Word Meds: Flannery O'Connor on Motivation

"I must force my loose mind into its overalls and get going." —author Flannery O'Connor (above), writing in her journal on February 2, 1944. In a previous journal entry, she'd written: “I must do do do and yet there is the brick wall that I must kick over stone by stone. It is I who have built the wall and I who must tear it down.” 

Seems appropriate for a November morning, an overcast one here in New York City. The day is already slipping by, it's hard to get a kick-start, and much remains to be done before the kids get home from school. 

O'Connor's battles with motivation, and the crisis of confidence underlying those struggles, are the subject of a new piece about her in The Atlantic, in conjunction with the first-time-ever publication of her 1943-44 journal in the current issue of Image magazine. O'Connor, who would go on to win literary fame during her short life (she died at 39) with novels and short stories including A Good Man Is Hard to Find, was 18 at the time she wrote the overalls quote in her journal. But her struggles to get going are ageless and timeless.

On the subject of self-confidence and how it ties into achievement and motivation, particularly for women, it's also worth checking out this previous Atlantic piece, The Confidence Gap. The article takes a deeper dive into the insidious crises of confidence that plague most women regardless of talent, intelligence, qualifications, or age.

"Men consistently overestimated their abilities and subsequent performance [and] women routinely underestimated both. The actual performances did not differ in quality," according to studies mentioned by The Atlantic's writers Claire Shipman and Katty Kay. That self-underestimation is a significant part of the reason why women are underrepresented in the top ranks of most professions and companies. 

Is the so-called "mommy track" another reason why women often go missing? Does having kids, whether that's in our 20s or 30s or 40s, mean losing that extra drive and impetus to do and achieve and climb? For some, yes, but that's only one part of the story. Ultimately, it all comes back to confidence. "Some observers say children change our priorities, and there is some truth in this claim. Maternal instincts do contribute to a complicated emotional tug between home and work lives, a tug that, at least for now, isn’t as fierce for most men," Shipman and Kay note. "But these explanations for a continued failure to break the glass ceiling are missing something more basic: women’s acute lack of confidence."

Luckily, that aw-shucks-not-me attitude isn't hard-wired. There's hope for rewiring our brains, and for pointing the way for our daughters to learn confidence early on: "We can make our brains more confidence-prone," Kay and Shipman write. They offer some ideas about what this means—including less perfectionism, less overthinking, and more just let's-do-this— in the Atlantic article and in the book that prompted it, The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance and What Women Should Know.

For now, on a lighter note: Have a sunshiny day. The gray clouds in the Brooklyn sky are already pushing away.

Flannery O'Connor photo by CMacauley via Wikimedia Commons.