environment, has given you an edge on many of your counterparts at co-ed institutions. But a head start is just that, a start. Confidence. A positive sense of self-worth is a lifelong project that takes active and constant effort. Do not play the deferral game with something so critical to your success. In 1978, there was a ground breaking study on “the imposter syndrome,” the phenomenon by which high achieving careerists, most often women, secretly believe, despite all external evidence to the contrary, that they are frauds. The names of women who have admitted to believing they are imposters would shock you: Sheryl Sandberg, Hillary Clinton, even Emma Watson, the actress behind the amazing Harry Potter character Hermione. The point is: Confidence does not just happen with time. Indeed, the imposter syndrome shows that confidence doesn’t even just happen with achievement. Confidence happens with painstaking effort toward a better perception of yourself, of your own value. When I left Mary Louis, I felt on top of the world. I had perfect grades, a best friend who was more like a sister, a one-way ticket to one of the best academic institutions in the world and a loving boyfriend who was joining me at college. I had what I thought was an immovable sense of self-worth. Shockingly, by middle of my first semester, not six months later, I was in shambles. I was struggling at even the most basic of classes at Harvard, my best friend was a nine-hour bus ride away in Montreal, my loving boyfriend had left me to “explore”, and I had an ever growing, debilitating suspicion that I was admitted to Harvard by mistake. In the three years that followed, I eventually clawed my way back toward academic success, made more best friends and fell in love with the new man who is still beside me today. But the wounds to my self-esteem from that first year took much longer to close. And I dare to say, I am still working to heal them today. So confidence is important and gaining it is an elusive process. But there are methods and those methods are rooted in Kindness and Community. Method 1: Kindness. As recipients of a Catholic education, you are all aware of your mandate to be kind to others. Today, I urge you, for the sake of your self-confidence, to be kind to yourselves. Demeaning self-talk is a key culprit in a losing battle for self-confidence. “The Confidence Gap,” a 2014 story in The Atlantic, highlighted this in a study around a particularly difficult course in Cornell’s math Ph.D. program. Psychologist David Dunning observed that as the course work intensified, male students would respond to their lower grades by saying, “Wow, this is a tough class” whereas female students were much more likely to respond with “You see, I knew I wasn’t good enough.” Do you notice this phenomenon in your own lives? When you MARIEL AFTER & 2016 ANNUAL REPORT
do well on a test, do you attribute that success to circumstance? Oh, that was a really easy test. But, when you do poorly, do you ascribe the setback to yourself ? What’s wrong with me, why don’t I get this? That is verbal self-assassination! Every word counts when you are building the vocabulary of your own internal dialogue. Whether you are choosing to tackle a new major or try a new sport, the conversation you have with yourself on your abilities, every hour of every day, will have a substantive impact on your sense of self-worth. I would be remiss in this plea for self-kindness if I did not expose what I remember to be the key punching bag for my own negative self-talk. My body. To the graduating class I ask that you grow an awareness of the language with which you discuss your bodies. This is particularly important at your age when your bodies are new and your perceptions of it still fresh and forming. What is important to your development of confidence is not what your body looks like but what you perceive it looks like. For reasons you should not ask, I recently found myself in a room full of supermodels. After a few hours, I was amazed to find that they too shared the same conversations with their friends as I do, agonizing over the size of their hips or flabbiness of their arms. It made no difference to them that their bodies were literally the emblem on which society had built the standard of beauty. In their perception, their bodies were still unacceptable. It is not about the reality; it is about the perception. Your body is a vehicle for your mind, and therefore your primary mode of transportation from here to your unbelievably golden future. So develop your perception of your body with a mindset of cherishment. Listen to old women like me, when we tell you your body is beautiful and your own - to do with it what you please.
THE POINT IS: CONFIDENCE DOES NOT JUST HAPPEN WITH TIME. INDEED, THE IMPOSTER SYNDROME SHOWS THAT CONFIDENCE DOESN’T EVEN JUST HAPPEN WITH ACHIEVEMENT. CONFIDENCE HAPPENS WITH PAINSTAKING EFFORT TOWARD A BETTER PERCEPTION OF YOURSELF, OF YOUR OWN VALUE. 11