often leaving Madeline in tears. She hated crying because the other kids would call her a baby when
she did. Scaredness seemed to like this and got Madeline so worried that some of her hair started to
fall out.
The worst place to be was on the school bus. That was where she got teased the most. Scared-
ness had Madeline so worried about catching the bus that her mom had to start picking her up from
school.
Madeline wanted to do something about how Scaredness was messing up her life and stopping
her from having fun. She started watching how Scaredness worked in her life and found things started
to get better. One thing she worked out was that Scaredness was most strong in the mornings. This
was because Confidence was a bit lazy and liked to sleep in!
With the help of Mom, Madeline learned to remember not to walk out of the house without
waking Confidence up first. This was a really smart move, and pretty soon things started to get bet-
ter. It was not that people stopped being mean, although that did get better, too; it was that Scared-
ness and Sadness couldn’t use other kids’ meanness to upset Madeline so much with Confidence there
to protect her.
What Madeline started to notice was that when a girl who had been nasty before called Made-
line over on the playground, Scaredness’s trick was to whisper in her ear, “Uh oh, she’s going to bully
you,” and Madeline would feel frightened. But as Confidence started to be more awake it would talk
in her other ear and say: “It’s okay. You can be strong. You can handle this.”
With Confidence around, Madeline began to discover that often there wasn’t a problem there at
all. The girl actually wanted to be nice, and Scaredness was tricking her. This was not always how it
was. Some girls could still say mean things sometimes, but, by listening to Confidence (“You are
okay. Remind yourself of the nice things about you.”) Madeline was able to stand up for herself.
Pretty soon Madeline felt ready to catch the bus again, but, because this took a lot of courage,
she thought it was important to make some big friends so that she would feel safer. These big girls,
in more senior years, all promised to say hello to Madeline when they saw her on the bus. It was great
to have a whole lot of “big sisters” looking out for her. Madeline felt so confident that one day she
even got mad at a girl who was mean to one of her friends.
Madeline figured out that Scaredness was also making her feel worried about schoolwork.
Scaredness was whispering in her ear that she’d got everything wrong and that she would get into
trouble. It made her feel bad when she took longer to get her work finished than the other kids. In
fact, Scaredness was really pushing and shoving her around in the classroom. This was especially true
in math, but also sometimes when she was doing harder work in English. Scaredness would get her
so worried that she would feel sick, or need to go to the toilet, or need to get a drink so she could
get out of the classroom for a while.
When this happened, Madeline realized she needed to wake up Confidence here in the class-
room, too. She understood how anyone could doze off in some lessons. Confidence helped her to
feel better about showing her work to the teacher—“Showing her will help you to learn,” said Con-
fidence, “and I bet you made less mistakes than what Scaredness says.” She learned that most of the
time Scaredness was tricking her.
Mom had the idea that they could help to wake up Confidence by taking Madeline to a math
tutor after school. Madeline thought that doing extra math was a bad idea at first, but she soon found
that the extra practice helped her to feel more confident in math at school. (“See how well you are
CREATING THOUGHTSCreating Helpful Thoughts 153