The Confidence Formula: How to Build Confidence - Episode 15 w/ Your Host - Coach Bryn

Many of us are very determined to become a better shooter, or we're comparing ourselves, comparing ourselves against someone who is on day 75 and we're on day 7. For example, I'm on episode 15 of my podcast. Many people that I strive to be like and want to emulate are on episode 100, 200, 1,000. It would be foolish of me to think that I would have the polish, the acuity, the skill of someone who was far ahead of me on the journey. Talent can close some gaps. However, consistency and repetition is what develops confidence. Before we get into today's episode, I want to encourage you to like, comment, and subscribe. I don't want you to miss a minute of the great juicy content we have coming for you on the Mental Advantage Podcast. Thanks for watching, being a listener, and now let's get to this week's episode. Everyone wants confidence. Feeling confident is no doubt the cause of many great athletic performances, performances in the world of art, obviously cinema, politics, you name it. But how does one develop confidence? Are we born with it? Is it a case where some have it and some just don't? Well, in this episode, we are going to be answering the age-old question: how does one develop confidence? Hi everyone, it's Coach Brynn here in episode 15 Hey team, it's just me, another solo episode, and we are gonna be discussing the confidence question. The number one thing my athletes come to me for is confidence. And you might be thinking, wait a minute, athletes not having confidence? That doesn't even compute. When I think of LeBron James, Steph Curry, not having confidence, that doesn't even make sense. And then you might even say, hey, Bren, you compared athletes to superheroes, and I can't even imagine Wonder Woman struggling with confidence, or the Black Panther, or even Storm having a moment. Well, I want to call your attention to the beginning of the X-Men movies, uh, when they look at the younger X-Men as they are developing their harness over the powers that they have and think about how they're struggling to get control of these things and even feel like these powers might be a burden. So having natural gifts, talents, capacities may be something that some of us are born with. But then there are people that have to develop these talents into something where they have a harness of those powers, right? So LeBron James, Steph Curry, uh, Simone Biles, Megan Rapinoe from the world of soccer, you name an athlete, and there was a point where I bet you would ask them, did you once have a challenge or struggle with your confidence, or did your confidence even falter at some point throughout your journey on the rise to fame, even when your name was still pretty big? And they'll probably tell you that yes, confidence is something that comes and goes, and it is something that constantly has to be worked at. So with that, how do we develop confidence? Well, what is confidence? Let's look at the dictionary definition. One, confidence is to have someone's trust. So one could say confidence is having trust in self, okay? So having a trust in yourself. But the dictionary definition, I want to read this because I want to get it right, it says here, a feeling of self-assurance arising from one's appreciation of one's own abilities or qualities. Now that sounds really fancy, but I have my own definition of confidence. Make sure you write this down, grab a pen, All right, confidence is just the repeating of an action so many times that it becomes automatic. Okay, a repeating of an action over time, the same action over time repeated. Let's talk about an action that each of us does every single day that we have quite a confidence in. What am I talking about? Walking. Each one of us is what I would call a very confident walker. Funny enough, there are videos of a time that we used to suck at walking. Yes, I apologize for using that four-letter word, uh, four-letter word suck, but you used to suck at walking. Your parents filmed it. You used to get up and be all wobbly, and you used to suck at walking. But the thing about When you were a sucky walker, which is usually some time as you're graduating from baby to toddler, you were determined, determined to walk. So you would get up, you would pull yourself up, you would attempt many times despite many falls. And the thing about babies is they are quite resilient. So one thing is you must be determined in the pursuit of a task. To become or develop confidence, determination is very important. So the good news is, to develop confidence, there is a recipe. When followed to the T, you will be guaranteed to develop confidence. Doesn't mean that at no time confidence may falter, but in general, you will have a baseline of confidence in this skill, and The first ingredient is determination. Like that baby, you have to be absolutely determined to want to develop this skill. Okay, so the baby would get up no matter how many times. The other thing is resilience. Resilience. Okay, so the second ingredient is resilience. You must be resilient in the pursuit of this thing. So you're determined, and when there are falters or falls, you are resilient You are not going to be stopped by the time that, the times that you will have falls, you will have setbacks, challenges in the process. If you notice, looking at our baby friends