3 Ways To Build Unstoppable Confidence - Dean Graziosi

If I want to protect my confidence, I don't look at my phone. So as soon as I wake up. And you could rob this or use a variation of it, do me a favor, try it for me, see if I'm not lying about this being the foundation for your next level of wealth. Like my kids, I have kids 10 and 12, right. They don't like, they're frustrated when they got to get a pen out even at school because everything's electronic, right? That's just, that's just your life in today's world. But I don't think electronically doing it with your thumbs or your fingers or just hearing it, it just doesn't, it's not, it doesn't hit your physiology. Like it doesn't sink, Internalize, internalize.

I agree, right.

So when I write something out, like I wish I could show you, when we're done, I'll show you. But my journal from this weekend, I took 30 pages of notes.

Wow.

Now and I'm sitting there, we're in a group of people that have generated 10 million and I'm over a billion and everywhere in between, right? There wasn't one successful person there this weekend that didn't take 100 pages of notes. Like we were kids. Like, like we were in school. I mean I was writing voracious, like I was writing, writing, writing, writing like some of the stuff like stop, stop, stop, don't say another word, I gotta write this down, right? And then I put like still like I've done for 30 years, I put one one to three stars next to everything I write down. So if it's one, I want to get to it someday. Two, I should look at it pretty soon. If I put three stars next to something, that's the stuff. Literally tonight after you leave and I have one more meeting, I'll sit in my room tonight and I will take all the three star stuff and I'll put create an action plan immediately. I'll send it to my team. Each person that needs to do something or if I have to do because that's what moves the needle.

I love that. Now what's your system on a day to day on a practical level, because there's a lot of people watching, whether entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs. Maybe people just want to take their life, their business or their body the next level. Talk to me a little bit about what your system is for your daily.

To do lists, you know, that's great, I'll do it. So yeah, so I have a. And if you ever heard me say this Before. Excuse me, but it's really important, is I have a morning routine. And I think it's really important that if I look at. I'm not big on routines. I want to be honest with you. Like, I shouldn't say that I'm not big on doing the same thing. I don't like driving to work the same way. I'm not a structure type person. I could never. If somebody paid me 5 million a year, 100 million a year to work on an assembly line, and I did the same thing every day, I couldn't do it. That's not the way my brain's wired. But my accountant loves doing the same thing every day. He loves looking at the books, creating the same spreadsheets, and he loves it anyway. But my morning routine is super important because I feel that one thing that we don't give enough credit to is confidence. I don't know about you, Omar, but I've never done anything good in my life when my confidence is down. Amen. Did you ever ask a girl on a date when your confidence is down? Nope. Right. Did you ever ask a part, and if she. If you did and your confidence was down, did you get the date?

Yeah. No. And even if you do get it, you don't feel good about where you're going or how you carry yourself.

That's right. If you called my team and your confidence was down and you said, hey, you know, I'd really love to do this thing with Dean, we wouldn't be here. Right. You were confident, you were articulate. You knew that you could deliver value. Right? So nothing good happens when your confidence is down. Not even 5%. Confidence isn't 0 to 100. It's 95 to 50 to 100%. You're at 93% with your confidence. It's not like you. It's like you just play a little small. Maybe not today. I'm not going to make that sales call today. You know what? Maybe I shouldn't risk that money. Maybe I should stay in the job a little longer. Maybe I should stay in this terrible, abusive relationship like you just make shitty decisions. So for me, I want to do everything in my power to protect my confidence. And listen, if you're watching right now and you want to start a company or you have a company, you want to make more money, you might be thinking, all right, Dean, you done a billion sales? Tell me how to make the money. I'm telling you. Literally, I'm telling you right now. Like, when I look back, I always thought it Was like, I needed this thing. Like, it had to be real estate, or it had to be this or it had to be that. And it wasn't. It was. I went upstream, I got self education, I anchored in habits that actually allowed me to push through and other people gave up.

What percent of success would you say is habit versus actual business acumen, knowledge?

