The confidence prescription

Whenever I’m trying to work up the courage to do something I get some lines from Macbeth floating around in my head: specifically the bit there the witches are urging Macbeth to be ‘bloody, bold and resolute’.  And look at how well that all turned out, eh…

As I’ve written before, I used to wish that confidence was something you could buy in pill form or have it injected.  This makes confidence sound like a drug and to me, it always did seem like something totally alien and unnatural, something which had to be imported in some way.
I think you know me well enough by now to know, dear reader, that when in doubt, I usually reach for a book. When it comes to parenting, as with all other areas of my life, I rely on my old friends the books to give me a helping hand. ‘How to be a happy Mum’ - literally, that’s what it’s called, to, erm Supernanny to Toddler Taming and when I felt that my children could do with a helping hand in the confidence department, (perhaps because I didn’t feel quite able to lead by example) I bought them The Confidence Code for girls.

What do other parents do when they don’t turn to books for everything? Take parenting classes? Enlist the kids in lots of extra curricular activities? Actually talk to the little monsters? (kidding).
The confidence code had been recommended by A Mighty Girl https://www.amightygirl.com/, who said that girls’ confidence could take a real dip between the age of 8 and 14. My children haven’t even reached the lower age limit yet but I was seeing things that caused me concern and so I turned to my old friends, books. You may well be thinking that I would be better off coming away from books and being more practical, but you see, The Confidence Code is a practical book - it has lots of scenarios and comic strips, illustrating the dilemmas facing the girls in modern life. It has quizzes to ascertain how the reader would act in certain situations. It encourages girls to question things in society and it challenges some of the more damaging and suppressing assumptions about femininity. It doesn’t just deal with being assertive, taking risks and becoming more comfortable with discomfort it also flag posts signs that some friendships might be a bit toxic.
Yes, it’s a book for children but I’m reading it too, because I want to see what messages it’s imparting to children. And do you know what, it’s great! As I was reading it I thought - I could do with following some of the suggestions in this book, I’m not particularly comfortable with taking risks, so I purchased the adult version for our Wellbeing collection at work.  It’s also diverse and inclusive - it tackles the different cultural and societal pressures that children might face and it addresses issues that LGBT teenagers might have to deal with. The Confidence Code is not about fitting in but fulfilling your potential, reaching high to try and attain your goals and being comfortable with who you are. How many of us, even as adults, are truly comfortable with who we are? Actually, you might be comfortable with who you are, but I’m not quite there yet.

There is another book I’m reading at the moment; it’s called Big Bones and it’s a novel for young adults.

I was nervous about reading this book because it’s about an overweight teenager who has no attention of trying to lose weight and the book that I’ve written, the book that I’m trying (unsuccessfully) to get an agent for, is about an overweight teenager who refuses to lose weight! I was worried that reading Big Bones would influence my writing or, worse, be so similar to my book, yet so much better, that it would destroy my confidence in my writing and make me smash my computer in tears of rage and despair. But Big Bones is a glorious book (which is nothing like mine) and it’s main character, Bluebelle, or BB for short, is a glorious character. Not only is she unapologetically fat, she is brimming with self-love and self-confidence. This is a very important book because there is a pervasive lie in our society, that if you are less than perfect, or, more accurately, if you don’t fit into the rigidly prescribed, societal parameters of what is deemed to be attractive, then nobody will fancy you and you’ll never have sex*. This lie is particularly insidious when you are young and starts to fade, for many, when you get older (although, as a woman, you’re not really supposed to get older either!) [*The great thing about Caitlin Moran’s book How to Build a girl is that at one point the character points out that she is fat but she has loads of sex, with lots of different people.] Bluebelle, in Big Bones, loves herself, revels in tight-fitting, brightly-coloured, clothing and she calls out all the fat-phobia around her. She is a truly magnificent, body-positive heroine.

I’ve always felt that fiction has its place in imparting messages and ideas, as well as non-fiction. I wish that this book had been around when I was a teenager, because what Big Bones does, for me (we all have our own interpretations), is demonstrate that confidence can be a choice.

Confidence is a choice.
Yes, easier said than done and some people have been so battered by life, so flattened by experience that it might feel like an impossible choice but if you are living high up on the pyramid of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, then perhaps it is a choice that you can adopt.