ATLANTIC INSTITUTE
CONVERSATIONS ON CONFIDENCE PODCAST SERIES

PODCAST 03 | LE NHAN PHUONG

Music Thoughts in G by Cheyenne Mize.

LN Phuong …the identity crisis, as I call it, that I went through was a major part of my life growing up here in the south-eastern US…You’re in the new country expecting to assimilate and expecting to be “American”.  There’s a huge conflict in that.  The tension between self and community.  The tension of who am I?  Am I American?  Am I Vietnamese?  It wasn’t until I started in my sophomore year in college that I made up my mind to apply for a volunteer position in the refugee camp in southeast Asia in the Philippines and spend the summer there that I recognised that there are other options than having to decide am I Vietnamese or am I American?  You can be both.  You can be neither.  You can be yourself.  

F Sweeney: Le Nhan Phuong, Executive Director of Equity Initiative, the Atlantic Fellows for Health Equity in Southeast Asia.  Born in Vietnam and sent to the US at a young age without his parents, Phuong had to quickly adapt to his new surroundings.

Welcome to CONVERSATIONS ON CONFIDENCE with clinical psychologist and neuroscientist Professor Ian Robertson from the Global Brain Health Institute in Dublin, and me, Fionnuala Sweeney.  Ian is the author of HOW CONFIDENCE WORKS: THE NEW SCIENCE OF SELF-BELIEF.  In this series, we speak to Fellows from the Global Atlantic community about the role of confidence (or lack of it) in their lives, both growing up, and in their work today as Atlantic Fellows advancing fairer, healthier, more inclusive societies.

The goal of Equity Initiative is to create a network of young leaders throughout ASEAN countries and China to work for the improvement of health equity in the region.  I began by asking Phuong what had drawn him to this kind of work:

LN Phuong: Well, for me, the emphasis on service to community.  Since my childhood coming to America, and throughout my life, I've been at the receiving end of so many goodwill, kindness that it's my way of paying it forward to do something with my life that I hope will help others.  I've been trained as a physician in general medicine and in paediatrics.  However, my passion is in working with people in the realm of public health and then lately with personal development for people who are in a position to impact the health of societies.

F Sweeney: You had an experience which saw you, not unlike many of your fellow countrymen and women, come to the United States.  Can you start at the beginning and tell us about where you were born and what life was like for you then?

LN Phuong: I was born in a coastal city of [Nha Trang] which is in Central Vietnam.  My father, who was in the military in South Vietnam at that time – the country was divided into north and south - my father passed away when I was very young.  When I was six months of age, he died from a car accident.  

I had a very chaotic childhood.  My mom, who’s a single mom now, had two other children, and had to fend for herself and provide for us in any way that she can.  So, we moved around a lot and I remember not really having a place where I can call home for any length of time.  Eventually my mother got better and better work, so she had to travel a lot so I was placed in a number of Catholic schools – we call it boarding school where I would stay for months at a time before I would see my mother and my sisters again.  For me that childhood was a period of growing up without my immediate family although I made a lot of friends in school.  

When I was about eight or nine years old, my mother remarried and so I was finally brought out of boarding school and in a family situation again which was great because that way I can see my other siblings and my parents.  

But then the war came to an end in 1975.  When that happened, it created another upheaval in our family.  My parents had been working for the Southern government as well as the US government at the time, and there’s this fear permeating throughout the country that if you have been involved with the Southern government or the Americans in any way your future’s not going to be very good, to say the least.  So, what my mother did was she looked for ways to try to protect her children.  So, she made the decision to split us up and myself and my younger sister – I was ten at the time, my sister was eight – were given away to the Catholic orphanage.  And she did it in a way that we were both given a new name, a new birth certificate, I suppose to protect us that should anything happen, we would be safe in her mind, and it would be difficult to trace back to the family again.  It was very traumatic for us obviously, but I was old enough to understand why she did what she did.  

