How To Be Confident
The difference between success and failure often hangs on a humiliatingly small and elusive trait that standard education never touches: confidence.
We spend vast amounts of time acquiring confidence in narrow professional fields, while overlooking the primordial need to acquire a more wide-ranging variety of confidence which can serve us across a range of tasks in our professional and personal lives.
We so often lack confidence because we implicitly regard its possession as a matter of slightly freakish good luck. We believe we are stuck with the confidence levels we were born with, but as this class shows, the opposite is true. Confidence is not a gift from the gods, but a skill that can be learned. It is a skill founded on a set of ideas we have about the world and our natural place within it.
How to Be Confident teaches us:
- How to overcome the impostor syndrome.
- How to master shyness about advancing our plans.
- How to outgrow the legacy of childhood timidity.
- How to remain confident that we can change things through our own agency.
We leave the class equipped with a range of confidence-inducing ideas to allow us to escape the shackles of excessive hesitancy and compliance. We are schooled in the art of confidence.
TIMETABLE - WEEKDAYS
5.45pm Drinks & welcome
6.00pm Class Begins
7.30pm Break (times vary)
9.00pm Class finishes
TIMETABLE - SATURDAY
10.00am Drinks & welcome
10.15am Class Begins
11.45am Break (times vary)
1.00pm Class finishes
'Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.'
– E.E. Cummings
Explore More
How To Be Confident is one of the twelve classes that comprise our core curriculum. Our classes tackle the core themes of emotional life, from relationships and the workplace, to understanding the self and exploring our relationship with culture. You can explore the full curriculum here.
This class is in a sequence with How To Identify Your Career Potential and How To Fail which together cover The School of Life's ideas on work.
The School of Life Curriculum has been written, designed and quality assured by The School of Life HQ in London, led by Alain de Botton. Presented as an EQ learning journey, these 12 classes and 4 full-day workshops bring together over 10 years of teaching and continuous improvement of our emotional intelligence curriculum around the world.
About Classes
Our classes have been designed to give useful insights around the big themes in life. You’ll be challenged to think deeply and have courageous conversations about the issues that matter most, and you’ll be encouraged to step outside your comfort zone in a safe space with other curious, open-minded individuals.
To find out more about what to expect when you come to a class or workshop at The School of Life, take a look inside our London classroom.
These sessions are designed by experts and taught by members of our faculty. They include a mix of lecture, conversation and group activity.