5 Steps You Can Take To Boost Your Confidence

Real confidence is simply having the ability to genuinely express who we truly are and to pursue things that we truly desire. That's confidence. Confidence doesn't have to mean you're leaping over tall buildings. Confidence means you're being who you are. All right, let's rock and roll. Five steps to having more confidence in your life. Number one, decide you need no reason whatsoever to be more confident. Just make the decision to be confident. You don't need a reason. You don't need 50 people to tell you you're amazing or you're beautiful or we love you. You just have to say, you know what? Today I'm gonna lift my head up a little bit. You know, today I'm gonna give myself a little bit of credit. Today I'm just gonna be confident. I'm gonna walk into this room, I'm gonna stand tall as if I were an incredibly confident person for no other reason than then that's my intention right now. That's it. That's the power of intention. It's the power of the self directed human being that we just get to choose how we want to feel. You could be happy right now for no reason, right? For no reason at all. You could just say, you know what? I'm decided to be happy in my life. You don't need 50 things to make you happy. Just sense the moment, feel grateful for life, you're good to go, right? We over complicate these things. We think we have to have, you know, some big long psychological story and build up to suddenly one day wake up and be more confident. No, we don't. We have to wake up one more day and say, today I'm be confident. Just like we decide when we wake up. Have you ever had a day where you just, I mean, you just crushed it, you know, you got so much done. You were like, wow, at the end of the day you're like, man, I just crushed it today. That happened because when you woke up in the morning, you said, I'm going to get some stuff done today. You had the intention to be a productive human being that day. So why not set the intention to be a confident human being that day? Why not set the intention to be a loving person or an ambitious person, or a fun person, or a flirty person, or a sexy person, or whatever kind of person that you want to be? Just decide you don't need a bunch of stuff. People really get this one wrong. And what happens is if you don't have the intention in the moment to say, I'm going to be confident. I'm just going to allow that to come up. I. I'm going to feel that sense and feeling what confidence is for me and express that genuinely and real for myself. In the vacuum of intention arises impulse. And often from that impulse, through our brainstem, up comes worry, concern, fear. The paying attention to what is wrong so that we can fix it or flee or escape, right? So we have to have the intention of who we are and what we're going to be. It begins with you. Simply deciding to be a confident person changed my life when I did that. I realized this was way back in college for me. I just thought, I want to be a confident person. How's this going to happen? Do I have to wait till I'm 50, after I've achieved everything? I've made some money or maybe people like me somewhere. Come on, get over it. We should get over our stuff and one day just realize. Real confidence is simply having the ability to genuinely express who we truly are and. And to pursue things that we truly desire. That's confidence. Confidence doesn't have to mean you're leaping over tall buildings. Confidence means you're being who you are authentically for no other reason. No one gave you permission. You just decided to be who you are. You decided to chase your dreams. That's confidence, right? Believing in yourself and believing in where you're going, that's confidence. It doesn't take a whole lot of magic. That's confidence from that decision to be confident just because. Just because we want to feel that sense of strength in our own bodies, that sense of energy and joy of expressing who we are and chasing what we want. Everything rolls from there. You know, the human develops in its psyche. We develop a real sense of competence or confidence coming from a sense of integrity for ourselves. You know, integrity is. I know who I am and I am being that consistently. I know what I want and I am chasing that consistently. Integrity. Being aligned with who you are, your values, your beliefs and your dreams, having integrity, that gives us confidence in self, right? That our self can stand on its own and be itself and do what it desires to. That gives us a sense of confidence. So how have you been doing that department? Have you been really demonstrating who you are to the world? Have you allowed yourself to do that? Because if you do that over a period of time, the self, and I would argue the soul senses a coherence. You know, there's a cohesive sense of identity that comes from being consistent to the best of who we are. Confidence comes from that and that too is will, it is decision. It is a desire to want to be a person of integrity and confidence. And that's where it stems from. I think if you decide to be confident, you have integrity in who you are being and what it is you're seeking in life and your values. I think the third one from there, it really comes down to competency. I mentioned that word earlier, competency, which means, you know, psychologists often call it the confidence, competence loop. As you become more competent in something, you learn how to do it, you're more confident in doing it. As you learn how to ride a bike, and you rode the bike more and more and more, you became more skilled at it, you develop more confidence in your ability to ride the bike. Any area of your life, you're going to go into the for the first time, be okay with being uncertain, be okay with being uncomfortable. Be okay with not knowing how it's