The Confidence To Achieve And Succeed with Robert MacPhee ­ Part 1

Coming to you from the center for Social Confidence in Portland, Oregon, welcome to Shrink for the Shy guy helping men everywhere go from social anxiety to social domination with your host, Dr. Aziz.

Hey, welcome to today's episode of the show. Today we're going to be diving into the confidence to succeed and to achieve the confidence that it takes to be able to put your mind to something and to create it in your life. And I think confidence is the doorway to success in every area of our life. And if we don't have that confidence, then we struggle. It's hard. We make a little bit of progress and then we stall out. Or we don't even start something because we're doubting ourselves, we're criticizing ourselves. We're saying, I couldn't do that. That's not going to work out. Here's the 50 reasons why I am destined to fail at X. And X is anything that you want, anything you want to succeed at. And I'm excited today because we have a special guest who has studied confidence, self esteem, high achievement, and success for decades. So we're going to dive into that in just a moment. If you'd like to go deeper or learn more about the interview in the show notes or anything about the show, go to shrinkforthshyguy.com, shrinkforthshy guy. You can send me a message there. Ask me a question. I'll be answering more and more of those in the Ask the Shrink bonus segments. So that's a great way to get your unique questions answered in a way that's also going to help everyone. So go to shrinkforthshyguy.com for more information there. So the confidence to succeed, I think is extremely important. And I'm curious in your life, this is just going to help set you up as you listen to this interview. So it's not some abstract thing like, oh, yeah, success, this abstract concept, but, like, think about your life right now. What would more success and achievement look like to you? Would it be in your work, in your career, you own a business, or are you in someone's business? How would you like to excel or achieve or succeed? Is that something you even allow yourself to imagine? Or do you think like, well, this is just what I'm doing. This is what I deserve. This is where I'm at. This is where I should be, shouldn't want more. I shouldn't strive for more. It's not good. I'm not gonna get it anyway. So I'll just tell myself that it's not good, right to see what's happening there. But if you could remove that just temporarily, and really see what you actually want, what would more achievement look like? Maybe it's in your career. Maybe it's a certain amount of income you want to earn, a certain amount of promotion you want to get. Maybe you want to create your own business and have it thrive. We'll be talking a lot about thriving in the interview, but there's success in other areas too, right? Maybe it's in your dating life, your relationships. Maybe you want to meet someone. Maybe you want to create a phenomenal relationship with that person. Maybe it could be something else entirely in your health, in your social life. And maybe most importantly of all, I think, is that inner success, that inner fulfillment. Tony Robbins says success without fulfillment is the ultimate failure. So maybe success for you is about achieving something, but also feeling good during the process and once you've done it. And in my interview, we talk a lot about that as well, because we want to figure out how to not just be driving ourselves to get to that next level and thinking like, I'm not good enough, I'm not good enough, I'm not good enough. Got to get better, got to get better, got to get more. Gotta get that particular date, the particular relationship, the particular promotion, the particular income, that particular car. That'll be enough. And so we're bust through a lot of that, too. So you can not only achieve and succeed highly, but also not need to. To feel like you're a good enough person. So without further ado, now that we got you thinking about success in your own life, let's dive into my interview with Robert McPhee, who is an amazing just wealth of knowledge. Get out your sheet of paper or your phone or whatever you're gonna take notes on because you're gonna want to remember this stuff. You're gonna want to deepen it into your mind, into your learning. So let's jump into that interview right now.

Expert interview.

My guest expert today is Robert McPhee, and he's the founder and president of a company called Heartset Inc. In San Diego, California. And I met Robert not too long ago at a seminar that we were both at. And. And he immediately struck me as someone who was very knowledgeable and skilled in a lot of areas based on what we were talking about, but also in how people can approach life with confidence. I kind of felt that right away. And then as I found out more about him, he was the director of training for the Canfield Training Group and worked with Jack Canfield who's the co creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul book series and many other things that you might have heard of. He's also been the, the director and one of the founding members of something called the Transformational Leadership Council. And he helps people become better leaders, better decision makers. In fact, he goes around, teaches people in companies and universities how to make excellent decisions and be better leaders. And there is no place where confidence shows up more than in leadership. He's done a ton of other things. He's an author. I could go on and on about all that you've done, Robert, but thank you so much for joining us today.