or back at our baby selves, when we fell, we often didn't cry, we just got back up. The funny thing I always say is that if adults had to learn how to walk, we would still be crawling because We typically, when we fall, want to tell the woe-is-me tale of all the times that it hurt, it was hard, whereas a baby just gets right back up and keeps on moving. So determination and resilience are key. Okay? And then the next thing, which is probably the most key thing, is repetition. Repetition. So we got determination, resilience, and repetition. How many times, right? So people often ask, to develop a habit, right, let's say walking was a habit, okay, how many days does it take to form a new habit? It is said, common and popularly, it takes 21 days. This, James Clear in his book Atomic Habits, takes exception. And he says, no, it's not how much time, it is how many, how many repetitions, right? How many reps, okay? Formally said, as I am a mental performance coach, I tell my athletes all the time, you have to get your reps in. Everything is like a muscle. You develop muscle through using that muscle over time. Joe Dispenza is famously quoted as saying, neurons that fire together wire together. And the only way that your brain sort of fires itself and wires itself around an ability is through repetition. This is how we develop our quote-unquote good and bad habits, okay? So if you are interested in forming confidence, then you must perform a certain consistent amount of reps of that activity to equal confidence. Okay, so one of the other things that I want people to know is that your repetitions are going— is— are very important. So also in James Clear's book, he talks about Atomic Habits. And let me say that again, he talks about this story, and I find this story absolutely fascinating. There was a professor at a college and it was a photography class. And he divided his class in half and he said, on this side of the class, we will have— you will be graded on the quantity of pictures that you take. The quantity of pictures that you take. As long as you take a lot of pictures, you will do well in this class because you will just be graded on if you took 100 pictures, 200 pictures, you're going to get the best grade, "Right? On this side of the class, the good news is you will only be graded on quality. So you have— you could take one picture and do very well on this class." So which group do you think, listener, watcher of this, was the group that turned out the best pictures? Now you may be on to me because we're talking about repetition. It was in fact the group that took the quantity pictures, the quantity pictures. So they turned out the best quality pictures because they took the most pictures and also took the most risks, showed the most resiliency. They had more room to play. The quality group didn't have enough reps to develop maybe the skill or the confidence to take the best pictures, to maybe put the risk involved and, you know, take all of that where they might fall, they might wobble, those type of things, going back to our walking example. So with that, right, Adam Grant in his book Originals— I just want to mention this, right— we have some famous names in the world of art and music. Picasso, he churned out thousands of pictures. Of those thousand, we probably only count a handful as works of genius, right? Similarly, Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart— thousands of works of music, symphonies, whatever you want to call them, opuses— and only a few of those are considered the best hits of today, the ones that we go to, namely Beethoven's bit, right? So with that, the more reps of something, you are going to be able to get better through the just doing of the thing. As they say in the world of basketball, you want to become a better shooter, just take more shots. Take more shots. And in the world of entrepreneurship, they say if you want more sales, make more offers. Dave Shands, who's a person that I follow as far as podcasting and social media content creation. You want to churn out better content in your business? Produce more content. Make 10,000 posts like that, and I guarantee you that there will be works of genius somewhere in there. Will you have 10,000 works of genius? No, I hate to tell you, but you will have some works of genius if you get enough reps in. Now, the other thing with confidence is people often say, what are the habits to develop success? What are the habits for me to become a confident person? Well, going back to James Clear in his book, he says, well, no one really wants the habit, they just want the results. And being too results-focused is what robs people of their ability to develop confidence. I'm going to say that again. Being too results-focused robs individuals, athletes in particular, of being able to develop the confidence, you know, to get their reps in. Okay? So the key here is just repetition. But to develop anything, you have to have a certain amount of awareness. So where— if you have that determination, going back to our formula, right, our recipe, right? We have determination, we have the situation with resilience, we have repetition, and then I'm just gonna say persistence, because there's going to be a point where you're going to be 2 results focused, and you have to bring it back to it's about staying the course. So as I share with all my athletes, there