Some of the orphanages, the children were being airlifted out and taken to America.  So, there was a hope that perhaps we would be one of those orphanages.  After a few days we were loaded on a military cargo plane and taken out of the country.  It's just my sister and myself on this trip.  I didn’t know what happened to the rest of my family until years later.  My sister and I, we were resettled in Portland, Oregon and were placed in temporary foster care.  So, because we were a brother and sister team and were slightly older than your average orphans, it was difficult for us to be adopted at the time.  And so we were placed in temporary care for up to three months at a time and we were moved from one family to the next, to the next.  

Almost a year later we were finally adopted by this very nice American family.  Everything was ready for us to be part of this wonderful family.  And then I got a phone call from my mother, from Atlanta, Georgia, which is across the country, saying that she would come and pick us up and we’ll be reunited with the family again.

F Sweeney: What was going through you and your sister’s minds at this time?  You were still kept together, is that correct, as you moved families?

LN Phuong: That’s right.  That first year in America was quite traumatic for me as a ten-year-old away from his family.  I lapsed into a period of major depression and when I received that phone call, my life changed instantly.  I was just really, really happy.  But we’d also developed a relationship with our foster care family who were about to adopt us.  And so, it was a bit of regret as well but certainly reunited with our family was something that was very fortunate for myself.

F Sweeney: Did you recognise that you were depressed or would you have even known that term?  Or was it just simply that you were very, very unhappy in a place where you were really straddling two cultures, coming from Vietnam to a very Western society?

LN Phuong: Well, I didn’t even know the word “depression” at the time, but I was very, very unhappy.  There were times when I would just cry for no reason.  Everything looked dark, dark and grey.  It didn’t help that in Portland, Oregon, in the northwest of the US, the weather is kind of grey most of the time too and so it doesn't help that when you walk outside everything is cloudy and grey as well.  So those were the times when I felt at my lowest.

F Sweeney: Your world changed overnight, as you’ve said, when your Mum made that phone call and said, out of the blue, “I'm in Atlanta, Georgia.”  How were the next few years for you then when you were reunited with her?

LN Phuong: We were so happy to be together again.  But growing up in [?], Georgia, which is a suburb outside of Atlanta, it wasn’t easy for us.  We were one of the very few Asian families at the time in that area and in our school, we were probably the only Asian kids.  

Fortunately, our combined family, that’s from my stepfather and my mother, there’s nine children altogether so we have a large family to fall back on and so I leaned a lot on my brother and sister to get me through these early years.  It was tough being an Asian kid in south-eastern US, going to school and kids can be pretty mean to each other at times, and especially when you’re different.  So, for me my source of strength was my family and my brother and sisters.  And, of course, the teachers in the school were wonderful.  They gave us all the help that we needed in terms of language training, in terms of making us feel comfortable fitting in and all that.  But it was a growing and adapting period for me.

F Sweeney: This is where I'd like to bring in Ian.  Presumably there was something happening to Phuong in terms of the processes that were taking place in his mind about having some kind of stability, but also realising he was sort of out of place as well?

I Robertson: Yeah, Phuong, what an amazing story and what a tumultuous childhood you had.  Even before you went to America you were moving house and your Dad died.  Now you wouldn’t be aware of your Dad dying then but any one of these things would be a challenge for someone.  And then possibly a feeling of abandonment when you went into the orphanage?  Even though you did rationally understand your mother’s totally sensible reasons for doing it, you couldn’t have helped but feel a bit abandoned I'm guessing.  Is that right?

LN Phuong: Yes and no.  I understood the reason why.  I think my mother did a great job in explaining to us.  My difficulty in accepting it, especially when I was in the US without my family, the first few months in the US, was that I would start losing the image of my mother in my mind.  It created a sense of guilt.  You shouldn’t forget your mother!  You shouldn’t forget what your mother looks like.  But without seeing her, without being around her and you start to say, “I wonder what she looks like now?”  There was a time when I actually thought that I had forgotten what she looked like.  And to me that create a huge sense of guilt and again, the depression spiral, spiral downward with that as well.  So, it was a difficult adjustment period for me.

F Sweeney: And would you say at this time that you were confident while you were in school?  Would you describe yourself as a confident teenager?

