What inspired your latest book, Happy High Status, and what did you learn from the research process?

‘Happy high status’ was a term I came across when I first started moving from journalism to stand up comedy about 15 years ago.

The world of comedy is very exposing and very intimidating in a lot of ways, especially when you're new to it and you don't know what you're doing. I was completely fascinated by how some people seem to be effortlessly themselves, even in a very harsh spotlight, and some people really struggle. Often when you see comedians being interviewed, you'll see there's quite a marked difference between their off-stage persona and their on-stage persona. 

So I was really interested in the projection of confidence under pressure, and I came across this expression, ‘happy high status.’ It comes from the world of improvisational comedy, where you are going on stage without a script. In these situations, you're always working in a team, as people don't tend to do very much improv on their own. Within that team, you use your projection of status as a way of signaling to other people on stage who you are and what you expect to happen next. 

So when you go on stage, you adopt a ‘high status’ or a ‘low status’. In crude terms, you could walk on and show everybody that you're the king, or you walk on and you show everybody that you're a very strict teacher, or perhaps you're the supply teacher who's really hopeless. So you're adopting space positions to signal who you are to other people on stage, so that they understand what they're working with. 

In a wider context, whenever we see someone come into a room or come on stage; when we watch anything on screen - whether it's drama or real life - we are constantly judging somebody's status. Are they high status? Are they low status? Does the status that they have in life match who they are inside their own heads? We all know people who are very high status, but actually have an inferiority complex and can't quite live up to the title on their business card. 

So ‘happy high status’ is a way of being in between; it's being neutral. It's not trying to be the most important person in the room or the least important person in the room. It's about standing right in the middle and saying, ‘I'm not going to impose my ideas on you, but I'm not going to defer to you either. I'm going to wait and see what's needed in this interaction.’

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Confidence seems to be such an elusive thing - what were some of the key discoveries that informed the direction of the book?

I would say that ‘happy high status’ is a kind of neutral confidence that is very positive but without pushing positivity in people's faces. It's very difficult to explain, but once you understand what it is and you start to see it in other people, it's very powerful.

It’s a form of confidence that allows us to sidestep all of the social and cultural messages that we've had from childhood about confidence, which are often very intimidating. A lot of people have negative connotations around confidence because they've been told as a child to ‘just be more confident.’ Alongside this, we often hear a contradictory message: ‘he’s very confident, he's full of himself.’

So our relationship with the word ‘confidence’ is often very negative. I really experimented a lot with this when I was first performing comedy, because especially as a woman, you don’t want to come across as ‘too confident’. But equally, you don't want people to think you’re terrified. So it's a way of trying to sit in the middle of these things. What I love about it is that it's very personal. Happy high status looks very different for all of us. Think about your friends: who are they when they're at their most relaxed, comfortable energy? That’s what you might call confidence. For some people, this might mean being quite quiet and just listening. For other people, it would be playing the clown and entertaining everyone. 

I think often we have a stereotype of confidence; we assume that it’s about being the loudest voice in the room. It really doesn't mean that at all. It means being the most comfortable version of yourself. 

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How much of what you learned as a comedian is brought into your public speaking? 

A lot of the business of understanding high level performance and moments where you're under extreme pressure involve very contradictory ideas. 

I learned about this from the beginning in comedy. I had a gig that went really badly so I asked another comedian what I could do to improve. He thought about it for a while and then said ‘just be funny.’ 

This is the same as people telling you to just relax and be yourself when you have something stressful coming up. You think, well, if I could just be myself, I wouldn’t be feeling like this and in any case, what is ‘myself’? What does that look like?

So the advice is often very contradictory, because we're telling people, you must be prepared, don't leave it to chance. Then on the other hand, we’re telling them, you must be relaxed and spontaneous. You must be yourself. 

It’s only the people who are really deeply experienced at doing this who do it very well. I was watching Michelle Obama this morning and she's one of the people who does this with absolute expertise. She is incredibly relaxed and informal, full of intimacy and vulnerability. Yet she’s talking about something very formal, very political, very direct, full of hard facts and data. She’s able to combine all these different elements in one four minute speech. 

It's very difficult to incorporate all of these things, but I think it's really important that we talk about it and that we encourage people to do the work, because ultimately, it's great to listen to other people's thoughts and get tips and advice, but really there is no substitute for experience. 

Ultimately, the only way you get good at this is by doing it - and often doing it badly.

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Where do you think Imposter Syndrome comes from? Can we reframe it in any way or use elements of it to our advantage?

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Imposter syndrome is probably one of the most talked-about topics when it comes to women and confidence. I published How to Own the Room in 2018 and at that time, this topic wasn’t coming up much, within a year it started to trickle down and now there's usually a question on it at every single event that I do. 

I'm very disturbed by how easily people parrot this expression, ‘Imposter Syndrome’. 

There's been a lot of good journalism on this in the last year. Probably the best is Leslie Jameson's article in The New Yorker, where she traces the origin of the phrase. There’s one origin: a 1970s study of first generation University undergraduates in the US [all women or from minority backgrounds]. They used the word ‘imposter’ [to describe how they felt in the university setting], so the authors of this study started to use the phrase ‘Imposter Syndrome’. Now of course, you can hear from the context that they're not imposters, but it just so happens that in the situation that they found themselves in, because they were the first and or the only, they felt really uncomfortable. 

So it's really interesting that this very specific scenario has translated itself 50 years later to mean any feeling of self doubt or insecurity. 

People seem to be ascribing this to themselves and to something lacking inside them, rather than ascribing it to the context. Because often, if you dig down into why you feel like you have Imposter Syndrome, it is due to external factors. It could be that you’re being bullied or undermined. You could be working in a culture where there's no support. 

So for me, it's a real sign of people's tendency - and especially women's tendency - to internalise problems that they actually can't control often or influence. 

It's a really fascinating phenomenon that everyone wants to talk about, and people clearly identify with it, or whatever they think it is. However, I think when people talk about it, they're often talking about very different things, and we need to isolate what those things are.

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‍Do you think this ties into the wider issue of how women are expected to ‘do the work’ to solve inequality (for example by working on their confidence) when the focus should be on the systemic inequalities and barriers that hold them back? 

Yes absolutely. I'm fascinated by this whole question of the balance between internal and external. 

I think about it a lot in the context of public speaking, because a lot of people's issues with public speaking are to do with their internal narrative, rather than what other people can actually see. We're very good at controlling what other people can see, and we're very good at knowing what we are supposed to do. There is actually very little you can teach people about the externals of public speaking that most educated adults don't already know. 

People should be asking themselves, why do you think that you come across in a certain way? Why are you telling yourself that you look nervous or you sound nervous or you feel uncertain? That’s the interesting question, and that does tie in with this whole question of, how do we move forward certain underrepresented factors in society? That's something that we've been grappling with more than 50 years now. I believe [this lack of movement] is partly because we don't often differentiate between these internal and external factors. 

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