I think it's. I think it's 60, 40, maybe 70, 30. 70, 30 on the habit side. So a habit I have in the morning is taking that confidence thing real, is what do I do to protect my confidence with everything I can. And I think of it as confidence or offense and defense. Did you ever have days where you play defense all day? Like, you wake up and you get an email like, ah, shit, I gotta put this fire out. And then, like, you get in this defense mode and you're kind of waiting for your team to screw up so you can fix it. Your team to send you an email that the sale didn't happen or. Or you didn't get the interview, or the Facebook ads aren't working and you're just in this mood of like, ah, let me fix this. To me, that's defense. When I play defense, I'm flat. I'm not taking my company. I'm not doing what my company needs. They need me to be the freaking leader. They need me to be the innovator. They need me to see what's coming up tomorrow and be ahead of it so I can take the team and all of us to the next level. I can't be a defensive guy. I gotta be offense. So how do I protect my confidence and how do I play offense on a regular basis? And I. So you're gonna realize how smart I am. I'm just kidding. Is I started observing what robbed my confidence. And here's the brilliant part. I did less of that. And then I started observing what built my confidence, and I did more of that. Again, my brilliance. Right? No, it's the simple thing. So in the morning, here's what I realized. If I woke up and looked at my phone, it was Russian roulette. If I roll over, the first thing that most of you watching right now do is you roll over, you grab your phone, you. And you get a text, and you either go, oh. Or you go, oh, shit, that's right. Should I answer this after the gym or after I eat?

Or should I do it 100% accurate?

Let me do it now. Let me do it now. It's like. And all of a sudden you're Sitting on the edge of your bed, and you're like, oh, shit, it's late. You shower, you go off to work.

100%.

Ever do it?

Yep. Absolutely.

Okay. That, to me, showed me that that's playing with my offense or defense, with my confidence. So now I force myself and I tell you. I have kids, and they live half with me, half with their mom. So I do roll over. So I love being transparent. And I look and see if there's any message for them, but I don't look at any. I just look at the front of the phone. If Brianna or Brody text me, I'm looking. If nothing else, I don't. Because it's Russian roulette. The sales didn't hit the point you want. The book didn't hit New York Times, best seller, any of those things. And you have the same thing. So if I want to protect my confidence, I don't look at my phone. So as soon as I wake up. And you could rob this or use a variation of it. Do me a favor, try it for a week. See if I'm not lying about this being the foundation for your next level of wealth, success, whatever you want to call it. I immediately think of something I'm grateful for. Now everybody knows gratitude. You can't be grateful and sad, grateful and stressed, blah, blah, blah. Did you ever try to do a gratitude journal for more than 30 days? You run out of shit to say, Like, I already said, my fan. Yeah. Like, I'm happy, I'm healthy, right? But what I try to do is pick little things like, oh, my God, these sheets feel amazing. Or, oh, my God, it's sunny. Some days, literally. My buddy Trent Shelton told me this, shared this stat with me, but 150,000 people die every day. He's like. He wakes up and says, wow, I'm not one of those today. Like, that's setting the bar low. Like, how can you not have a great day? So if I do this and I have to tell you, I screw it up sometimes, some days I forget.

Yeah, you're human.

I'm human. So some days I'm in a hurry, I wake up and just go do it. And I screw my day up. So I.

So even at this level, you do feel that way?

I still do still. So I wake up, I don't check my phone. This is the perfect morning for offense and confidence. I don't check my phone. I think of something. I'm grateful for a few things. And it could be a smile on my son's face when he Got a double playing baseball or anything? And it just fills me up. If not, keep a book next to your bed. If you can't think anything, keep my book, Tony's book, anybody's book. Wayne Dyer, anybody's book that inspires you. Highlight all the areas that you really like and leave it next to your bed. Just flip open a page, find a highlight, and read three sentences. Just something to me. I want to stimulate the brain to be in a positive offense.

You want to create an anchor, first thing.

Exactly. First thing. Right. So I think it's something I'm grateful for. The second thing, I think of three wins I had the previous day.

I love that I do the same exact thing.

Because most entrepreneurs are people striving to be one. What we do is we want to say, I can't believe we didn't get this done yet. Why aren't we here yet? Why aren't we making more money? Listen, the start of my infomercial with Larry King is something that felt everybody. It's like, have you ever in your adult life looked in the mirror and thought to yourself, wow, I thought I'd be further ahead by now. Like, that's just the thing that people do themselves all the time. I thought I'd be further ahead. Why aren't I making the money? Why didn't I start the company? But we don't give ourselves credit enough. So if you have a little gratitude and then you think of three things that you were a win the day before, you go, oh, wow, I did accomplish that. Oh, my God, I did help out here. Oh, I gotta thank you or what? You know, and it puts you in a different mindset. And then I think of three wins I want to happen that day. This is all in seconds. So gratitude. Three wins the previous day, three wins that day. I feel like I feed my body. I get out of bed personally. This is what I do. I walk down and I make myself a green drink. Scoop of green powder, some apple cider vinegar, some XCT oil, MCT oil. I down that and I go work out. I just need to go do it first thing in the morning or I never get it done. So I felt like I fed my mind, I fed my body, and then I'll come back, I do my little routine with my kids, and I make a get to do list. That sounds cheesy.

