The Confidence Map

Chapter 1: Visualizing Confidence


When I was growing up, we had one of those supersized National Geographic atlases-a blue, hardcover treasure trove of detailed maps of the world, about the size of a front-door welcome mat. My dad traveled a lot, and when he returned from a business trip, he would pull the atlas from the shelf next to our kitchen table, open it up-all but covering the table-and leaf through it until he found the specific map detailing the city he had just visited. As he spoke about his experience and pointed his index finger to different locations on the page, the maps helped me visualize where he had been and how far he had traveled to get there.

With each new trip, more pages of the atlas were highlighted. I gained a better sense of the world around me: individual cities and countries didn't stand alone but instead fit into a broader patchwork of geography. When my dad flew to Dubai or Saudi Arabia, which he did often, I knew not only his exact location in the atlas but, more broadly, that he was in the Middle East. Specific cities and countries began to fit together.

When I grew older, the atlas became more than just a series of maps I could use to assess relative distances and understand the broader geographic configuration of the world. As my father shared specific experiences from his trips, the atlas formed the framework for a rich, unwritten travel guide filled with interesting stories detailing what things looked like and how people behaved in different places on the map. I knew that on page 194, people ate sushi and drank sake. On page 179, they wore a thawb. On page 174, they spoke Russian and used the Cyrillic alphabet. Cultural norms added depth to the geography on the page. Later in my life, when I was the one traveling, I carried these associations with me. When I landed in London or Tokyo, I had a general sense of what to expect. I felt prepared. There was a line of understanding stretching from my childhood travels with my dad across the pages of the atlas to my real-world adult journeys abroad.

When I became a parent, one of my first purchases was an atlas of my own-and a globe, too. Like my father, I wanted my children to see that dots on maps were more than just locations; they represented people with stories and cultures-places where distinct things happened.

Little did I know how helpful this perspective would be in my second career.

Introducing the Confidence Quadrant

A few years into teaching my class on confidence and decision-making, I realized my students were struggling. The concepts I was trying to share felt too abstract to them; students were having trouble "seeing" the connections between their own actions (as well as the behavior of others) and confidence. Trying to separate confidence into two distinct feelings, certainty and control, didn't help matters-I had simply created a jumbled-up word cloud. Not only did I need a way to show that specific feelings drive behavior, I also needed to show how and why that was the case. I needed to turn the word cloud into a simple, easy-to-use framework that made it clear that different mixes of our feelings of certainty and control lead to different outcomes in our preferences, decisions, and actions. Moreover, the framework needed to acknowledge and allow for the fact that our feelings routinely change, altering how we act. I realized that, like my father with the atlas, I needed a map that enabled my students to see specific feeling locations in relationship to others, on top of which I could then layer stories that revealed the norms and behaviors unique to each location. With that map in hand, my students would better understand why our feelings of certainty and control matter so much, and what happens as these feelings change when we move from location to location around the map.

With this in mind, I developed a tool I call the Confidence Quadrant (Figure 1.1). As you look at it for the first time, ignore all the labeling. Just think of it as a map made up of four distinct states-like a map of the Four Corners region of the American Southwest.

If you've traveled to Four Corners, where the boundaries of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona all come together like the center of the image above, the differences from state to state there are indistinguishable. Without the granite monument and the small, detailed bronze disc at its center, you'd never know where one state ends and the next begins. But the farther away you drive from that marker, the more unique the culture, the norms, and the topography of each state become.

Rather than subdividing a physical region, like the American Southwest, into four unique states, the Confidence Quadrant divides our feelings of confidence into four unique environments that reflect the relative mix of certainty and control we feel in our lives. The horizontal axis of the Quadrant measures the relative intensity of our feeling of certainty-how sure we feel about what is ahead-while the vertical axis measures the relative intensity of our feeling of control-what level of influence we feel we have over the outcome.

Just as at Four Corners, our feelings of certainty and control are indistinguishable at the center of the Quadrant, no matter which of the four environments we are in. But as we move away from the center, each of the four confidence environments of the Quadrant becomes increasingly distinct. There are consistent patterns of behavior-cultural norms, as it were-that characterize our presence in each box. Different combinations of certainty and control change how we feel and, in turn, how we act. There is a clear relationship between our location on the Quadrant and our behavior.

Before I go any deeper into these connections, I think it's important we start with a quick tour of each of the four confidence environments of the Quadrant.

The upper right-hand box, where we feel high levels of both certainty and control, is our "Comfort Zone." We are confident in this box, relaxed and optimistic about what we see ahead. Here, things feel familiar to us. We believe we will succeed at whatever it is we are undertaking.

When athletes are in the upper-right box, they describe it as being "in the zone": time passes quickly; actions seem effortless. Likewise, business leaders routinely map their greatest successes to the Comfort Zone-positive outcomes like expectation-beating product launches, career promotions, and stock-option gains. The Comfort Zone is where leaders feel most valued, appreciated, and rewarded. It's also where we have fun. When prompted, my students always identify the Comfort Zone as the location of experiences like spring break and prom-unless, of course, their date was a dud.

Those dud experiences typically show up in the lower left-hand box-the "Stress Center." This box is where we feel powerless-we lack control-and the future feels uncertain. We feel vulnerable here. We are anxious, pessimistic, and doubtful of our ability to handle things. In the Stress Center, even easy things feel hard.

A few years ago, a student rushed into my class late, making profuse apologies: "Professor," she said, "I'm so, so sorry I'm late, but I'm in the lower left-hand box! Last night, I had a fight with my roommate. Then I overslept this morning. And to top it all off, I have an organic chemistry test this afternoon that I didn't have time to study for!" In her exasperation, she perfectly captured what it feels like when we are in the Stress Center-it seems as though everything is going wrong at once and there is little we can do to stop it.