LN Phuong: I’ve never thought of myself as a confident child.  I'm in the middle of a river, where the river takes you wherever it takes you.  For me that was the feeling.  I was just drifting along.  Now the thing that actually ground me and allowed me to claim a bit of self was in my ability to do math.  Math is something that I found that I excelled early on when I was a child in school in Vietnam.  And for me when I came to America my ability to do math was on par, if not better, than my peers.  And so, I grasped onto that as something that I can be confident about, that I can do something about, that I can be good at.  Throughout my childhood that was something that I grasped onto, math and then eventually academic excellence, because I felt that if I can do that then I can be more confident in other things, it spread into other things.

F Sweeney: So what was taking place there, Ian, do you think?

I Robertson: Well, what does confidence mean?  It means we have a belief about our ability to create a future state of the world that we want, that suits us, and a belief that if we create that state then good things will happen.  But what strikes me, Phuong, in the way you’re talking, your faith in your ability to create a future state of the world that made sense to you must have been taking a big beating because of events stripping you of control so much of the time.  I mean, even your Mum coming back.  That just came out of the blue after a year and it was delightful, but it must have been hard for you to feel in command, if you like, of your destiny.

LN Phuong: You’re absolutely right.  There was a sense of regret when we’d actually reunited with our parents in that I had planned and invested myself to be a member of this new family.  Even though I reunited with my parents my sense of control was also being tested because I can't do anything about that.  There was a recognition I suppose early on in my part that there are things that you can do, and there are things that you just can't do.  So, that’s why I started to turn inward and said, OK, what am I good at?  If I can't go in for the big things, what small thing can I do?  And then what are the small steps?  And then it was throwing myself into the academics, throwing myself into math, do things I can be good at, be better at.

I Robertson: And regaining a slight feeling of control.  You could control very few other things in your life at the time, but you could control your performance in the tests and the exams.  And control’s central to feeling confident.  If you feel out of control, it's very difficult to feel confident about the future.  And if you don't feel confident about the future, the risk is you feel despairing about the future.  I think you were feeling a bit despairing in that year in Portland, the way you described it, that sense of hopelessness I guess about the future because you felt you just had no control over it.  Is that right?

LN Phuong: That’s absolutely correct, Ian.  I tap into that often when I work with young people.  I felt that I can empathise with people who are falling into hopelessness because I've been there.  That feeling’s still around and so I was able to tap into that to try to help them.

I Robertson: Yes, I imagine there’s a constant battle because to have these tough experiences, and many repeated and different tough experiences early in life, you’re going to have to relive these from time to time in dreams or in other settings.

LN Phuong: You’re right.  Actually, when you mentioned dreams, I think many people have similar dreams especially when they lose control, is that when you’re falling, that feeling of falling through air and not being able to do anything about.  That occur a lot, especially during my childhood.

I Robertson: I guess it becomes a life’s work to create meaning and to deal with these feelings and the hopelessness that comes with them.  The work you’re doing in the Atlantic Fellows Programme is part of that work and you’re doing, as Viktor Frankl did, to realise that the most awful circumstances people are in there is always a capacity to – as a conscious human being - to engage in the existential task of forging, quite deliberately, a purpose and meaning in what you're doing.  

And that has two purposes in you.  One is to do good for the other young people you see and other people who have suffered things similar to what you did.  But also, to help you in your battle of these enemies of confidence, if you like, of enemies of wellbeing which are lapsing into these feelings that you had when you were a 10-year-old.  

LN Phuong: One of the things that I recognised early on is you can experience traumatic things and you can experience unwanted things.  But I think it matters more if you’re allowing it to control you or you take ownership of it and really ask yourself the question, what can I learn from this?  How can I take this experience and go forward?  For me it's a healthy way of dealing with setbacks because I've had many setbacks throughout my life.  And these setbacks, you can let it beat you down or you can use it and say, “Well, you know what, this is a new experience.  I can use this going forward.”  And you never know what that experience will be used for in the future.  But having it, and knowing it, and being through it I think helped me to be a better person today than I can be without it.  So, in a way I'm very grateful for it.

