Barry Kerzin shares a lesson for developing healthy self-confidence:

There’s a kind of mindfulness we teach that’s dropping into the present moment at will. I call it mindfulness with a capital M. There’s a lot of healing and a lot of joy in that; and a lot of love and compassion and wisdom that happens in the present moment.

When you notice you’re in a put-down mood—either putting yourself down or putting someone else down, then you say, “Okay, I need to be practicing healthy self-confidence. So how do I get there?”

One tool we teach, for imposter syndrome, is letting people know: You don’t own that feeling. When you were a kid, most likely, it was imposed upon you somehow. And you heard it a number of times—for instance: “You’re a girl, you can’t do that.” Or, “You’re not very smart, very handsome or pretty.” “You’re not very agile.” And you heard this again and again, and you started to adopt it as your own attitude toward yourself. So we tell people, “You have every right to get rid of that feeling, as it was imposed on you.”

So you allow these thoughts or feelings to come up—maybe, thinking you’re not good enough. And you train yourself not to react. You just observe it. And by just observing it, you don’t give it the spotlight. And that feeling of not being good enough is kind of narcissistic. It needs a lot of attention. If you don’t give it, over time, the feeling will weaken and eventually go away.

That won’t happen in one day, of course. It’s ingrained. But if you’re persistent, and you don’t give it the spotlight, it’ll become less and less of an influence and powerful.

Or maybe you notice that you’re arrogant. You’re feeling better than others. You’re feeling you know everything. There are pitfalls with that, such as you lose all your genuine friends, because no one likes to be put down.

You’re also feeling that you know everything—so you don’t read, you don’t grow. When you’re in a conversation with someone, you’re not listening. You’re actually forming your next words that you’re going to speak, because you think you know best.

It’s like being shackled, like being in solitary confinement.

So you remember the pitfalls of arrogance, and that will help you become more humble.

And in terms of putting yourself down, you move toward healthy self-confidence. In terms of putting others down, you move toward humility.  

Read more about Pitt Med's efforts to help med students attend to their minds so they can better attend to patients in our cover story. 

Read more from the Fall 2023 issue.