Ian Robertson, Co-Director of the Global Brain Health Institute, discusses the importance of confidence and how it can be learned. He explores why some people are overconfident while others are realistic about their abilities. The podcast also touches on topics such as the future of AI, the transformation of Ireland, connecting with nature, and promoting brain health.
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insights INSIGHT
Confidence as Learned Habits
Confidence is a learned set of mental, physical, and emotional habits rather than an innate trait.
It empowers action, unlike optimism or self-esteem which don’t necessarily drive personal effort.
insights INSIGHT
Gender Confidence Gap Magnifies
Men tend to be more overconfident, while women usually have a more realistic self-assessment.
Small early differences in confidence can magnify over time due to social and environmental factors.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Harness Anxiety into Confidence
Pay attention selectively to reduce anxiety, focusing on positive or neutral cues around you.
Reframe anxiety as energy you can harness to act despite nervousness, building confidence.
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How important is confidence? Psychologists say confidence is a series of mental, physical, and emotional habits that can be learned. What makes some people overconfident while others are realistic about their abilities and why are both outlooks important to succeed in life?
Ian Robertson is Co-Director of the Global Brain Health Institute (Trinity College Dublin and University of California at San Francisco) and Co-Leader of The BrainHealth Project at University of Texas at Dallas. A trained clinical psychologist as well as a neuroscientist, he is internationally renowned for his research on neuropsychology. He has written five books and numerous newspaper and magazine articles and comment pieces in the Guardian, Times, Telegraph, Irish Times, Time magazine and New York magazine, amongst others. He has appeared on BBC Radio and featured in several major television documentaries. He is a regular speaker at major futurology and business conferences in Europe, the USA and Asia.
“Narcissistic people have very high self-evaluations. This means they're able to do things in spite of not having mastered their brief. I'm thinking of Boris Johnson and Trump, in spite of having lots of legal cases against them. And so the kind of things that would make the rest of us anxious, the narcissist is so engrossed in their positive self-perception that they're not fazed by things. But the other thing about narcissism, particularly in the media, it can create charisma, and charisma gives you status, and status makes you persuasive. And persuasion gets you money and power and all sorts of other things, and these reinforce the charisma. So there's a rather sinister, vicious cycle to the narcissist and vicious to the rest of us. That can put people who are not fit for power in power because of the superficial, supreme overconfidence that is a part of narcissism.”
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