Allen & Unwin Confidence book English Paperback 240 pages

This startling re-evaluation of the role of self-belief in success explores why increasing your confidence is less important than building your competence. Now available in paperback.

We're told that the key to success in life and business is confidence: believe in yourself, and the world is yours. But building confidence can be a challenging task. And, as leading psychologist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic argues, confidence can actually get in the way of achievement; self-esteem is nothing without competence, the core skills, to back it up.Confidence is feeling capable. Competence is being capable. None of the figures whose success is put down to supreme self-belief, Barack Obama, Madonna, Muhammad Ali could have achieved their goals without the hard-won skills (and years of training) behind the confidence mask. Successful people are confident because of their success, and not the other way around. Whether you want to improve your social skills, get a promotion or that all-important first job, this game-changing exploration of how to build success, in the mould of Robert Cialdini's Influence, Susan Cain's Quiet and Steven Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, will change the way you think about achievement.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is professor of Business Psychology at University College London (UCL) and visiting professor at New York University. He is the author of six books and writes regular blogs for Harvard Business Review and Psychology Today. He lives in London and New York, and frequently appears in the media. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic has been named one of Thinkers50 next generation of business gurus, 'most likely to shape the future of how organisations are managed and led'. You can learn more about Tomas on his website www.drtomascp.com/