going to turn out because it's your first time, but stumble into it anyway. Because as you stumble into it, you develop skill, you develop comfort with it. And then suddenly one day you wake up and say, I'm pretty confident doing this. Nothing changed in who you are. What changes your level of competency? Knowledge, skill and ability. That's what competency is. Knowledge, skill, ability and talent. And so when we finally realize, oh, wow, I just need to learn a little bit more hair, I'll be more confident. I just need to apply this a little bit more here. I'll be more confident. As you develop skills and abilities in your life, in your unique areas, you become more confident. To do that, it requires the fourth thing. And that fourth thing is momentum. You know, momentum is key to confidence. When we stop having any momentum in our life, we often feel lost or confused or down. You know, we start losing that connection with our spirit, strength and ourself. And so we have to take more action to develop more confidence. That means we have to say, what is it I truly want? And start moving towards it on a consistent basis before we know the whole plan off it. A lot of people think that your decision is your destiny. And sometimes I'm like, I don't know about that. A lot of people decide to lose weight. A lot of people decide to be a loving spouse. A lot of people decide to do something good, but they don't. It's disciplined action that is your destiny, right? And often some of the best decisions in your life come after you have momentum at something, and then you've gained some more perspective, right? But a lot of us are waiting for the perfect plan, the perfect time, the perfect person, the perfect thing to pursue our goals or our dreams. And it's that waiting that often dampens our confidence because we're at the external. We're sort of at the whim of the world a little bit. Maybe we get lucky. Maybe that person comes in, maybe the funding comes through. Whatever it is. We have to instead say, what can I do to begin this? What can I do now to begin? Because even if you begin and you're not sure, you don't have to know the whole path, right? Sometimes the whole stairway is not lumen until you take that first step. As we learned from Martin Luther King, right? It's like, what is that? Sometimes it's that first step, and then the staircase emerges, then we can see. And so for yourself, soon as you take that first step, that says in your mind, hey, you know what? I took a step. Good for me. And then you start making better and better decisions because you're able to see more often. You don't know where you're going in life until you start jogging towards something. Just run in place, run somewhere. But as soon as you run, you start thinking, things open up to you. Say, oh, look at this, look at this, look at this. People often say, I wish I had more vision for my life. Brendan, I said, it's hard to have vision for your life if you've never seen anything. Get outside of the house, turn off the tv, turn off the computer, go see the world a little bit. You'll gain a little bit more vision. And with more vision and momentum towards the things you want, you will have more confidence. So he begins with deciding, really, you need nothing to be more confident. But if you need something, go with integrity. Be more of who you truly are. Chase what you truly desire. Be smart enough to know that you have to, have to, have to have to have to develop more competency at the things that you're interested in. More competency, more confidence. You have to realize, oh, my gosh, there is no reason in the world that you cannot yourself, with very simple moves, gain more momentum, more momentum, more progress, more progress, more confidence. And finally, the fifth thing of confidence, community. You know, we all need people around us who are supportive and positive and buoyant and who appreciate our sense of aliveness and joy and happiness in life. And if we don't have that, you can't sit there and be a victim. Oh, I just have a bad set of parents, and I got a bad set of friends, and I guess I'M destined to be around a bunch of duds. And no, go find a new peer group, go to a seminar, go to the church, go to, you know, a volunteer meeting. Go get around people who are positive and who are amazing. You know, a lot of people tell you, hey, you know what? Just get rid of all those negative people. But sometimes your negative people in your life are your, you know, your mom or your dad or your lover, your spouse or one of your kids is just a little tyrant. You know, you can't just open the door and say, get out of here, you little bastard. It doesn't work like that. It's not about cutting loose all the negative people, right? Of chopping off people and getting rid of them, though maybe there are some people you need to say, I don't need to associate with this person as much in my life anymore. Or if I do, I don't need to get so hooked up and trapped into their pools of pessimism. What you have to do is say instead, okay, if I don't have the supportive peer group, let me go create that. Let me go find those people and get around them. Because as people are cheering you on, you gain more confidence. As people are saying, hey, you're doing a good job, you say, yeah, I am doing a good job. And you allow yourself to feel that sense of success and that sense of integrity when other people recognize it in you. Sometimes our greatest confidence has come from having a community of supporters. And so you don't have to wait for those supporters to show up. Go find them, go mix, go mingle, get outside of the house, live life again. As you do that, as you live life again, what do you notice? More integrity, more momentum, more competency, more good people. And suddenly that thing you were hoping one day