I love that to do list because.

We'Re always thinking we have to do this. And I used, like, I hate certain things. I hate meetings with accountants. I hate going over Excel spreadsheets I hate conference calls. Yeah, but there was a time and somebody may have said it, so I'd love to give somebody credit, but something shifted and I started observing. I live in Phoenix, Arizona. In the summer, it's 115 degrees, and I started observing people that work in construction doing blacktop, putting on a tar roof at 115 degrees, sun beating down like unbelievable. I don't have to do conference calls. I don't have to meet with my accountant. I get to. I get to make an impact and hopefully help somebody here write books, be it masterminds, fly on private jets. Because I get to do conference calls. I get to go with it. I just started taking all the stuff I hated and I just wrote a get to do list. I'm like, I get to do it. And as silly and stupid as that sounds, that mental shift made all those things not seem so troublesome anymore. It's like, I get to do it. I can't do the good stuff unless I do that. And the other thing I do is I lump the things I don't like in one day. So if I got to do the real business stuff, like Dean owns a business, got to be in the frog that day, I just do it right, the frog that day. So that's my morning routine. That is like a practical thing. And. And I promise you, you do it for a week, it's addicting. It's addicting.

Powerful. Now, let me ask you this. When it comes to investing in yourself, obviously personal development, you said, was a core foundational principle that shifted your life, allowed you to get to next levels. Talk to me a little bit about how much investing in personal development. You know, obviously it starts with a book or program, and then it might be a seminar or a live event, and then it becomes something bigger and bigger. Talk to me a little bit about things you might have experienced mentally when you were uncertain about investing in personal development, where it actually ROI'd for you in more ways than one. Talk to me about that journey, because I think a lot of people, like you're saying, have the stigma or inherited the stigma from their parents or their environment. Like, oh, personal development's a bunch of guys are just trying to sell you old tricks or whatever it is. Talk to me a little bit about what your journey was like as you invested more and more in personal development and then the ROI that that created for you and, you know, more ways for one.

Yeah, I hear that all the time. It's like, oh, personal development. They've been saying the same thing forever. And I feel like saying, but you haven't done any of it yet. So what does it matter if they keep saying that you're not taking action? It's like somebody asked you for advice, and you already gave them advice in the past they didn't take. It's like you didn't do the first thing I tell you. Why would you. Why would I give you more advice? But for me, my first big purchase. I did a lot of small events and books and courses. But my buddy Joe Polish started Genius. Yeah, I cut him as first check. It was 25,000 bucks 30, 13 years ago. Had no idea what. I had run a couple masterminds then for my students, but I never paid anybody else money. And I remember thinking, it doesn't seem organized. It's 25 grand. Like, do I have the time to really go? And am I going to get an ROI on the money? Even though this was my life, I still had that. So when you say that, it's like, it's not that far in the past. Twelve years ago, even though I was in this business, I was like, is this really going to work for me? But that fundamentally changed my life. Like, right now. Masterminds, groups, workshops. There's nothing that has moved the needle in my life more than that. Nothing. Nothing even close. So I'll give you a story. I give Joe 25,000 bucks. He puts about 10 people in the group. The first meeting. We're all sitting around. He barely knows what he's going to do. He just puts the collective wisdom in the room and said, let's go at it. I was publishing a book called Be a Real Estate Millionaire at the time. It was when the market shifted, it was probably 2007. Yeah, I bet you it's 2007, 12 years ago, and we're in this meeting, and we start talking about the book. It's going to the printer the next day. And Joe, we're brainstorming back and forth. He goes, how cool would it be to have a phone number on the back of the book? Like a star, right on the book that's going to be in bookstores. I got a publishing deal on this book. Plus, it was an infomercial I was doing a star that says, do not open this book before you call this number. Now, this is 12 years ago. So the Internet wasn't what it was. It was easier to just do a phone call. And what we did is we put that sticker on and then that phone number when they called, because a Lot of times people buy a book, you can't serve them more. You can't offer more courses because the publisher gets the name and the credit card. I just get a small little royalty, Right? Right. So we put this star in the book with an 800 number, and it went to a recording. Was like, hey, this is Dean. I'm so glad you're picking my book up right now, but I wanted to offer you another opportunity. Like, get the book, read it word for word. But I'm doing a special video training, if you want to be a part. Anyway, we did this, the first one ever. Wow.

Very risky to do, right?