I Robertson: Well, tough times can strengthen people if they adopt the kind of attitude to them and way of processing that you've just described, Phuong, but also one of the greatest sources of confidence is mastering adversity.  Now I know you say you've never considered yourself a confident person, but I've seen you on stage, reading meditations.  I've seen you, in your quiet way, really communicating a wonderful leaderly confidence.  I have to believe that in part the fact that you have triumphed, and if you like, harnessed some of these bad experiences to learn from them and to improve what you’re doing has to have built a certain kind of resilience that some of us might call confidence.  Is that right?

LN Phuong: I think you’re correct there in that, up until we spoke a few weeks ago, I never thought myself as a confident person at all.  But looking back, if confidence is the ability to take actions, then I think it applies to me.  For me I visualise what can I do, what’s the action I should take?  I get nervous just like everyone else on stage and beforehand and everything.  But if you can visualise what is the worst that can happen and what’s likely to happen and go through your mind and really imagine what success will be like, or you know what failure would look like, and you prepare for it I think taking the actions actually becomes a cathartic thing.  You actually go through it and actualise it.  So, for me that’s how I approach things.

I Robertson: Well, you've captured confidence because confidence is linked to action which makes it different from optimism, from self-esteem; it's this ability to get you to take action which then changes the world a little bit and therefore changes you a little bit so, yeah, you've captured it completely.

F Sweeney: What is that ability to take control that Phuong demonstrated that contributed to how confidence works?  Does confidence envisage something before the action?

I Robertson: Yes, so confidence – two parts to it.  There’s the “can do” – “Yes, I can do that.” And then the “can happen – “If I do that then the thing I want is going to happen.”  Now as far as I can understand it, Phuong, you’re reunited with your Mum and your siblings but there are a whole lot of other siblings there.  Suddenly you’re a big family; you’re in a strange environment.  You’re maybe having tough times with some of the kids at school, and what you do?  You say, look, I'm good at maths.  And you create a goal for yourself that doesn't stop the anxiety, doesn't stop the hurt.  But it gives you this target in the future, which is you’re going to get a little better at maths.  It's that ability to set achievable goals that stretch you a bit but are within your capacities, and the little sense of success you get from achieving these goals acts in the brain like a mini anti-depressant and a mini anti-anxiety drug.  

So, if someone in dark times can locate in any realm - for you it was maths and then more generally scholastically - if you can just set yourself goals and gradually achieve them that is probably the single most important thing one can do to regain confidence in times like that.

LN Phuong: As you mentioned that, there is another factor I think that helped me tremendously.  It was the words of encouragement from my teacher in grade school at that time who recognised what I can do and what I can't do and then also helped me to train my focus on the things that I'm good at. Without them encouraging and without them giving feedback I wouldn’t have stumbled on it.  The kindness that they’ve shown to me in helping me through those periods by encouraging me to focus on what I'm good at and help me even become better in it, were I think seminal events in my early childhood that helped me to overcome many of these things.

I Robertson: So, that teacher who helped you discover the goal that you could then work at to build your sense of momentum – yeah, absolutely.  All of us need to feel held in someone’s mind at least part of the time, particularly when it comes to knowing whether something we're doing, whether we're good at it or not.  It's hard for a child to have that certainty themselves.  So, having a teacher or an adult, someone who can just validate, “Yeah, you’re good at this.  This is worth your doing.”

F Sweeney: So, from that point, Phuong, where you discovered that you could excel at maths and that helped give you confidence by being able to attain a realistic goal, did that solve your traumatic issues or the uncertainty that you'd experienced?  Or did it mark a steppingstone to becoming the person you were about to become?  If so, how did that transformation take place?

LN Phuong: I think it was a steppingstone process.  I didn’t wake up one day and say, “Wow, I've got it solved!” at all.  Only looking back reflectively I can see that my success, what I've attained many times are not just me.  Yes, I put in the effort, and I did this, but it was because I had so much help along the way.  This started to come out when I was in college and later professionally, to say, “You know what?  I made it this far because there’s so many people around me to help me get there.”

F Sweeney: And did the bad dreams go away?

LN Phuong: It become less.  Early on it was very frequent.  But now it’s gotten less and less as I come into the realisation of what I can do and where I'm taking this going forward.  

