Curiosity, Gumption and Reappraising Anxiety
Scope: The psychological chapters of The Way of Excellence on confidence, gumption, curiosity and failure: how Stulberg says to build trust in yourself, keep forward momentum, and turn fear into engagement. Courage in the Stoic series is in Courage and the Fear Threshold.
Confidence is evidence
Quoting Thich Nhat Hanh, faith is “the confidence a farmer has in his way of growing crops. It is not blind.” Stulberg’s version: “The more reps we put in, the more faith we gain in our respective endeavors, and in ourselves.” Contrast arrogance and confidence: “Arrogant people are loud … Underneath arrogance you’ll almost always find insecurity. Confident people are quiet … Underneath confidence you’ll almost always find evidence.” The technical name: self-efficacy, “an evidence-based belief that you are capable of showing up, working through challenges, and excelling in uncertain or highly charged circumstances.” How to build it: “Shoot the thousand daily jump shots. Practice your instrument every evening … gradually increasing the challenges you undertake.” On the start line: “pause to reflect on the evidence you’ve amassed. If you’ve put in the proper training, you can have the faith to trust it.”
Own your seat. A good coach or mentor “won’t call you up to bat until you are ready … But you can own your seat nonetheless, stepping into the arena, taking your doubts along for the ride, and relying on evidence to remind yourself you belong.” Check: “Do you have what you need to own your seat? If so, own it. If not, what evidence do you need before you can?” Earned confidence brings humility: “doing hard things makes us humble. It teaches us that we can push limits, but also that we have limits to begin with.” Insecure people read every challenge as a threat; confident people “welcomes challenges.” Slogan: “Confidence comes from evidence. Trust your training.” See Ego and Humility.
Gumption
Stulberg’s term (listed among the factors of excellence in Excellence as Mastery and Mattering): “Gumption is a forward inertia, a sense of progress and possibility, a strong yet measured enthusiasm … not an innate trait.” Marks: “you perceive obstacles as challenges rather than threats”; and, “Gumption is not about the absence of obstacles. It’s a feeling that no obstacle can stop you.” It arises from “caring, consistency, focus, discipline, patience,” and shows as skill, attentiveness and energy overlapping: “We gain a feel for what we’re doing. We settle into a groove.”
Gumption traps and fixes:
- Ruts: “stacking up a few victories, no matter how small or basic, goes a long way to help.”
- Ego bloat: “A human ego will expand to fill the space it’s given. As such, our egos require constraints.” Use “a good ego-check partner … [who] commits to telling you the truth.”
- Rigidity: “We must be able to release even from our strengths when necessary.”
- Cross-pollination: “Some of the most creative breakthroughs occur when an idea that works well in one domain gets grafted to another and revitalizes it.”
Curiosity as the antidote to fear
“Brave new world shifts me from a tense, closed state of fear into a more playful and open state of curiosity. I become less scared about what could happen and more interested to find out.” Why we lose it: “our focus shifts to achieving specific outcomes, avoiding failure, and safeguarding our egos … Our fear of failure overrides the joy of exploration.” The neuroscience he uses: the SEEKING pathway (“planning and problem-solving”) and PLAY pathway (“exploration, discovery, and adventure”), both activated by curiosity, which “feels good, motivates us to keep going, and builds upon itself.” Curiosity has three objects: “what you are capable of … your craft … yourself.” See Curiosity as Driver of Innovation.
Two selves. The participant-self plays “the finite game,” with wins, losses and great or terrible days; the ethnographer-self is in “the infinite game, which knows no end. The only goal is to continue playing, learning, and growing.” “Excellence is an infinite game: The goal is the path, and the path is the goal.” Compare Sinek’s infinite mindset.
Reappraising anxiety as excitement
Research on elite swimmers: non-elites “viewed stress as something to avoid, ignore, or try to dampen,” while elites “got curious about what they were feeling in their bodies and interpreted their sensations as neutral, if not aiding their performance.” The cited recommendation: “instead of trying to calm ourselves before consequential events … it’s better to ‘reappraise pre-performance anxiety as excitement.‘” Suppression “requires energy to fight the feeling of anxiety, energy that could be better spent on the task at hand.” Self-talk: “This is my nervous system rising to the occasion; or I am feeling this way because I care about what I am doing; or Once I get started, my training will take over and I’ll be fine.”
Failure and heartbreak
“Failure sucks. It is also inevitable. Keep going.” “Discomfort is a natural by-product of pushing our limits—which is to say discomfort is a natural by-product of growth.” And: “the things you care about break your heart. But you’ve got to trust the love of the pursuit is big enough to hold the hurt of failure.” Compare the Stoic framing in Courage and the Fear Threshold (fear as a signal pointing toward the right action).
Confidence, curiosity and the reappraisal tool all rest on the same substitution: evidence and interest in place of threat appraisal
Each tool replaces a threat reading of the moment with a data-or-discovery reading: evidence of past reps (confidence), a question about the unknown (curiosity), and a relabel of arousal (excitement). Compare Stoic obstacle reframing in Stoic Obstacle Reframing.