you found that you found confidence. No. One day you wake up, you found you created it. I'm really excited to talk about this month's topic, which is how do you create remarkable and long lasting friendships? And I'm talking about the kind of friendships that you love. The friendships that bring you alive, that bring you that connection, that help life feel more even meaningful, that help you progress and feel supported, help you be seen, help you feel a true connection with not just others, but with humanity. Because the people around you are awesome. And when the people around you are awesome, you know, you feel better about life. But we also went through this crazy last 18 months where so many people were isolated, where we had so much turmoil, so much conflict, so much just uncertainty and fear in the world where I really believe friendships really elevated. And you could see whether or not you had great friends throughout this pandemic or you didn't. You were able to see whether or not you got the support that you needed, whether or not you were able to maintain your sense of vibrancy in some of those times of aloneness, whether or not you had people who cheered you on when you decided to make a transition, start something new, or the kids left the house, or you got sick or something was going on that was difficult in your life. We look to our friends and I think that this is a very undervalued conversation in mental health. So much about the mental health conversation is appropriately about self awareness. It's about mindfulness, it's about taking care of our stressors. And a lot of it is that solo work that we all have to do for self mastery. But I can tell you that, you know, the great universities of the world, the psychology department is right near the sociology department because they go together like we are social beings. And when you lose that social connection with the world, which usually starts through lack of disciplined habits with your friends, then suddenly life loses its color. And I think this is so important. You're going to hear me talk about friendship today in a way you probably haven't heard before very much from what we would call a high performance psychology perspective. And I think you're going to love this. So if you've been struggling with friendships in your lifetime, not either having enough friends or not having the quality of friends that you've always wanted, this is a serious conversation today. I can't imagine a time, at least in my life so far, where friendships were so incredibly important. I get to share some of the things that really have worked, not just in my life and my friendships, but in studying this work deeply over the years, in recognizing how many people are entrepreneurs, high achievers, people who are trying to make great impact in the world, you're here today. And sometimes that journey can feel very lonely, or when you get to the top, it can feel lonely, they say. And I'm like, I kind of believe what my friend Brian Tracy and mentor said to me one time. He said, if it's lonely at the top, you did it wrong. I thought, woo, that's good, that's good. Because maybe sometimes we value today progress, we value today getting things done. We value that top mountain of achievement. And then we look around and go, oh, nobody really knows me. I don't feel a connection to others. Yeah, I got the thing, the house, the car, the bank account, the accolades, the Instagram page. And all of a sudden, though, something's missing. And friendship is one of the greatest vehicles to the real psychology of well being that we talk about here at Growth Day. And I'm going to share with you a secret today, just a simple phrase. You're going to go, oh, my gosh, that's why my friendships aren't going right. So you're going to love this session. I say that triangle, right, of well being that we talk about Growth Day aliveness is one of the things we all want after you had everything else, right? Another thing we want is connection. We're not after casual friendships here today. We're at like, how do I create authentic, deep, trusting, vulnerable, fun, real relationships? Because how many of you have ever had friendships that turned out to be fake? You thought you had a good friendship, and that thing turned out to be not so good or poisonous or, you know, somebody, like, they weren't loyal to you as a friend, or they lied to you or something went wrong. You thought, how could that happen in that relationship? And I always tell, like, friendships are a science of relationship, right? It's about how you create relationship with others. And I'm going to give you again a phrase that will really help you with this today. And then if it's true that we want aliveness and connection, this triangle, another thing that we want is meaning. Well, meaning isn't achieved just by living your purpose each day in your own head. Meaning is achieved through a social relationship network. My sense of meaning is, do I feel connected to the world? And the world isn't an abstract thing. It's not like I feel connected to the oak tree. It's like, no, I mean, did I feel, did you make your difference in the world that's going to be served and answered through your social impact, your relationships with others. And I have to tell you, I've been coaching people for 20 years of my life now, and a lot of people have one friend. You know, in the United States, unfortunately, the number of people with three good friends has declined over the decades. You're like, three good friends. Oh, we got to talk about that. Because some people stumble into friendships or hope for friendships, just like some people hope to have a loving relationship, just like some people hope to have a good job, just like some people hope that, you know, they get healthier. And then there's