Helping others in their moment of crisis with their difficulties to overcome these, I think is my way of saying thank you to the world, to society, and this must be my reason for being.  Why would I have gone through all these things, coming out the other end so well?  It give me a sense of purpose, and that sense of purpose carry me through the second half of my life from my early 20s to now.

F Sweeney: You talked earlier about sometimes still being anxious about public speaking and that relates to the fear of failure and what others might think of us.  Was there a moment when you’d made the transition from being concerned about external perceptions of you to your own internal choices that you wanted to make about who you were and how you wanted to live your life?

LN Phuong: For me the anxiety is still there but it was worse before I entered college.  And during my college time, this is where I'm beginning to overcome many of these things, mainly because I discover ways that I can overcome the anxiety by just practising ahead of time, by visualisation, by using techniques to overcome the immediate anxiety part.  

Now as a member of the Asian community and the Vietnamese community saving face and then not looking foolish in front of people is still a very strong part of me.  So, I continue to feel that anxiety, but less and less so now that I know how to control it better.  

The other aspect of it is, why am I doing this?  Even if I fall flat on my face, I often think is the risk worth the reward?  And the reward is doing what I believe in, doing something that’s consistent with my core values.  And so, when I put it that way, I'm willing to take the risk of falling flat on my face and being embarrassed and just go for it.  And so that’s something that allow me to go over the hump and just go forward rather than letting the anxiety hold me back.

F Sweeney: What is happening there, Ian, in the sense of values almost contributing more to confidence than happiness might?

I Robertson: So, when we locate ourself in our values we’re part of something bigger than ourselves and it's not all about me and my ego.  It's me as a vehicle for something bigger and more important than myself.  And that is a tremendous source of strength and it's also a tremendous source of protection against a sense of shame or humiliation or failure.  Also, because values are eternal, or at least much longer lasting than any one human life, it gives you a sense of extension in time and space, exactly the kind of protection and willingness to just take that step that Phuong was describing there.  

The Atlantic Fellowship programmes, they’re all grounded in, explicitly in values.  And I think that our values are solid foundations for confidence.  And if we learn the habit of bringing these values to mind at times when we're feeling low or feeling as if we're not getting anywhere or feeling as if people are mocking us or thinking badly of us, these values will allow us to sustain that confidence.

And you’re right, we can have our values and we can have that sense of just getting on with it even in spite of maybe not feeling that happy, or even in spite of feeling anxious because values help us take the actions and feel right about these actions.  And as we’ve heard from Phuong so magnificently, taking action is just a critical way of developing confidence and developing our particular path in delivering on the values in the world we live in.    

F Sweeney: We’ve talked very much about the individual sense of confidence.  And presumably growing up in America, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but there might have been an identity issue which most teenagers have.  But you were living in southeast America.  You were Asian living in a suburb of Atlanta.  Did you find any tension there between the identity or the values of your family and that collective sense of values and of American values where Americans see that individual success leads to greater success for more people?

LN Phuong: I'm glad you brought this up because the identity crisis, as I call it, that I went through was a major part of my life growing up here in the south-eastern US.  I think I speak for many immigrants who come to the US, especially as children growing up here, and then my parents or the older generation in the community of immigrants still hold a certain value of the old country.  You’re in the new country expecting to assimilate and expecting to be “American”.  There’s a huge conflict in that between the communal value versus the individualism value and it's played out every day in our lives.  It played out with me.  It played out in my siblings.  Several of my siblings became very rebellious because they see one thing when they go to school.  They come home; they’re expected to be another.  And so for us that was an important process that we had to go through.  

Personally, I dealt with it most when I was in college, the tension between self and community.  The tension of who am I?  Am I American?  Am I Vietnamese?  It wasn’t until I started in my sophomore year in college that I made up my mind to apply for a volunteer position in the refugee camp in southeast Asia in the Philippines and spend the summer there that I recognised that there are other options than having to decide am I Vietnamese or am I American?  You can be both.  You can be neither.  You can be yourself.  For me the act of going on my own to the camp and seeing for myself, learning things for myself, make decisions for myself, come to the conclusion on my own, allows me to say, “This is who I am, and the other thing doesn't matter so much anymore.”

