Book Report – Kickass Confidence by Alyssa Dver

“What’s wrong with being confident?” goes the rhetoric of the recent Top 40 hit. The gut reply is “nothing,” which is of course true unless said confidence is actually baseless cockiness. Alyssa Dver plumbs the depths of this important – and culturally relevant – topic in her 2015 book, Kickass Confidence. Donald Trump wasn’t yet running for office when she wrote it; he was just a regular asshole citizen, albeit louder than the average asshole and one who was deeply entangled in the infamous, nauseating birther movement. While the author does not name him specifically, she does a fine job describing the blowhard who would be – no, wait, still is? – president. Let us “not fall victim to their bonehead traps,” she writes. “Stand up, be mindful and know that you can maintain confidence despite these off-putting, imposter behaviors.” Amen, sister… and put some stank on it!

No imposter herself, Dver knows full well of what she speaks. As co-founder of the American Confidence Institute, and mother of a boy with the neurological movement disorder known as dystonia, she’s an expert the art of belief coupled with the science of the brain. She writes about the emotional distractions that can trip us up after (say) staying up half the night perfecting a PowerPoint presentation, sweating every detail. It’s showtime and we notice a yawn or phone check from an audience member and in our minds all hell breaks loose. Dver takes the reader through these sorts of high stakes scenarios that require peak performance that help “simulate and measure confident thoughts that over time become mental memory paths and eventually autonomic responses.” The goal is stronger neural pathways by creating confident thoughts (through analysis of options), evaluating potential outcomes and consequences (with data from learned experiences), decisively choosing a path (while fighting uncertainty), and lastly weighing likely success (self-efficacy). Call it look before you leap but at lightning speed.

As important as mind-over-matter conditioning is, perhaps the most crucial nuggets here are her Key Confidence Indicators, or KCIs in a cute play on the more common KPIs (or performance dashboards) that you’re likely sick of hearing about. Among the eight outlined by Dver, which cover everything from mental health to financial security to getting enough sleep, my vote for most key goes to KCI #2: Education and Street Smarts. Want to be more confident? The author suggests we enroll in an adult ed class, read the paper, join a book club, and interview experts on something about which we’ve always been curious. Sound advice for sure. And in a demonstration of what one assumes is her way of challenging clients, Dver provides this cornering question: “Do you take deliberate action to improve this KCI every week?” If this barb isn’t fully motivating, one might wonder why we even bother showing up. But if all you need is a little extra nudge, just imagine it’s Dirty Harry, wielding a .44 Magnum, who wants to know if you consistently work on self-improvement. Well do you, punk?