strivers who take life a little bit by the reins and say, no, no, no, let me architect that, let me build that, and I'll give you My own examples today of where I sucked at friendships and I had to learn how do you do them and how do you create them? And once you know how to create and craft them, life really opens up for you and it becomes not just more alive and connected, but more meaningful. Like, a sense of meaning happens when we have a tapestry of social relationships that are real and impactful. And then, of course, in the middle of that triangle, you always see me draw out growth, that your friends should be lifting you up, not pushing you down. Your friends should be inspiring you to get better. Your friends should have your back, but also be willing to challenge your face. You know what I'm saying? Like, your friends are and should be one of your primary growth drivers in life. Most people choose ambitious goals to be their growth driver. Oh, I'm going to do something that's hard, or I'm going to try to achieve this amazing thing. I'm going to try to become a millionaire or make this difference or build this company or, you know, have this type of family and it's this external climb, this thing they're trying to achieve. And too many people forget. It's like, actually, one of the best drivers of growth isn't your job, isn't your goals, it's your friendship circle. And when your friendship circles make you a more alive, deeper, caring, thoughtful, authentic person in the world, I'm telling you what, guess what? At work, you're better. At home, you're better. Your art gets better, your sense of life lifts. Let me share with you what I really believe to be the two central problems of friendship. Okay, the two central problems of friendship. The first one is a failure of each of our own. I'm just taking this on myself as well. It's like we fail in life to realize most of our friendships were assigned not aligned. Most of our friendships were assigned not aligned. What I mean by that is many of our friendships happen because group assignment, right? Think about it. Some of your best friends, where did you meet them? School, Your neighborhood? Some other affiliation? Maybe at work, maybe in a group that you joined. So it was like, oh, we showed up somewhere, or we were assigned somewhere and there was that girl who sat next to me in class. We became friends. Or, oh, I worked with this person at work. We were co workers. We became friends. And these are kind of like assigned. And I know that sounds really weird to say, so bear with me a little bit. I don't mean that the manager, like, you're going to be friends here. What I mean is, because of your Group, your affiliation or where you were, you kind of met people there. And by default, by you being a good person or communicating or doing stuff with them, you kind of became friends versus, that's like an assigned friend. It's like, oh, because we were here, we became friends versus an aligned friend, which is, oh, I'm an adult now. What are the types of friends that I want to create that align with my passion, my dreams, my lifestyle, my values, my beliefs, the things that I want of life, and let me go get them, not let them fall into my lap, which brings up the second designation. And this is hard to say to people. And if you're in a place where you feel lonely in your life or you feel like you don't have great friendships, I promise this will be so helpful for you today to even know how your own brain thinks. And many of us. And I was this way probably all the way throughout high school, even I never. And this is the second problem of friendships. I never made the deliberate choice to have remarkable friendships. I kind of ended up with friends. Anyone know what I'm talking about? Who's like, ended up with friends if you kind of just ended up with like this person? It was kind of my friend. One of my buddies goes. He goes, I don't want no rando friends. And it was like, random. Now, I love random. I love the universe. I love God, I love coincidence. Listen, I read the Celestine Prophecy. People are glowing out there for me. I believe in that coincidence stuff. But I can also share with you, like, if you just allow randomness in your life all the time, you'll always feel a sense of mediocrity too. We have to stretch. We have to choose our life. And to choose our life, we have to be deliberate and go, what kind of life do I want? I would like you to learn to architect your ideal friendships. And can you get all of them? And will all your friendships be perfect? I'm not that guy. I'm not here to promise everything's going to be sweet and perfect and peaches in life. I am here to suggest, though, that if you haven't deliberately chosen the types of friendships that you want, that's a problem, especially if you're an adult. Right? And that's the thing is we're just. We're not encouraged to do that. We're not. Think about how much time people were feeding your ears with the idea you had to be really thoughtful about the career you choose. How many of you ever had more people tell you more times about Be so thoughtful about the school you choose, the career you choose, but no one ever said as much. Be very thoughtful about the friends and the friendships that you build. And that's why we have a lot of high achieving people who are lonely their whole life. Think about your career. What are you going to be one day? Very rarely. What's the type of social network you're going to build around you? What's the type of friendships you're going to architect? What are you going to be proud of in terms of your friends in the future? What do you want your friends to achieve? What do you want your friends to experience in life? Not just what they give you, but what are you going to give out too. What kind of friendship do you