You're welcome. I'm thrilled to be here. I'm glad we had the chance to reconnect. And confidence is a topic that pushes a lot of buttons on my end. So I'm looking forward to it.

Fun. Interesting. I'm so curious, what do you mean by that? Like pushes buttons and gets you excited or pushes you buttons as in like.

Oh no, no, totally. That's your. That's funny because pushing buttons can be, can be taken several ways. But it's interesting. As I listen to you talk about my background, it takes me all the way back to when I first connected with Jack and his work because I was in a one day workshop, one of these like how to deal with difficult people kind of things or something like that. And the woman who was leading the workshop held up a set of Jack's tapes, cassette tapes, if that tells you how long ago it was. And she said Jack believes that all the problems that we have in our lives generally come down to our self esteem level. And I thought, wow, that's so true. And ended up buying those tapes and listening to those tapes for a couple years and then connecting with Jack and going to his workshop and ended up working with him for a long, long period of time. But I think that same kind of conversation about self esteem, that same kind of ringing true about just how important and how critical self esteem is, is the same thing with confidence. And I think there's some similarities to self esteem and confidence and then that without it we are really going to struggle in any area of our lives. So that's what I meant by pushing buttons in a very way.

Yeah. And there's some really good stuff you said in there about how, you know, our self esteem, our level of self esteem determines so many things. The quality of our life, how we approach problems, what the results that we get. So that is extremely important to go into. But you also said you kind of describing self esteem and confidence maybe as two different things. I'm curious. How do you see those two things? Are they the same? Are they related? How are they different?

I would say they're very similar. In my work with Jack, I learned to define self esteem using his formula, which was based on lovable and capable. That if we go through our life, if we wake up in the morning and we. And we feel that knowing that we're lovable and that we're capable, then we can function really, really well. It's interesting, as I even say, that I hadn't really thought about this, But a lot of my work these days is focused on helping people do what I call thriving, which I define as achieving at a really high level, but also having a really great experience of life, really being happy and joyful in your experience of life. And it's the same kind of thing, you know, it's that the relationships we have with people having that feeling of being lovable, but also being capable and achieving things out there in the world, in my experience, and I'd be curious to get your opinion on this. I think the confidence level certainly comes in on both sides of that equation. But even more so on the capable side, where I see people's confidence getting in their way a lot is in terms of what they're capable of, in terms of reaching their potential, Accomplishing the things that they're really, again, capable of accomplishing. So I would say that's kind of the fine difference in my mind between confidence and self esteem. Although they're very similar, it seems like the confidence is more focused on kind of the achievement side of that equation. Is that what you've seen in your experience as well?

Sure. That's an interesting distinction. It's like the confidence, you're saying is like the yes, I can. Yes, I can do it. Yes, I can try. Yes, I can figure it out. I think that's absolutely true. I think it's funny because as I've been studying confidence, I mean, at first when I first thought about confidence, I thought, oh, that means, like, you can talk to people and stuff. Like, because for me, I was very limited and had a lot of social anxiety. And Evie said, oh, tell me what confidence is like, or if there's a confident person, what would they be like? I'd be like, oh, they could talk to anybody and just be comfortable. And that's social confidence. But then there's what you're talking about here, which is like a belief in your ability to do you're capable and there's sort of that element of confidence. But then what I also found as I worked with people more and more and myself, that I think that a lovable thing is right in there with the capable. Because the reason that most people, you know, you probably have seen this too, that people are capable of way more than the stories they tell themselves. They tell themselves, oh, I can't do that. Oh, it's not gonna work. But really they could, they could figure it out, they could learn. But what's. I think what stops people from doing that and from really just trying and maybe kind of sucking at it at first, but keep going and keep getting better is that they try and then they fail or it's not that great. And then they feel unlovable, they feel worthless. So those two are so interconnected that it's almost like the capable. To be capable and go after what we want requires that lovability.

