Watt’s Backwards Law. But Alan Watts and Aldous Huxley never listened to podcasts. I’m confident that, if they gave Airplane Mode Season 2 a listen, they’d change their minds.
You can listen and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, and Megaphone.