That would be the light switch moment for me – to come back from my experience in the camp and say, “This is who I am and here are some of the values that I'm beginning to clarify for myself.  I'm a person.  I'm not a country.  I'm not an ethnicity.”

F Sweeney: So, coming back from that refugee camp in Vietnam was a light bulb moment for Phuong and his values and who he is as a person.  That’s another example of action overcoming adversity, Ian?

I Robertson: It is.  And the greatest source of stress as measured by how much cortisol the stress hormone that our bodies secretes, the greatest source of stress that people encounter is not fear of death, it's not injury, it's not illness; it's the fear of the negative evaluation of other people.  We're a group species and we're genetically wired to fear being expelled from the group because being expelled from the group in evolutionary terms meant death or abandonment.  

And to be released from that fear that other people will think badly of you, to feel grounded in your path, in your values, as Phuong was saying, “That’s who I am.  That’s what I do.”  And it doesn't depend on anyone else what they think of you.  There’s no-one going to say, “Are you doing that badly, are you doing that well?  This is who I am.”  That is the most incredible liberation, and it sounds as if it was a liberation for you, Phuong?

LN Phuong: It was.  It was.  Definitely.  As I said, if there was a light switch moment, I would say that would be it for me.

I Robertson: And then the freedom that gives you.  You spent the early part of your life, Phuong, being just buffeted by circumstances that were out of your control, and then you gradually regained that sense of control through your academic achievement and then in other ways.

But if we're concerned with what other people think of us, if we're worried people might think badly of us or might criticise us, that’s another form of not being in control of one’s destiny and another source of immense anxiety.

So, if you can do as you did, which is secure yourself in a set of values and in a path, and in a sense of yourself, it doesn't matter whether you’re Vietnamese or American or both or none!  You are who you are, and you do what you do.  The release from anxiety that that produces given that negative valuation of other people, the fear of it, is the greatest source of anxiety, that release from anxiety is an enormous fuel for confidence because anxiety’s the greatest corrosive of confidence and confidence is the greatest antidote to anxiety.  

And even though you still have anxiety, the fact that you’re not too bothered what others think as long as you are true to your values, that is an incredible source of confidence for anyone.

F Sweeney: Are we talking here, Phuong, about an external projection of confidence on your part?  I don't think so.  It seems to me that you could be the quietest person in the room but still be confident because of the value system you have?

LN Phuong: Yes.  In the past I've often equated confidence with being the external show of no fear.  But understanding it now, I think for me it's really about the internal confidence.  And it helps me in my dealing with young people who are also sometimes not sure of themselves or what we would call lacking confidence but outwardly they may appear to be the most resolute people.  

So, using this knowledge allows me to be able to address the issues with our Fellows and help them not only being able to express confidence outwardly and then take the action but also be grounded in who they are, recognising their values and identity in a way that strengthen them and take them even further than they would have otherwise.

F Sweeney: And in terms of being Vietnamese as well as growing up in America, is there a difference in how confidence expresses itself between both cultures?

LN Phuong: I think so.  As with most Asian cultures, the cultural expectation is you don't try to stand out.  You don't try to be individualistic.  But rather you have to take into account the welfare of the community, of the family, of the country.  So, there’s a balance in that.

But I find, especially when I come back to Vietnam and interact with many of my countrymen there, people are more reticent to step out.  I do a lot of coaching with my Fellows, and then many of my Asian Fellows and Vietnamese as well, they are hesitant to put a lot of importance of their own welfare, of their own needs and wants.  Instead they try to focus more on the family, on the community, in a way that sometime I think it's actually not helping them very well and so it creates a bit of a tension.

F Sweeney: Why would it not help?

LN Phuong: Well, I think if you’re going to serve others, I think you need to pay attention to your own needs as well.  If you don't do that, you can't serve others very well.  That’s the central thesis of my work with my Fellows: you have to take care of yourself if you want to take care of others.

F Sweeney: Ian, presumably you would agree with that?  And I'm just wondering then about the balance between collective confidence, individual confidence and where the ego and self-esteem plays into this?