Yeah.

We're gonna pause for just one moment and then continue with our interview with confidence expert Robert McPhee.

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Yeah, and it's interesting with self esteem and I saw this with Jack's work. I've certainly seen it in the educational world especially. Seems like with the younger, younger, earlier levels of education. I'll just say the younger, younger children. I'm in this process right now trying to stay away from using the word kids. My own children are older and I've liked that. I've got this little flag that goes up in my mind, says don't call them kids. They're not kids anymore. And when I'm working with colleges and universities, I got to be really conscious of not doing that. But the young people this term self esteem, got a really bad name because when we focus on the lovable side of it, you know, it's like, oh, you failed your test, but we still love you and you're still a good person. And it's, you know, like the trophies for everyone in sports and all that kind of thing. And on some level it gets a bad name. But it's also A really critical element, like most people are not getting the level of encouragement and support that they really crave, that we really need to function on a really high level. And arguably you can go too far with that. You know, it is important to learn responsibility and learn consequences for actions. And, you know, not that, you know, life is all perfectly rosy and wonderful every single day, because it's not. But I think we've erred so far on the side of, you know, life is hard, we need to work hard and all that kind of thing. That whole element of just feeling loved and feeling cared for and feeling a sense of self love and having that be okay is really critical. And I agree. It's funny, I think one of the reasons I asked you if that's been your experience, because even as I was saying that the confidence is more focused on the capable side, I was kind of thinking to myself, well, I'm not sure I can really leave out that lovable side. So I would totally agree with you.

I know, it's so interesting because as you're saying that and I've heard that, you know, the trophies for everyone kind of the self esteem movement was bad and a lot of people have internalized sort of a, I don't know, cynical attitude towards self love. It's kind of like, oh, here we go with the flowers. And you know, and it's like, hold on a second here. I mean, I don't really know what the story is behind. Maybe they actually did say let's give trophies to everyone. But there is an element of like, yeah, you didn't win the game and that's okay. Like, it doesn't, it doesn't have any effect on your worth as a human. It's. And yeah, maybe that team played better or they have more skill or something. That's, that's fine. We can work on your skill level if you want, but it has nothing to do with you as a human. Like, I think that's the message that, that, that self esteem movement was trying to.

Right. To me, it's foundational where, you know, with, I mean, I coached my own children when they were very young and you know, in soccer and T ball and basketball and those kinds of things. And I believe when they are young that they all should get a trophy, that the objective should not be winning and losing. It shouldn't be, you know, how many points you score. It should be, do you want to come back and play next year? Want to keep engaging? And I think it goes right back to something you said earlier in this conversation about how when we're first learning how to do something, it can get a little tricky, right? It doesn't always go so well. You know, you go all the way back to everything we've ever learned how to do, from, you know, walking, you know, to playing sports, to school, to everything. When we first try something in general, it doesn't go very well. I have a powerful metaphor that I teach. I'll have to show you sometime with wine corks, where I will do a simple. It looks almost like a magic trick kind of a thing, but it's not a magic trick. It's just transferring two wine corks from one hand to the other. And it looks really easy when I do it. But if you tried to do it the same way I did it, you would have a hard time. And it puts people in their body in that experience of what it's like to see somebody do something and have it be really easy. But then when they try and do it themselves, it's kind of hard. And for a lot of people, the first thing that shows up is they want to quit. Like, they don't like that feeling. They're uncomfortable, it's awkward. They feel stupid. They're not good at games, whatever it is. And I believe it goes all the way back to conditioning early in their life. And to me, the beauty of, you know, if the kids come out and they're playing soccer, and some of them are clearly more athletic than others, but they're all laughing and smiling and having a good time, and they all get a trophy. I'm good with that. You know, they all come back next year, they try it again, and at some point you find out which ones are, you know, really, you know, gonna make a life out of soccer and be like, my brother, who's in his 50s and still plays soccer. Now, if they're in high school and they're all still getting participation trophies, I think we've got a problem, because there is a point. Like, I remember when my oldest daughter went and tried out for the soccer team in her high school, and she got cut, and it wasn't great. I wasn't like, oh, goody, my daughter got cut. But I look back on it now, and I see that was a really valuable experience for her. It was an experience in resiliency. I think it ultimately ended up building her confidence because she said, okay, well, I didn't make the soccer team, so I'm going to try lacrosse. And she ended up after never playing lacrosse in her entire life, playing four years of high school lacrosse and it ended up being just fine for her. So there is something about that foundation of self esteem and then when they're younger, it's perfectly okay. And I also think for adults, if they've never had that, there's got to be a point where they get some of that. I saw that in Jack's workshops where we had adults, you know, people in their 40s and their 50s or even older and they would get more nurturing and love and support in a one week workshop with Jack Canfield and our team than they had maybe gotten in their entire lives. And it was really eye opening on some level.

