Closing the confidence gap means being honest about your abilities, not constantly undervaluing them.
Interpretation
Recognizing and acknowledging your true abilities is essential to closing the gap in self-confidence.
In this quote, Katty Kay emphasizes the importance of self-awareness and honesty regarding one's skills and talents. Often, individuals underestimate their abilities due to self-doubt or external pressures, which hinders their confidence and potential. By being truthful about what we can do, we empower ourselves to overcome insecurities and thrive.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming challenges, I could use this quote to encourage self-acceptance.
Every woman dreams of a workplace where her boss doesn't suggest they grab a drink after work, where there isn't that colleague you'd just rather not get stuck in the office with alone and where your job prospects don't depend, however subtly, on whether you put up with lascivious comments from a man who has power over you.
Economists argue about the relative impact of immigrants versus robots on wage stagnation - voters don't care much. They blame immigrants. It's easier to get mad at a person from Macedonia or Mexico, taking your job than it is to get mad at a piece of technology from Silicon Valley.
Ive lived and worked in developing countries so Im particularly interested in helping women in oppressive societies. Our problems can pale in comparison to theirs, the more we can do to empower them, the better off all women will be.
I honestly do not know a woman, in any profession, at any level, who has not at some point, often at many points, had to repudiate the unwanted advances of a man they've worked with or for. We shouldn't have to.
People sometimes imagine that just because they have access to so many newspapers, radio and TV channels, they will get an infinity of different opinions. Then they discover that things are just the opposite: the power of these loudspeakers only amplifies the opinion prevalent at a certain time, to the point where it covers any other opinion.
We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.
Don't join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.
Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out - it's the grain of sand in your shoe.
Stairway to Wisdom”) David Brooks detailed the needed ingredients to gaining a deep understanding of a social problem, beginning with the data and moving on to first-hand accounts. The highest rung on his stairway, though, went beyond those: “Empathy opens you up to absorb the good and the bad. Love impels you not just to observe but to seek union—to think as another thinks and feel as another feels.
A man who cannot control his temper is not very likely to control his passions, and no matter what his pretensions in religion, he moves in daily life very close to the animal plane.
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