I Robertson: It's not just between Asian and Western cultures you get this difference.  You even get it within China, between the traditionally wheat-growing and the traditionally rice-growing parts of China.  With rice-growing being a more communal activity, a more collectivist mind-set predominates in southern parts of China and the more individualistic one in northern parts and this has a huge range of consequences.  

The thing about the ego and individual confidence is very much about the belief in yourself and the ego to be able to do x, y or z.  It's quite a useful thing because it motivates people to do stuff, to take action.  And, yes, part of that’s for egotistical reasons but it can also be for the wider benefit.  So, for instance you get more patents, more innovation in more individualistic parts of China than you do in the more collectivist parts.  You’ve also got higher divorce rates in the more individualistic compared to the more collectivist ones.  There’s all sorts of differences in thinking and emotions and social relations between these two areas.

There are pros and cons of both of these types of confidence, if you like – the collective confidence in us that we can do that, and the sometimes-creative individual confidence that I can do that.  So interesting, someone like you, Phuong, you’re able to straddle these two cultures and I'm sure see the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches as you've just outlined in terms of the collectivist mind-set leading people to neglect their own needs.  And the thing is if you don't feel in control of your own emotions, it's very hard to be confident and very hard to for you to be an inspiring leader.  So, to an extent, neglect of one’s own wellbeing and emotional state is not a particularly healthy thing.

So, I think what we need for leadership in facing up to the world’s problems just now is some synthesis of the best of the more individualistic ego-driven confidence of the more individualistic cultures, and the more empowering collective confidence, which protects the ego because it's collective and the individual ego doesn't feel as threatened.  I think we need some combination of these to face up to some of the challenges that you and your team and ourselves at the Global Brain Health Institute are facing up to, Phuong.

LN Phuong: Totally agree.  Totally agree.  More and more I recognise the value in that.  And ultimately, I think it all comes back to the underlying core values that you hold dear and how can you be in service to that value.  What can you do to be in service of that value is what give you the confidence to move forward and then to do the things that may at first seem contrary to what the culture or the situation dictates.

F Sweeney: Phuong, you’ve obviously gone through a very reflective process and continue to do so.  I just wonder what both you and Ian think of happiness in relation to confidence, and whether it's a goal in itself, an end in itself, or simply a by-product of having confidence that’s based on values?

I Robertson: Can I just say that happy people are more confident and confident people are happier - on average.  But that happiness as a goal is an elusive one.  It comes as a by-product of achieving other goals.  There is eudemonic happiness and there is hedonic happiness.  There’s the one that’s to do with purpose and meaning and value and the one that’s to do with pleasure.  And for sure the seeking of pleasure as a goal in itself, because of the hedonic treadmill and other phenomenon, is a fool’s errand.  The searching for happiness in terms of meaning and purpose, in terms of purposeful action of the type that Phuong has described doing, that is, for sure, a worthy goal.

LN Phuong: For me I use happiness in a very narrow sense, in terms of, “Am I happy right now?”  And I guess that’s a short-term use of the word.  More and more I use now the word “wellbeing.”  I think it better describes a future-oriented or a long-term condition that we would call “happiness” or what people are seeking for.  And then for me it's actually a number of things that contributes.  Certainly, the attitude, positive attitude of what we call happiness normally, the relationship-building that we have, the sense of accomplishment and the sense of engagement that we can have in our day-to-day activities.  Those are all things that contribute to this wellbeing, I like to think.  And, of course, what is the meaning?  And it comes back to values.  What would give us meaning in our lives?  That to me is what we usually call happiness that I tend to use the word wellbeing for.

Music Thoughts in G by Cheyenne Mize.

F Sweeney: Le Nhan Phuong, Executive Director of Equity Initiative, bringing us to the end of today’s CONVERSATION.

For more CONVERSATIONS ON CONFIDENCE, go to our website at www.atlanticfellows.org.  Here you can also learn more about the seven Atlantic Fellows programs empowering emerging leaders to advance fairer, healthier, more inclusive societies.  

I’m Fionnuala Sweeney. Thank you for listening.  I do hope you will join Ian and me for our next CONVERSATION with environmental activist Abraham Freeman, Atlantic Fellow for Health Equity US & Global.

                          ENDS | DURATION: 34’ 39

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