Yeah. And it's super important because we're going to pause for just one more moment and then resume with our interview with confidence expert Robert McPhee.

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That's what I found when I'm working with people is there is a tremendous lack of that self love. It's okay that you didn't get it right away, any of that message. There's a huge lack of that. And a lot of people, not just the people I work with, I think that's kind of a problem or a challenge for most people. Underneath, maybe they hide it behind their Persona, but underneath they are not very good at something. They feel ashamed, they feel embarrassed, they feel like a failure and they want to stop. And there is, there is no like safety net. There's no nurturing energy that's like, hey, you're alright. And in fact we think that when we make a mistake, we gotta like, you know, I'm actually right and you can't see it. We have to realize that this is audio. I'm clenching my hands, my fists and gritting my teeth and there's this like, God, okay, here we go. And this sort of angry and maybe there's a determination in there, but often not. It's kind of like instead of a bending, it's a breaking. And then people quit. But in a lot of the things that I help people with, you kind of can't quit really. Like soccer, you can quit and never play again. Pursuing love and relationships, creating that in your life or you know, being in your company or in your career, you can't really quit that forever. I mean, I guess you can. There are people that have given up on that. But, you know, so. So then we have to try again. And then we're this kind of try and then stop and try and stop. And you said, really one thing that's very interesting in there that I wanted to ask you about, it's like for most people, the natural impulse or first impulse upon a failure or setback is to quit. And why do you think that is and how do we change that or what's going on there?