Yeah, risky to do. No one had ever done it before. And just fortunately, that book went on to be my best seller of all time. It broke a million copies. And that phone number, I'd love to say I know the exact number, but I guarantee it was over a million dollars, that phone number. And that moment, everything shifted. For me, it was just one little thing. Like, people want to go to a course or a Mastermind or a workshop or a live, and they're thinking they're gonna get a hundred things. They do, but usually it's only one. You only need one shift. And everything changes. And then I became different. I stopped looking at it. Like, when I go to Masterminds, it buys me time back because what I did this weekend, I have a journal that's worth 10 million bucks because of this weekend. And it's gonna save me time because these guys already figured out something I didn't. Yeah, they went through the heartache, and I went through. I figured out ways, like, we sold 500,000 copies on social media. None of my friends have. I gave them the blueprint this weekend. I gave them the blueprint to sell a ton of books and make a massive impact on social media. Right. So they don't have to spend five years. I took five years to figure that out. They got it in three days. Right. And once I realized that Masterminds personal growth gives you back time, it doesn't matter what you spend. If you take out a capability or two, you get your time back, you get your money back, and you get to go faster.

Well, that's incredible. Now, talk to me also about. You know, I noticed in your entrepreneurial journey, there was a lot of times where you were doing new things, not just a sticker on the book, but in doing an infomercial, you know, who is this Dean Graziosi guy? Out of nowhere, he sees a Tony Robinson, gets inspired. Talk to me a little Bit about, you know, the moments of you having limiting beliefs about doing things that nobody was doing. You know, now you're probably, you know, well versed in doing infomercials and, you know, direct response marketing. But in the beginning, you had no clue, right. You were just as uncertain as maybe Russell was before he started his thing with digital marketing or Tony and personal development. But take me back to the dean that was sort of like, unsure about pulling the trigger. And what was the psychology? And the reason I want to zoom in on this is because I know there's a lot of people out there who might be where you were, where maybe, you know, whether things are going well or not going well, they're thinking about doing their own version of an infomercial or they're thinking about launching their own personal brand or their own thing. But they're like, I don't want to. Or like, ah, I'm nervous. What if it doesn't work? What if I invest money? What was your mindset at the time and over the years? How has it evolved when you're uncertain but you pull the trigger anyways?

Yeah.

You know, take that mindset.

Sometimes it's hard to go back to that mindset because I've developed so many things on how I talk through that. So I'm going to tell you how I look through it now. But if I go back to that, I would say that the pain of leaving my life the way it is was stronger than the pain of failure. And I think that's. That's what, like, the thought of being like my dad. For me, that was my. I didn't want to be a guy that works 60 hours a week in a collision shop with headaches, miserable, at the world, ready to fist fight anybody. Because in her, he knew. My dad is smart as hell. One of the smartest guys I've ever met, One of the hardest workers I've ever met. But smarts and hard work doesn't equate to success. You know that. My dad's one of the hardest workers I know. He didn't make a lot of money. Smartest guy I know didn't make a lot of money. It was people who went for it. Like, they don't build statues of critics. They build statues of people who go against the grain, where everybody says they're nuts and they go for it. And. And I think if I look back in that, and I'll tell you is, what if you leave your life the way it is? What if right now, this very moment, the thing that You're a little afraid of what? If you fast forward five years and you were looking in the mirror and you said, well, I didn't do it because of that thing. Fast forward 20 years, you think this is bullshit. There's people right now that are 80 years old and they thought that one little thing was too hard to face, or they didn't want to fail. And they're 85, 90 years old, and they wish they would give their life to go back to who you are right now and. And say, oh, my God. I mean, do you want to be at the end of your life and people standing around your deathbed going, well, I'm really glad Omar played it safe. I'm really glad he kept that job and he got his 401k and, you know, he retired in a little trailer in Florida or Arizona or Southern California, like, that would be, like, crippling pain. Like, use that.

You live a life for something.

Yeah. You have so much to give the world, and failure is a part of the journey. Like Sarah Blakely. I love the story of Sarah Blakely. Like, somebody asked her why you failed so much. How did you keep going? Her father just told her her whole life, he used to ask her, have you ever hear that story? Yeah. Yeah. At the dinner table.

Yeah. What did you fail at today?

What'd you fail at today? She said, nothing. He's like, you're not pushing yourself. And so failure became something good in her life. So she failed. She's like, okay. Or somebody else like, oh, my God, I failed. Who cares, right?

They get scared to pull the trigger ever.