want to create and experience? How do you want your friends to actually interact with one another? Have you ever thought about that? We spend so much time. If you're a parent and you have two kids, you're so worried about how they interact, right? I know people who've never even thought, how do I want my friends to interact? I mean, they might think, you know what, we shouldn't put them in a room at a party because they have this history of that background. But very few people are like, I'm going to actually teach my friends how to be friends with one another. Now, I know some of you might be like, this guy sounds like a control freak. I'm like, I am, but I'm a happy one. You know what I'm saying? I think this is such an important area to architect. Most friends have never talked about how to be friends. They just go, you want to go to lunch? They go to lunch. They talk about the weather, the waiter, the food, what's going on. They leave and there's no architecting. There's no, I think of like, social systems are things that can be shaped. You all think, like at work, right? How much we talk about at work, building a culture. More books and more people have spent time on this conversation of building culture at work and never the culture of a friendship. Isn't that weird? I don't know where along the line we lost the conversation and the desire to choose to build awesome friendships. And a culture of friendship, meaning not just friends. Most people think of, I want a friend, right? When you're in high school, you just want a friend, right? You're just like, at least I was like, can I get one? It's like you worry about having friendships when you grow up. And usually that means you think, and we're all trained this Way, Especially in Western cultures, we're taught to have a friend, and we think in a very individualistic mode. I and this person are in relationship, and then you have another friend. I and this person are in relationship, and maybe you go out and you try to get them together and we have a party. But even at the party, it's individual nodes. Me, that friend and this friend. And I don't get trained, as I'm getting older, to think as a systems social architect. Oh, wow, look at all these nodes, if you will, these friends. If I like each of these people and have relationship with each people, why don't in some way I weave them together and create a tapestry of friendship where I'm actually connecting the dots and creating a culture of friendship? See, we don't think like that, do we? I was a very, kind of solitary child. I was kind of in my own little world. I don't know about you all, but I was definitely, you know, much. I would be like an introverted kind of child. I kind of kept to myself. I like to play with my toys kind of by myself. In elementary school, from what I can remember, I was kind of solo. Brendan I didn't see social systems right. I was in a class with kids and a teacher, and I had a relationship with the teacher, and I had a relationship with this person or that person or not. But I couldn't see the class. I couldn't say, oh, you know, like, this group is kind of like this. Instead, it was just like, she likes me or she doesn't. Teachers like that. I didn't see the system. Today I'd like you to try to see the system a little bit. See the system of the friendships you've built in your life. See the system at play at work. See the system of your culture or your nonprofit or your company. When you can start seeing a bigger picture and get out of your head a little bit now, something happens. There's connection, there's community. See, everyone says, I want community. I'm like, well, you can't be an individualistic person in the community forever. You have to elevate to seeing the system. If you'll never be a community member or an effective one or a helpful one, if you can't get out of your head, well, I'm saying that not as judgment to you. That was me. So there's no judgment here. If you don't have friends, I'm like, I'm telling you my story, too. I was a solo person. I was in my own head. I couldn't see the class, I couldn't see the system. And so I felt apart. And because I felt apart and I couldn't see what was happening and I didn't know how to engage. I was lonely. And then when I finally made a connection with a friend, that friend became my life. Later on, that perpetuated into, you know, some of you guys know my story of my first breakup with the. My, my high school sweetheart. I was destroyed because that was my one person, right? That was my one node in the world. And then when that relationship fell apart, I fell apart and became depressed and suicidal. And so how we relate to with one or multiple people can completely shape our mental health. I know you already know that. And so I had to learn like, Wow. 1. I don't want to ever be dependent on one friend. I want to build a support system. You ever heard that language before? No one says, go build a supporter. I want you to listen to the language of successful people. When successful people are speaking, they never tell you, go build a supporter. They say, go build what? A support system. A support network. Oh, I got to get out of single node thinking. A node is a one individual unit. And I got to get into the system. I got to stop thinking, does Sally at the class. No. Next. Does she like me? And if she likes me, my whole life is good or bad or ruined. And I gotta go. There's a class here. There's an energy is vibe, a spirit. There's rules and norms. There's a culture here that is happening. How do I want to participate in this? And how do I want this culture to happen too? In ways that I can affect what do they want? And we all have to start thinking about that more and more in a society in which we're supposedly connected, but we've actually become individual nodes in