Well, I think we're kind of talking about the foundation of that. And I think the work that you do and the work that I do really on some level directly is targeted to that exact issue. Like you said, people in terms of finding a real wonderful, loving relationship in their life or really thriving in their career, people can quit. You know, I kind of heard you caught yourself in the middle of that too. Like, oh, they could quit, but the consequences of doing that are really tragic, you know, and there are people who have given up on finding a loving relationship. There are people who have given up on really being successful in their career. And it is kind of tragic. But again, I think the work you and I are doing really addresses that really gets to that place where people have the resources they need, they have that foundation. And I think it was what really intrigued me probably the most when I saw that you were targeting your coaching and the work that you do specifically to this concept called confidence. Because the other dynamic that you were talking about, about kind of hard work, lots of effort, willpower, people can get a lot of stuff done that way, but that's not what I would call thriving, you know, like people who are living their life. You, I know you told me before we started this that you had had a chance to read my book and there's a diagram in there about how results come from action. And then actions are driven by our thinking, and our thinking is driven by both external influences in our world and also our self image, our beliefs about who we are, which is a lot of what we're talking about with the self esteem and confidence. And if people are just operating in that results in action model, where it's hard work, effort, willpower, stuff gets done, things get created, but people get tired, you know, that, I think, is where we get to the point where we want to quit. Like things don't go the way we want them to go, or there's so much work and so much effort required to accomplish what it is we're accomplishing that we just can't keep going at that pace. So, you know, I think the answer to that is to look at the question, is there a way to accomplish as much or more, but do it without so much hard work and effort and struggle and stress and anxiety. I mean, the work that I do with young people now, I see the level of stress and pressure that our young people are under in today's world, even if they're doing really well. I've done some work at Stanford and some work at Dartmouth, and I sit down and I talk to these students and I realize how much pressure they're under and how much stress they're faced with. And in many cases, they're not very well equipped to handle it because their parents have kind of covered for them for so many years. And then they, you know, plop them down into this incredibly high stress environment and expect them to continue to perform at a high level. And no one's ever really addressed the kind of issues we're talking about here about self love and what do you really want to do and what's most important to you? What's your vision? What are your values? Do you have a fundamental understanding of things like personal responsibility? And the young people who do have that can do just fine in those kinds of environments, but the ones who don't are in that model of, you know, try really hard, do, you know, work even harder, sleep less, you know, that kind of thing. And they're literally killing themselves. I mean, it's just they're wearing themselves down. And here they have this opportunity to have this incredible experience in the college and university environment, which is the perfect metaphor for life. You know, we all have this incredible opportunity to have a wonderful experience in our lives. And yet we're in this, you know, hard work, try harder, willpower, no matter what kind of kind of world. And I believe a lot of it has to do with the fact that that foundation has never really been built. We don't really know what our values are. We don't really have a vision that we're pursuing. And without that, I think we do get to that point where it's like, this isn't fun anymore. It's fun. I don't know if you could hear that little clicking. It's like I'm holding my pen and just in that moment, I just like, drop my pen. Screw it, I don't want to do this anymore. It's not fun anymore. It's too much hard work. I'm done. I'm tired. I'm worn out. And I think it's another thing that happens in addition to that dynamic of just in order to change, we have to try new things. And when we try new things, it doesn't always go the way we want it to go. And that's another point where I think people get that feeling of, I just want to quit. I just want to give up. I want it to go the way I want it to go. Mm.

That brings us to the end of our episode today. There is more in this interview. We're gonna dive into the rest of it next week, but for now, we can't go anywhere without your action step.

Time for action.

Your action step for today is to make a list. What is success to you? What would you want to achieve on your journey towards success? All the things that you'd like to be able to do, to create, to achieve. Let yourself think bigger than perhaps you ever have before. Remove any idea that says, this is bad or wrong or I shouldn't want that. I shouldn't think about this. Just really open up the floodgates. In fact, I mean, I really go deep into this in my new book. If you haven't gotten it, I highly suggest checking it out. It's called the Art of Extraordinary Confidence. And in there, the whole first chapter is called Step Up. And I am playing, teasing, challenging, just really trying to open up our minds and our hearts to what could be possible. And sometimes just opening that up also brings in a little bit of fear. Just to even imagine can be scary because part of our mind is like, oh, no, no. What if you really try to go after it? All kinds of failure and rejection await. Right? So it wants to keep us really thinking small. But I want you to think big and dream big. And that doesn't necessarily mean a billion dollars. I talk about this in the book. I mean, it can if that's your thing. But it might just be like wanting to create an amazing relationship that gets better every year or to be a phenomenal father or mother, whatever that means to you. Right? So these are the things that could be like a personal goal that doesn't involve a huge multi million impact, but it also could because I know that you have that inside of you as well. If you want to achieve big in the business world and succeed and earn a lot of money, you can do that too. And there's nothing wrong with that. So write out those things. That's your action step for today. We'll get more into the interview next week with Robert. Stay tuned for that until we speak again. May you have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome.

Talk to you soon.

Thanks for listening to Shrink for the shy guy with Dr. Aziz. If you know anyone who can benefit from what you've just heard, please let them know and send them a link to shrinkforthshyguy.com for free blogs, ebooks and training videos related to overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to socialconfidencecenter.com.

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