Yeah. So I would just say I'd love. I said, I think an exercise that I would visualize today, and I'll tell you one that happened to me most recently is I just visualize five years in advance. I say, is this problem strong enough? Is this fear big enough to hold me back from a better version of me? And it never is. And that helps me power through. Back then, I probably just kept saying, don't want to be like my dad, because that's the path. I know. Listen, here's what I can tell you. If you don't overcome the fear, if you don't push, you already know the life you're going to have. It's right in front of you. Ain't going to change. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. You don't do something different, you're going to get the same result over and over. So feel that pain and let Pain push you powerful.

And on that note, I know there's a famous story of your father actually coming home one day, being the hard worker that he is, and seeing that someone else was mowing your lawn. Can you share that story with the audience? Yeah, share that story with the audience.

I bought my first apartment house.

How old were you at the time?

I was probably 20.

So this is when you first started to sort of be different than dad?

Yeah, yeah. So I got my first apartment house and I had a collision shop. I was building houses. I was probably 20, maybe 22, 21, 22. I was building houses, had 18 apartments and I had a collision shop. And every Saturday in this apartment house I owned that I actually lived in too, had this big ass lawn. And every Saturday from like nine in the morning till five in the afternoon, I'd mow and weed, whack and trim and hedges and all that stuff. And man, I realized one day it's like, wow, I could go work on a car and make 500 bucks. I could sell a car, make a thousand, go work on an apartment, go try to find a new house to buy. I could potentially make thousands of dollars on my Saturday and I'm mowing this damn lawn all day for. Sorry, I hired somebody for 50 bucks. The kid's name was Doug Smith. 15 year old kid, he comes, he's mowing the lawn and I'm walking out and my dad pulls in the driveway and literally I got a stomach ache because I knew my dad was born during a depression and my dad had the limiting belief. And he doesn't probably to this day realize he probably does now since I, he knows I take care of him, so. But he had this limiting belief sales.

Should change his mind a little bit.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. He had this limiting belief from his parents that if you could do it yourself, why would you pay someone?

Yeah, same thing with my father.

Yeah, don't you dare pay if you could do it yourself. So my dad comes and I'm paying, paid somebody to mow my lawn. It was like sacrilegious. Like he lost his mind. And he's like, what? You hired someone to mow your lawn? And he went like this. He went, oh, Mr. Big Shot, you're done now. This is it. You went over the edge. You are gonna blow your money. You're never gonna like, just went off. He got so mad, he jumped in his car and literally like hit the gas. It was gravel in the driveway and he dented up the whole side of my car because the wheels Spun the gravel, and it was like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, all over my car. He left, pissed off, squealing the wheels. And I remember sitting there, and I don't want to make this like a movie scene, but I remember sitting there going, I'm on the right track. I really felt it in that moment. And what I looked at was an ROI. Like if he mowed his lawn, 50 bucks. All I had to do was go make 70 bucks, and it was still worth me not mowing my lawn. But I bet you I made 700 to 5,000 bucks on those Saturdays. And then I just started thinking of all the things that I shouldn't be doing. And I'm a huge advocate of not to do lists. I've been doing it ever since that age. Like, there are things that you do because your parents told you you should. There's things that you do that don't serve God, don't serve a bigger version of you, that don't serve love in your life, don't serve more income, don't serve your business, but you do them anyway. And I'm always obsessing on things that I do that I shouldn't be, that I could either delegate, eliminate, or automate. Right. If you're currently paying your bills in your handwriting, automate that stuff. Buy time back, work on personal development. Work on your new business. If you're doing hanging out with your buddies that you've been doing forever, but they all talk about how bad the economy is or what an ass the president is or how bad their jobs are, and that's taking away your energy. Dump those friends or avoid that. Get that time back for personal growth and working on your business. There's certain projects that you work on that used to excite you. They don't anymore. Stop doing them. Eliminate them. Or so I literally, in my life, when I didn't have money, I just had to eliminate stuff or automate stuff and sometimes get someone to mow the lawn. But as I started making more money, I just looked at everything as an roi. If I don't love it and I could pay somebody to do it, and I could go do something else to pay for it, and it would make me more money. I just kept chipping away. And that's kind of the secret of Dan Sullivan, who runs Strategic Coach. It's like work on your unique ability and pay people to do the rest. That's how entrepreneurs go from 100,000 heirs to millionaires to billionaires. Exactly. Is work on what you. What moves the needle and light you up and get people to do the rest. What's up? What's up? Hey, before you go, you need to watch these next few videos. They're absolute game changers. Hurry up and click right over here and watch them, and I'll see you there, Sam.