15 Minute Foreplay™ Conversation with Peter Atwater.

In this conversation Bronwyn Williams and Tumelo Mojapelo talk to Peter Atwater about the confidence model. 

Bronwyn Williams: Hello and welcome to the Flux Foreplay™ Conversations where we get the best ideas from all over the world about how to think about the future so that we get more of what we want and less of what we don’t want, whatever that is. And today our guest is Peter Atwater and we’ve invited him to talk to us about his mental model known as the confidence map. So over to you Peter, what is the confidence map?

Peter Atwater: So the confidence map is a way of looking at how our feelings impact what we do, what we want, the stories we tell. What I discovered in my work is that to be confident we need feelings of certainty and control. The world needs to feel predictable to us and we need to feel like we know what we’re doing in order to navigate that outcome. As I say, often it’s great that we know the road ahead but it’s helpful if we also know how to drive the car. So with those two feelings I’ve created this 2×2 box chart and if you think about it, put certainty on the bottom axis, on the x axis, and control on the y axis and create a box chart of 2×2. 

When we have high confidence and we feel certain and we feel in control that’s the upper right hand box. I call that the comfort zone. It tends to be where we’re relaxed, where things are easy for us. There’s a sense of fluency that comes with our behaviours and what we’re doing there and we like it. When we talk about being in our comfort zone that’s what we really mean. It’s a place where we feel certain and in control. 

The opposite environment is the stress centre. That’s where we feel powerless and uncertain. There’s feelings of intense vulnerability often go along with that. Why that box matters is that that’s where we’re anxious and with that anxiety we tend to focus on ourselves and what’s happening now as opposed to being generous with others. Often when we’re feeling stressed there’s scarcity and something that matters to us. It could be time, money, influence. It’s again where we feel vulnerable. When we think of confidence, those are the two boxes that we naturally think of but there are two other boxes where we spend a lot of our time. 

The lower right hand box where we have certainty but in control, I call that the passenger seat. Why? Because if you’ve been in an airplane or the passenger in a car hopefully you have certainty but you have absolutely no control. That’s an environment that can go from feeling comfortable one moment to feeling very stressful the next. I think it’s often helpful to think about the passenger seat as a prison because in fact prisons are environments of intense certainty and powerlessness and so if we’re there involuntarily we feel trapped. 

The last box is the launchpad. That’s where we have control but no certainty. If you think about the financial decisions in your life that’s where they’re all made. Whether you’re borrowing, lending, investing, the launchpad is where we make those choices and as a result those choices that we make are heavily influenced by our imagination of the future. When we’re optimistic and feeling positive we envision ourselves returning to the comfort zone when we make those choices and when we’re feeling doubtful or pessimistic we can imagine ourselves falling back into the stress centre. 

So one of the things we need to be very careful of when we’re in the launchpad is to not forget that our imagination of the future is a function not of the reality of that outcome or the probabilities of that outcome but it’s heavily influenced by our own level of confidence. So we want to be very careful and very mindful of the stories we’re telling ourselves because those stories have… they weigh very heavily on the choices we make when we’re in the launchpad. 

So that’s the framework that I use and I always think it’s helpful to know where we are because by self-assessing our feelings of certainty and control we can make better choices and not fall victim to the… the, the natural consequences that come with our location on the map. 

Bronwyn Williams: So why is it that you think that this mental model has achieved such success with the people that you have shared with? What is it that makes it understandable and actionable for people to get a handle on? 

Peter Atwater: Well it’s one of the first ways people have found to be able to visualise how they feel and being able to see where you are, particularly relative to other locations, helps you to realise how impactful those feelings of certainty and control are on us. And moreover if I know where I am I can naturally know what the stories are that I’m telling myself and these stories apply whether I’m in a personal situation, a professional situation, in business, if I’m dealing with others, if I know that others are in the stress centre, well then I know that they’re in me-here-now mode and so I need to change how I approach them in order to be resonant and relevant to where they are. So the location becomes a really important criteria in our preferences, decisions and actions. 

And certainty and control are actionable. I can always do something to feel more certain, to feel more in control. We often tell ourselves when we’re in the stress centre that asking for help is weakness and I would say that asking for help is taking control of the situation and in many ways getting more certainty as a result. So we should never hesitate when we’re feeling vulnerable to ask for help. 

Tumelo Mojapelo: Thank you so much. You mentioned about how we have… about certainty and control, about how we have the power to actually get somewhere with that,right, and I love, like, what you said about the quadrant, about how if you know where you’re located, you can get to another point. So if I had a situation in a stressful situation, how does this model help me consider long-term decisions, especially if you know, like, when you’re stressed you normally make decisions that help you out of a stressful situation? How would you apply this model to not only make the short-term decisions to get out of that situation but also flip it on its head and say I would like to maybe avoid the pitfalls maybe of short-term decisions that I’ve made or maybe actually just not just look around myself if that’s possible by the way? I’m just asking this question. How can I actually look past this point and a bit further? 

Peter Atwater: Yeah, so when we are in the stress centre we’re naturally inclined to avoid risk. When things already feel uncertain and we feel powerless we’re unwilling to take the risks that we should take and so by looking at that objectively we should know that rather than avoiding risk we should feel comfortable taking risks. It’s actually a place where the downside is far more limited than we realise. We already feel powerless, we already feel uncertain. So we tend to overemphasise all the things that could go wrong and to disregard the things that could go right and so we skew the probabilities of the outcome and so if I can just step back and say, oh I’m in the stress centre, that’s a place to take more risk and to ignore the voices in my head that are holding me back. By taking risk I’m going to improve my situation and that could be in the form of taking control of the situation or asking others for help but I need to set my stories aside and to realise that they are always going to be self-limiting. 

The place to take risk … I often joke that when we are panicked it’s God’s way of telling us the worst is behind us rather than ahead of us. We fear the fear that’s coming instead of realising that, oh no, the worst is behind us, we’re in the stress centre, there’s nowhere worse to go so it’s only up from here and whether it’s as an investor or just in life to appreciate that vulnerability is a way of realising that there’s much more upside and potential than we realise. 

Tumelo Mojapelo: I love that answer, that’s a really great response. Do you have any other questions Bronwyn? 

Bronwyn Williams: No I think that that’s pretty clear that action is the antidote to uncertainty and if you are curious with exploring this particular mental model further then we highly recommend that you get your hands on a copy of Peter’s book by the same title The Confidence Map and thank you so much for joining us on this really short 15 minute Foreplay™ conversation.

By Flux Trends

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