Your Confidence Is NOT Due To Circumstance

I can't be confident because of my dad. That's what a client told me. This is many years ago when I was working as a clinical psychologist, and I was working with a client who had a lot of social anxiety. He said, I can't be confident because of my dad. My dad was an alcoholic. He yelled a lot. He was physically and verbally abusive. And on top of that, we were in the military. He was in the military, and it was a military family, and we moved all the time. And so I was going from school to school. I had this terrible home life. My dad was yelling at me, and I felt so scared and so bad. And then I got to go to a new school and a new school and a new school, and I just got so shy and so anxious, and I just. Everywhere I'd go, I'd be the outcast. And every time I moved to a new school, I didn't have to go through it all again. It became so awful. I mean, that's why I'm not confident now. That's why I can't be. I never learned how to be social, and I just feel so bad about myself, and no one's gonna want to interact with me. Seems like a plausible story, doesn't it? It's a pretty tragic set of experiences that he faced, and it makes sense why he's anxious and why he doesn't have friends now at the level that he wants. Those are his circumstances. It's very compelling. But then about maybe this was about six months later, I had another client that I was working with, and I was actually working with him on a very different thing. Because back then, I was doing clinical psychology. I was working with people with all kinds of different things. And he didn't have any issues with social confidence. He was actually a very confident, socially confident person. He was having some issues in a romantic relationship. He was married, and there was some dysfunction there that he wanted to improve. But he was very social. He had a lot of friends. He was social in his workplace. And as I started to explore his background with him, it became really fascinating. It turns out that he grew up, he was a military child, a child of a military family. He moved around all the time. His dad was an alcoholic. His dad was verbally and physically abusive as well. And I was like, wow, what is happening here? And so I started to uncover, because he didn't know about my other client. But I just had a few questions because I was really curious. I was like, you know, how is it that your dad yelled at you and called you these names and said you wouldn't matter. Pretty toxic stuff that he would tell his little kid. He's like, how did that not get in? And he said, well, I mean, I think a lot of it got in. But I realized that if I listened to my old man, I'd become my old man. And I decided when I was a really little kid, as he's maybe 4 or 5, that it was one of my first memories of really deciding something for my whole life. I said, I am not going to be him. And I decided that. So I studied what he did. I decided I wasn't going to do those things. So my dad drank. I decided I would never drink. My dad mistreated me and my siblings and my mom. I decided I would never do that. I would never treat someone without harshness. And my dad was a very like lonely guy. He was a very isolated guy. And I said, you know what, I'm never going to do that too. I'm going to connect. I'm going to meet people and connect with them. And then I had this opportunity. I go to all these different schools and every time I went I realized like, look, I'm going to be, I'm going to connect with people because if I don't connect with people, I'm going to be like my dad. So I got to connect with people. And so I'd go there on the first day of school and I just say hi to people. I remember when I was a six year old kid, I went to a new school and I'm not going to say his real name, but let's say his name is Peter, which it wasn't. But he said, he went into the school and he said, and he went into his class and it was before the class started, before all the kids were sitting down and he walked up to like 10 different kids and said hi, I'm Peter. Hi, I'm Peter, hi, I'm Peter. And shook their hand. This is like a little six year old kid trying to do that. And I don't know how that well went, if you made a bunch of friends there or not. But that energy helped him. And within the course of a couple days or a couple weeks at a new school, he would have a whole lot of people that were wanting to connect with him. And I said, were you scared before you went to a new school? He said, oh yeah, I was terrified. When he was that six year old kid, he was so scared and he had no one to talk to about it. But he said, you Know, I just realized if I don't do this, I'm going to end up like my dad. And that scared me more than anything else. I thought, wow. And it reminded me. And maybe it's reminding you that we are not dependent on our circumstances. Our confidence is not decided for us by our circumstances. And I can give you 1001 examples of this. The same event happens to two different people. The same thing is happening right now in the world with the coronavirus. And people are reacting in 1001 different ways. So how are you reacting? And here's the thing. When the circumstances get more intense, people feel more. It's more justified to have negative