Business leaders describe the Stress Center as the place where they work hardest and get recognized (and paid) the least. It is where they experience their greatest failures, too. Demotions, firings, and the fallout from flawed decisions all cluster here. So do feelings of shame and embarrassment.

The upper right-hand and lower left-hand boxes of the Quadrant are the mountaintops and valleys of our lives-our Wide World of Sports's thrill of victory and agony of defeat, respectively. It is as if there is a spectrum of confidence that runs from the top right corner to the lower left corner of the Quadrant. The farther into either box we go, the more extreme our feelings become. When we think about being or not being confident, the Comfort Zone and the Stress Center are what first come to mind.

The other two boxes of the Quadrant are a little fuzzier in our minds and more challenging to capture. These are environments of mixed feelings, where we have either certainty or control. We often overlook these states of being-if we acknowledge they exist at all. Typically, we lump together our feelings of certainty and control, believing that we can't have one without the other.

We can and we do-and far more often than we realize.

The lower right-hand box, where we feel certainty but have low control, is the "Passenger Seat." This is an environment where we feel someone or something else has the steering wheel, but there is predictability and stability to our circumstances. Being on an elevator is a common Passenger Seat experience; so, too, is getting a haircut or an oil change. Passenger Seat environments involve a loss of agency, where control has been taken by or ceded to someone or something else.

In the workplace, the Passenger Seat tends to encompass those environments where employees are told what to do. It's full of assignments, training, and projects where workers are instructed to follow the clear direction of others. And here is where the lower right-hand box gets interesting: the experience of certainty without control can feel pleasurable, or it can feel prisonlike.

We like it when a Passenger Seat experience is voluntary-when we have chosen to cede control. But even that may not be enough. To be comfortable in the Passenger Seat, we also typically need a very high level of certainty in the outcome we desire. We must feel like we are on the far right side of that lower right-hand box. We wouldn't get on an airplane if we had only a 50 percent chance of arriving safely at our destination, nor would most of us get on a plane with even a 90 percent chance-we require 99.99999 percent certainty. When we are in the Passenger Seat, we are comfortable only when we are hugging the right edge of the box.

As a result, and especially when the consequences to us are dire, even a very small decrease in our feelings of predictability or stability can quickly move us from the Passenger Seat to the depths of the Stress Center. Because we have one but not both of our requirements for confidence, there is an inherent fragility to our feelings when we are in the lower right-hand box. If you've ever tried to teach your children to drive, you have experienced that Passenger Seat fragility firsthand.

The final box is the opposite environment to the Passenger Seat. Here, in the upper left-hand box of the Quadrant, we have high control but low certainty. This is the "Launch Pad." It is where we control a decision or action but the outcome of that choice is still unknown. The Launch Pad is where we are when we pull the lever on a slot machine, when we are rock climbing and begin our ascent up the side of a cliff, or when we've updated our résumé and hit "Send" to deliver it to a potential new employer. When experts talk about "decision-making amid uncertainty," they are almost always discussing a choice we make in the Launch Pad. In these moments we have control-agency-but the outcomes remain uncertain. We don't know whether we will hit the jackpot, reach the mountaintop, or be called for an interview; if we'll come away successful or licking our wounds.

Some have suggested the upper left-hand box is akin to the early moments of the hero's journey-that it is the moment when "Sully" Sullenberger took back control and decided to land US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River; or when Tom Hanks set off on his raft in the film Cast Away. Others have suggested that I should simply call the upper left-hand box "TBD."

No matter what we call it, we try to compensate for the uncertainty of the upper left-hand box by doing something to make us feel like we have both our hands on the wheel. We want to be at the very, very top edge of the box. The more control we feel we have, the better we feel. Just as we require near-absolute certainty to feel secure amid the powerlessness of the Passenger Seat, we require near total control to feel secure amid the uncertainty of the Launch Pad.

To be fair, there are some people who love spending time in this box, particularly thrill seekers and entrepreneurs. But most people view the Launch Pad as a necessary means to an end, a temporary environment they must endure in order to reach or return to the Comfort Zone.

Not surprisingly, business leaders tend to map those experiences in which they deliberately took a risk and succeeded in the Launch Pad. They often draw a circular path from the Comfort Zone over to the Launch Pad and back, forming a visual victory lap that celebrates the outcome of their successful risk-taking. Few leaders volunteer experiences where they willingly left the Comfort Zone for the Launch Pad, failed, and ended up in the depths of the Stress Center.

While opposite environments, the Launch Pad and the Passenger Seat often generate similar feelings of anxiety. Both involve elements of risk-taking, since either certainty or control is missing. In the Launch Pad, we hike up a steep, winding trail to reach the summit of a mountain on our own. In the Passenger Seat, we ride a chairlift that dangles from a thin cable above our head. Both get us to the top, but they do so via different paths on the Quadrant. Moreover, in both cases, we look forward to the experience being over and successfully returning us to the Comfort Zone, where we once again have certainty and control in our lives.

Taken together, the full Confidence Quadrant looks like Figure 1.6.

According to the different mixture of our feelings of certainty and control in each box on the Quadrant, we feel, and in turn act, differently.

Earlier, I shared that our choices fall into two broad categories: we act either to retain confidence once it has been achieved or to restore it once it has been lost. As Figure 1.6 shows, any time we are outside of the Comfort Zone, we feel vulnerable. There is something unknown and fragile about the environment, so in order to feel relaxed and secure, we must return to the Comfort Zone. Having once returned to its safety, we will do whatever it takes to preserve the certainty and control we feel there.