the network. Beat back those fears. I've got four big ideas for you and you're going to love them. Number one. And you're going to hate this one. I'll make sure you like the rest. Number one, stop thinking the reason you are not getting ahead has anything whatsoever to do with fear. Fear gets too much play in our lives. We're always going to it, we're always blaming it. Oh, it's fear. Fear held me back. Well, I'm worried about this, so I stop. And you know what it is? It's a grand lie that's been perpetuated by society. It's a huge lie because look, fear, real fear, physical fear especially, is there's an external threat that's imminent and it's in your face. That's fear. Everything else is a self contrived story that we tell ourselves. And we need to realize that most fear is just bad management of our minds, but we allow ourselves to loop it. What happens if you don't know psychologically what's happening? Fear is really just saying what if? Followed by a negative statement. What if she rejects me? What if they don't give me the promotion? I ask, what if I fail? What if they make fun of me? What if I lose everything I worked so hard for? What if? Followed by a negative statement. I have a question for you though. What if you started focusing more in your life on the what ifs? Followed by a positive statement. What if she says yes? What if I get what I finally deserve? What if I can grow this business? What if I can accomplish that? What? What if I believed in myself again? And you started stewing on the positive as much as you stewed on that old negative. It would change your story. It would change how you feel about yourself. Fear is usually not the thing holding people back. What's usually holding them back is a connection with something more important than fear. Let me say it again. Fear is not usually what's holding people back. Fear. What's holding them back is a lack of connection with something that's bigger than fear, right? I mean, how does a soldier run into harm's way? How does a firefighter run into the burning building? It's not that they're not fear, right? There is always going to be fear when you're doing something where there might be risk, but instead the soldier is attached to his mission, his commitment, his pledge to his country. Something bigger than the fear and himself. The firefighter runs into the building, he's still, he's still afraid. He or she runs in that building because they have a bigger commitment to serve people and save people. That's bigger than their fear. If you're not doing something, don't blame fear. Realize that you're lacking a connection to something that's bigger than the fear. Something that you care about more than your insecurity, your worry, your negative what ifs. And so that's what the heroes do. The firefighter said, what if I could save lives? The soldier said, what if I could serve my country? The executive who finally tried that big bold, crazy idea said, not what if this turns out badly? What if this is innovative, changes the game, serves our customers better. The woman who finally talked to her husband about that thing that's bothering her so Long. Instead of saying, well, what if he's a jerk? She said, well, he's probably going to be a jerk, but what if I finally move him? This time they allowed themselves to believe. She said, what if he finally changes? And she got over her fears because she said, I care about our relationship and our future more than how scared I am to say something that's vulnerable. You follow? Stop blaming the fear, my friend. This was a big thing for me. I stopped. You know what? I probably started shooting videos about two years after I should have, because I thought, well, what if they make fun of me? What if no one watches them? You know, I wasn't a good communicator. This like I'm doing now. I don't have a teleprompter. I don't have a couple bullet points in front of me. I'm teaching you from my life, from my experience of serving millions of people around the world. I didn't have that ability before. So I sat there for years, worried and not ready to start. And it was too unfortunate. I mean, I wish I'd started earlier, but back then it was, well, what if it doesn't work? What if this is stupid? And then finally I said, you know what? This isn't fear. There's no fear preventing me from going around and pressing the red button on that camera. There is no fear. There's no fear there. There's a story there, there's a what if? Followed by the negative statement there. But there's no fear. There is no lie in between me and the video camera. It's my own self stopping me. It's my own lack of commitment to something bigger than that red button. Stop telling yourself it's fear, my friend. And that will change everything in your life. Number two, and this is huge, huge, huge. If you don't believe anything I just said, then fine. Get a piece of paper and write down the real fears. Write them down. I want you to think of the dream that you have, the ambition, the goal, and any reason that you think you've been stopping. Write down why. Okay? What would you have to go learn, do or ask for in order to overcome that fear or that challenge? It's simple. You know, the biggest breakthrough sometimes for people's lives is when they write stuff down. Have you ever had that? You've been in a seminar and you write in your journal. Pow. The idea hits you, or you're writing your journal at night, or you're typing your book, or you're doing something, and just by the act of Expression or capturing. You find your answers. So if I'm talking to you, it's just not hitting. That's okay. Take that time and you'll find your own answers. When you say, I want this, but this is stopping me. And then you take that next step to say, okay, here's what I should do to address. Learn, re, equip, ask for help