reactions, negative experiences, right? Just like that first client is like, how dare you say that? I, of course my circumstances determine my reality. Of course they decided how I'm going to be and how I can feel and what I can or can't do. But they didn't for that other person, that other client, right, he was able to shift that. So what are you allowing circumstances to determine for you right now? And the more we want to just rationalize and say, well, other people would react this way. It's okay for me to react this way. It absolutely is. There's nothing wrong or bad here with you. It's just choice. Is this what I want to do? Is this how I want to react? Is this how I want to live? What if your confidence is not determined by your circumstances? What if you decide? What if you choose? What if your energy and your mood and how you treat other people and how you interact is not determined by your circumstances? What if. What if you get to decide that. And I'm not saying that you suppress all feelings. Like, maybe you do feel anxious. Maybe you wake up one morning feeling really anxious and really worried about the global health situation or some family member or something in your career, your livelihood or your business, your finances. You know, maybe you do wake up with anxiety. But then what do you do with that? Do you just say, well, that's. Yeah, of course I'm anxious. Cause everything's falling apart. Jesus Christ, you know, and just go off down the races for the rest of the day, the anxiety loops. And you say, wait a minute. And one of the things that I absolutely love to teach and I do it at all my live events is I have this all go through total ownership, which goes like this. I am the captain of my ship. I determine my destiny. I decide. I am the captain of my ship. I determine my. I decide which direction I head. I defy doubt. I Defeat doubt. I destroy doubt. I am the captain of my ship, and I have people go through this again and again and again. So it gets into our bodies. And you are the captain of your ship. Where do you want to steer it? And look, you can say that you're not, and then you will have a life of a ship going wherever, probably not to where you want or even in the vicinity of where you want. But if you remember that you're the captain of the ship, like, look, the captain does not control the tides or the storms or the winds, right? That's just. That's the broader world. That's our interconnectivity. That's God. That's anything beyond us. Right? That's nature. That's forces beyond your control. But when there is a storm, what does a captain do? Do they throw up their hands and say, well, I don't know. I don't know. Let's just all die in the ocean. Right? Right. Or does the captain say, okay, here's what we got to do. Figure that out. Shift that, do that, move this way. Close that thing down. I don't understand sailing at all. So if you're a sailor, you probably know more specific things to do. But I'm sure there's things to do when there's no wind, when the tides aren't going the way that you want. How does the captain respond to that? You got to do something. You got to respond in some way. So remember that you're the captain of your ship. You determine where you go. And no matter how intense the circumstances are, whether in your personal life or collectively, you are still getting to decide how you're going to want to react to them, how you want to respond to them, and therefore, your confidence and you and your choice are circumstance independent. And you can find a way to bring more confidence in any situation. And one of the most powerful and quickest ways to do that is to get outside of yourself and say, how can I contribute here? Who needs help here? What does this person need? What does that person want? And then all of a sudden your anxiety starts to dissolve because it's not like, what am I going to survive? It's like, what is needed here? How do I contribute? How do I give? How do I serve? That's one tool. There's so many more I could share with you. If you want to go even further with this stuff. If you want to become the master of your own destiny, decide things. You've got to build an ultimate confidence foundation, which is the first course I Teach Inside of Confidence University. If you have not heard about that course, the whole university, by all means click down below to check it out. It's called Confidence University. You can find it@theconfidenceuniversity.com and in times like this, this is even more important and you might even have more time on your hands right now to study a course and go through it. There's the Ultimate Confidence Foundation. Then there's Social Mastery, Dating Mastery, Career Acceleration, how to master all the areas of your life. But we start with that foundation because if you don't realize the captain of your ship and you're not guiding that ship and being on your own side as you do that, then it's hard to master any area of life, let alone during a crisis. So I look forward to seeing you more in these videos. Share in the comments what's serving you? What are you finding most valuable? Let's all support each other because we have this amazing forum to do that. And until we speak again, may I have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awes.