are 4 stages to change because currently there are some things that you want to develop. So you need to know where you are to develop this repetition. How many reps do I need to get in? So the first stage of any change— there are 4 stages to change. Change is a huge part of confidence because in order to do, to get that confidence piece, we need to have the self-awareness to know where are we currently in this process. Okay, and so if there's 4 stages, we need to know what those stages are. Step number 1 is what I call unconscious competence. It's not really my, uh, words. Okay, this is— I didn't label these things., but it's called unconscious incompetence, excuse me, unconscious incompetence, okay? Which is, in short, you don't know what you don't know. So let's say, for example, I want to become a more confident speaker and I say "um" a lot when I speak. I happen to know that one of the words that I say quite a bit on this podcast is the word "so." If I want to develop a speaking pattern that to me is a bit more professional without saying the word "so" all the time, beginning sentences with "so," or Toastmasters focuses a lot on those transition words, but also "um," well then we need to become aware of when we're saying "so" and we're saying "um." So I want to become— I just said "so," right? Okay, so therefore I have transitioned from unconscious incompetence, step 1, to now having self-awareness, to saying, uh, to what we call conscious incompetence, which means I am still saying so or um, and I am aware now when I'm saying so. And um. The number one thing to slowing that down or to becoming aware, also to changing it. So now I know that I'm saying it, I'm just aware. Let's say I want to change it. I want to stop saying so as much. I want to stop saying um all the time. I am making an active active step there to change it. That now transitions me to step 3. It is really easy, by the way, to get from step 1 to step 3, which is just now I'm actively taking steps to change it, which puts me in conscious competence. So I know I'm saying it, okay, that was conscious. I went from unconscious incompetence to becoming aware I'm saying it, so I went to conscious incompetence. To actively changing it, changing the word or, you know, stopping myself from saying it. So that goes into conscious competence, conscious competence, okay? I want to stop saying the word. So one of the steps that I'm going to take is to slow down my speech. Typically the ums and the sos come when you are not as confident in your speech. Or like, in other words, if I'm talking about something and I'm very confident about it, most likely I'm not going to say so or um because I have a constant stream of thought and words that I can back up with those thoughts. Then when I slow down, I'm not searching for words because now my mind and my mouth are kind of catching up with each other. Does that make sense? Okay, if you're with me, just type a comment below if you're getting this, if you're like, oh, this is exactly what happens to me. So if I want to change, I just said so one more time, right? And I am going to think about that I want to change it. So what would I do instead of so? As I feel a so coming on, I can pause. Instead, I can choose a different word. I can try to slow down and just not have to say anything in that moment and transition into a new sentence. There are lots of different methods or behaviors I would do, but it takes effort on my part. It takes effort on my part to make that change. We want to know how do we get to this point of the final stage. Most of us stop right here at conscious competence, which we're constantly doing the tough work of having to work at it to make the change. How do I go from unconfident shooter to confident shooter? How do I go from unconfident player to confident player, better teammate? All of the different goals that we might have as an athlete, as a coach, as a worker, whatever your occupation or thing you want to develop confidence in, you are already somewhere on this scale. Most likely you are somewhere between conscious incompetence— you know you're doing it but you're not sure what to do to change it— or you know how— you know you're actively working to change it but you're getting really fatigued at how you, uh, are running— how to develop the get over that hump to get to that fourth stage. So I'm going to tell you what the fourth stage is, and then we'll talk about some methods to kind of not stop yourself from getting there. Okay, the fourth stage is called unconscious competence. Unconscious competence, or as James Clear talks in his book, called automaticity. Automaticity. Okay, let me put that right here for you. Automaticity. Okay. Automaticity is the unconscious competence stage, which is developing something without the conscious thought of it. Just like walking, you are able to walk without thinking about it. You don't have to struggle to think how to walk, to talk, to eat, to drink. Most of us, these are unconscious behaviors that you can do without thought. Even driving, dare I say, at the danger, it can become something you can do with unconscious competence. Although I do urge and implore you to have some conscientiousness when driving. You don't wanna go into complete unconsciousness or subconsciousness when driving. The key here is, how do I get, the question that is asked, how do I get