to address that challenge. Then guess what happens. You usually do. Third, big idea. From there, you know what? Fear tends to dissipate with daily action. Fear tends to dissipate with daily action. So I'd love you to do this. All I want you to do is take three steps a day, accomplish three goals a day. I know sometimes in your life when it's really difficult. I mean, I remember in my life when I was seriously depressed and suicidal as a young man in college, after my girlfriend broke up with me. I mean, you know, a goal for the day might be something as big as take a shower. Literally. I mean, that might have been it. Take a shower, eat some food, talk to a friend. Sometimes when you're there, that's all it takes. But you can do those three things. When you're uber successful now and you're breaking through, it might be, call that person who you've been waiting to call and ask for something from. Shoot that video, create that product, invent that thing, tell those people to stop, ask for help, whatever it is. Find three things that you can do every day that's appropriate for where you're at in your life and just do them. Because you know what? Momentum beats the pants out of fear. The more momentum in your life you get what we call in psychology, the experience of the competence confidence loop. Have you heard of that? The competence confidence loop. It's a psychologically proven reality where the better you get, or the more momentum you get, the more confidence and the beauty is, the more confidence you get, the more you'll try things and develop more knowledge, skill, and ability. Thus, more competence. And the more competence is confidence, the more confidence these things grow together. And all of a sudden, fear isn't such a thing anymore. Because you know what? You've gotten through things before. You've broken through things before. And because you did that, things change. And here's the last big idea. What's something crazy that you could aspire to or want crazy. When you looked at your goals, was there anything on those goals that were crazy, totally out of reach? You were like, no way. Don't know how, can't do that. Were there anything like that? I want you to find those things. I want you to write that thing down. Here's three big crazy things I want in my life. Then I also want you to write, here's the fear I would have if I chased those or I accomplished those three big fears of if I chased it or accomplished it. Because sometimes it's not just the fears we have today, it's we're thinking we're going to have fear tomorrow. Well, if I go for that dream, then these things, I might have fears later on. Identify those and create an action plan for those too. Because you know what? The more you think about your fears, the more you realize they're silly. The more you realize those worst case scenarios almost never happen. And the more you realize you deserve something beyond them. You don't deserve to live a life trapped by fear. That cage of fear can only be rattled by you, only be broken by you, only be broken by your mind expanding into new possibilities for yourself and you taking new daily actions. It's okay to think clear crazy once in a while. I want something crazy and big and it's a big goal and I don't know how I'm going to do it. Don't let fear stop you. Get committed to what you want. Set those daily actions and quit making the excuses that it's fear, my friend. It will be the biggest breakthrough you ever have in your life. Capability is you can do it. You can do it every time. It is like a strength, if you will. It is something that is, you are highly capable at that thing. You are at another level of skill that it shows up every single time. But here's the truth. Capability. Capability is as much as a mindset as a competence. Let me give you an example. A lot of extremely smart people who can handle the problem don't handle the problem because they don't feel capable. It's like, yeah, I know it, but I don't do it. It's like a lot of people who achieve a lot of great things, they actually. How many of you know someone who's very competent, has great skills but lacks the capability to execute? See, capability is something you know. Capability is self trust to take the action. It's not just do I know how to take the action, it's I'm an action taker, I'm going to show up, I'm capable to handle this. I will do this. I trusted myself to handle this. To execute, to execute again and again and again and again and again. That's capability. And I really want you to develop that in your heart and in your soul by checking off the simplest of things each day. By if you have a list of three to do, lists, if you wrote down your three top priorities for the day, do those first. Before you do your social media, before you reply to everyone's DMs inbox, you know, voice message texts, it's like, listen, I have so many people, they spend all day just checking their email to reply to everybody else. Now that's fine if that's your job, that's customer service, do that, that's your job. But if you're an entrepreneur as an example, or you have a whole list of other priorities and you're just checking into people's agendas all day to meet all their obligations, and you keep missing your key priorities day after day after day after day. Your brain doesn't feel like you're capable anymore. Even though you might be smart, you're competent, but your brain doesn't believe you're capable. You know what I mean? It's so important to understand this. I know if you're a parent, you understand this difference. But lots of kids can learn things and have things and have skills and abilities. But if they don't put them and apply them, they don't sense that feeling of capability. And now your smart child, your child full of strength, talent and ability, doesn't run on the