Status is subtle and distributed. Peoples’ opinion of you is based on many signals and interactions, and your behavioral presentation to them is based on a highly dimensional set of your beliefs about yourself, about them, and your mental framing of past and desired future interactions between you.
Even if you simplify to a few scalar features “self-confidence”, “status”, and “success” (roughly being self-presentation, other-evaluation, and interaction-outcomes), there are causal links in every direction. You can’t bootstrap them all to 100% via any one mechanism, you have to increase what you can, let the others catch up to the new equilibrium, and then repeat.
Modeled that way, “be (more) confident” and “fake it ’till you make it” are both next-step advice, not a complete strategy for life. For most people, acting a bit more confident will lead to a bit more success, with luck in a repeatable “virtuous circle”.
Trying to change any one of the factors too quickly, though, can lead to degradation rather than improvement, as the other factors will either overcorrect or just become disconnected. I suspect I can make a theory of second-best argument around this, but I’ve perhaps already stretched the simplified model far enough.
Status is subtle and distributed. Peoples’ opinion of you is based on many signals and interactions, and your behavioral presentation to them is based on a highly dimensional set of your beliefs about yourself, about them, and your mental framing of past and desired future interactions between you.
Even if you simplify to a few scalar features “self-confidence”, “status”, and “success” (roughly being self-presentation, other-evaluation, and interaction-outcomes), there are causal links in every direction. You can’t bootstrap them all to 100% via any one mechanism, you have to increase what you can, let the others catch up to the new equilibrium, and then repeat.
Modeled that way, “be (more) confident” and “fake it ’till you make it” are both next-step advice, not a complete strategy for life. For most people, acting a bit more confident will lead to a bit more success, with luck in a repeatable “virtuous circle”.
Trying to change any one of the factors too quickly, though, can lead to degradation rather than improvement, as the other factors will either overcorrect or just become disconnected. I suspect I can make a theory of second-best argument around this, but I’ve perhaps already stretched the simplified model far enough.