from that third step of conscious competence to unconscious competence? And again, that goes back to resistance, resilience, and persistence, and, and not focusing on the result. Many of us are very determined to become a better shooter, or we're comparing ourselves, comparing ourselves against someone who is on day 75 and we're on day 7. For example, I'm on episode 15 of my podcast Many people that I strive to be like and want to emulate are on episode 100, 200, 1,000. It would be foolish of me to think that I would have the polish, the acuity, the skill of someone who was far ahead of me on the journey. Talent can close some gaps. However, consistency and repetition is what develops confidence. So what do you do to help yourself get past those moments where you start to feel like, I'm not seeing the results I want, so why should I keep going? It's too hard, it's too challenging. And this is where that persistence and determination comes in. It has to be something that you want very badly to sort of get to that place where it becomes automatic. You want to do it so bad, as E.T. the Hip-Hop Preacher says, you want it as bad as you want to breathe. So confidence in something is just going to take consistent repetition over time. Before, as James Clear talks about in his book Atomic Habits, it passed the habit line and then it just becomes automatic, a habit, and a part of who you are. So I would add one layer, which is develop the identity. Develop the identity that says, I am a shooter. I am a good shooter. I am a great shooter. If it was to develop confidence in shooting, if it was speaking, I am an excellent eloquent speaker, therefore I don't use so as often as I used to. In fact, I pause before I insert all my ums. All right, I don't talk like that, so I'm just going to be myself. The important thing is have these type of components will help you get confidence. If you are an athlete who wants to develop more confidence, if you are a coach who wants to develop more confidence, if you are an entrepreneur who wants to develop more confidence, then these are the steps I would encourage you to take. Take a look at where you are on this scale of the 4 stages of change. Most likely you're somewhere between confident, you know, unconscious incompetence conscious incompetence and conscious competence. Most of us haven't reached quite the scale of unconscious incompetence, but the only way to get there is to stay the course and focus on the process of repeating an action consistently, finding a way to define your own wins. Don't be so focused on how everyone else is measuring, right? One of my favorite quotes is, "Don't measure yourself with someone else's stick." Don't compare yourself to someone who's far ahead of you. We've talked about that. In fact, I call the comparison of others the compare affair. You cheat yourself when you compare to someone else. Cool thing about track and field where I came from, you had to run in your own lane and you were really competing against yourself and the clock. I could redefine your own way of winning. So maybe give yourself little ways to have goals along the way. So if initially one of the things or ticks is that I say so in one 5-minute span 5 times, then I want to continue to measure that to say, wow, I got it down to 4. That's a win. When your brain gets these dopamine hits It gives you the momentum to continue. So, in order to create that momentum, you want to define your own ways of sort of, I guess, measuring a win, or calculating a win that doesn't have to be only the end result of "I am no longer saying so." Does that make sense? I want all of us to— to become confident, but know this, any talk that it was something people were just naturally born with, it's something some people have and some people don't, isn't true. Are there some people that are maybe more naturally gifted at taking risks, not worrying about what other people think about them, and seeming and appearing confident? Sure. But I guarantee you it's through practice, application, consistency, resilience, determination, and all of the things that we've discussed on today's podcast. I hope this discussion has helped you. I know that more confidence is coming for you in your future if you follow this simple formula, and I would love for you to leave me a comment below to tell me how this has helped you or who you are going to share it with to be able to have the confidence that you seek. We are all confident in some area. That's the one thing I tell people about consistency. People say, how do you become consistent? Well, the thing is, we're all consistent. It's just, are you consistent in the things that are leading you towards the things you say you want? So perhaps we'll do a future episode on how to be more intentionally consistent, but the big thing here is just persist in the notion that you will develop confidence to become the confident shooter that you already are in mind to become that in body. The body follows the mind. So let's train ourselves to tell ourselves we are a confident shooter, persist in that notion, back it up with action, and you will be confident. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Mental Advantage Podcast. Please go back and listen to any of the other episodes. I hope you have enjoyed it. And you'll consider subscribing so you won't miss any future ones. I'll see you next time.