field, doesn't take the action, doesn't finish the test, doesn't go for it. They don't feel capable. Why don't they feel capable? They don't have a pattern of action taking. You've got to develop the pattern of taking the action, the pattern of taking the action. Better yet, the pattern of taking the action to complete the key priorities. So all I want you to do as a daily, simple habit, every morning we do it in the High Performance Planner. I write down my key priorities for the day. Do those first, get those out of the way. Make that happen. Maybe that's your morning. Maybe for me, I didn't feel capable in my career for a long time because I was replying to everybody. And then I did a simple thing. I said, you know what? No phone calls till 1pm in the afternoon, my time. That leaves the morning to do the most important work. Because I do the most important work almost every morning of my life. I feel incredibly capable. Give me a task list. Give me that log is happening in the brain. Good job today. Good job today. Good job today. Good job. That consistency, that congruence developed the capability. Now I feel capable and I am capable because I executed. Because I executed so many times, I developed a skill. Y' all follow. This is so important. Okay, this is so important, this, this capability piece. And the best part is when you get some capability, if you'll do what we talked about earlier, self reflection, you'll start to go, look what I did there. If you do what I've always taught, which is you have to integrate the wins. Integrate the wins. When you do something, take a moment and go, I did that, you know, yesterday. Here's how simple this is yesterday. After months of thinking, strategizing, and planning, I created this presentation and I sent the email, and it took me about two hours to pull this off, but I decided, you know what? This has been on my big dream list for a while. I'm going to make this pitch. It's a pitch. And so I said, okay, I'm going to get it done. And I finally sent it. And I'll tell you what, I walked out in the other room, Denise, like, what's up with you? I was just feeling so good. I said, we're going to have to. I'm going to have a nice glass of wine with dinner tonight to celebrate. I did this. It was sending an email, but I was selling somebody like, I'll have a glass of wine every time I send an email. Yes, sure. Thank you. But here's the thing. You got to celebrate the days that you are capable when you do something good. Go. Good job. Pat yourself on the back a little bit. You have to integrate the win to your identity. If you took all of your strengths and all of your good days and all the wonderful things you have done in your life, and you really sat with them for a minute. You let them come in, you let them mentally stack where you just thought of that time. You finished that big project, you launched that thing, you got the negotiation, you won the award. You handled that tough situation at the park with the kids well. You didn't get brought into their drama. You just took some time for yourself, and you let that integrate into the identity of who you were. You would feel an internal goodness. And see, when you integrate the good of what you're doing in life, you feel good. And I don't mean that like with hyperbole. I mean you sense goodness again, when I sense that I'm good. Because one, in my opinion, I'm lucky to be here. My clarity says, if you are alive, have reverence for life. You're a child of God. What a gift. You are so lucky. You're Blessed to be here. So for me, I feel capable as a person. I feel I've been given gifts and strengths. Yeah, I had to develop a lot of them just like you did. But because I trust that I was given those gifts or those strengths or this life, I feel capable. I feel like, you ever heard that thing, you can do all things through Christ, which strengthens you. You ever heard about that? It's like, oh, yeah, I'm capable because I got someone watching over me. My dad's up there, my Creator's up there, Grandma's up there. I feel good, I feel good. I feel capable. Because you know what? I've done some good things. Okay? You let that come in. You let that goodness come in. Some of you haven't let your goodness shine for a while. Your vibrancy, your joy, that sense of soul or spirit or flow or femininity or masculinity. That part of you that's like this. Because why hasn't it gone out like that? Because you haven't brought it in and stored it up. See, all you've done is deplete yourself for other people without those moments of self reflection about the goodness that you're doing for other people, about the goodness you're doing in the world, about the virtues and the values you stand for. You haven't let that stuff come in and sit in, like, sit like form into the cement of the foundation of your character. And so you wonder why it doesn't emanate. Why doesn't the goodness come out? Because you haven't sat with the goodness that's already within. Why doesn't the goodness spread out? Because you haven't sat with the goodness that's already there. If you knew half of how good of a human you are, the choices that you've made, to be. To be on something like this, to raise your hand for personal development, to want to learn from other people. I celebrate that. I raise my hand to learn. When I go to a seminar or I buy a course, I patent myself, I'm like, good job. You're learning, kid. You're not done yet. And I feel good about myself as a learner. I think learners tend to be more confident than people who think they know everything. You know, because people who think they know everything are terrified their worldview might break learners. Like, I'll adapt. I'll figure it out, right? That adaptation mentality, that learning mentality gives me confidence. I believe in my ability to figure things out.