5 Ways to Build Your CONFIDENCE - #BelieveLife

Good morning, Believe Nation.

Today we're going to talk about how you can build your confidence. Clip number 3 is my personal favorite. I make sure to stick around all the way to the end for some special bonus clips. Also, as you watch this video, if somebody says something that really resonates with you, make sure to write it down in the comments below and put quotes around it so that others can benefit and be inspired as well.

I grew up with no self-confidence, no self-esteem. I kicked— I was kicked out of school several times. I misbehaved. I ended up spending half of my school in the library because I was kicked out of courses. I left school in the 12th grade and got a job as a dishwasher, worked as a laborer, lived in my car, dug ditches, and things like that. So I had no self-esteem, and I began studying the subject over the years, and I found that your level of self-confidence, how much confidence you have in yourself to be, do, accomplish something, really determines the whole quality of your life. So what I found is that there's a direct relationship between how high your level of self-confidence is and your level of sales. One-to-one relationship between self-confidence and selling success, because in selling you've got to be bold, you've got to be courageous, You've got to take rejection and disappointment. You've got to get out there. You've got to face all your fears in order to get appointments. You've got to face your fears in order to ask for orders. So self-confidence is critical. Self-confidence is essential in business, because it's impossible even to start a business, to arrange a bank loan, to set up customers, to hire people, to do all the things that are necessary in business require self-confidence. Also, what we have found is that your level of self-confidence is the critical factor in your level of sex appeal. Is that the more confident you are, the more appealing you are to other people. The more confident you are, actually, the more magnetism you have. That's why actors and actresses who seem to be extremely confident have a certain amount of magnetism. So confidence not only is really important for us, it makes us feel happy, it affects and empowers other people, it causes people to treat us differently, we make more sales, we make more money, we marry better, we're better and more effective socially. Self-confidence is everything.

The easiest way to build self-confidence— there's no magic button. I can't say, "Hey, this plane is going down. Who can fly it? Put your hand up." "I can, I'm confident." Repetition, repetition, repetition, right? What does Malcolm Gladwell call it? The 10,000-hour rule. There's no magic button. I recruited a goalie from Colombia, South America one year. Big, tall, 6-foot-3 man. You know, he had hands like stone. I thought he was like Flipper. Every time I'd throw him the ball, "Dong!" Down onto the ground. I was like, "Oh my God, we're in trouble." Simple solution: get to the wall, kick the ball against the wall, and catch it. Kick the ball against the wall and catch it. His goal was 350 a day for 8 months. He came back, his hands were calloused, the moisture on his hands were literally gone. He is now playing in Europe. Magic?

No.

Repetition, repetition, repetition. The problem is we expect to be self-confident, but we can't be unless the skill or the task we're doing is not novel, is not new to us. We want to be in a situation where we've created, we've had so much pressure in that, and what I mean, 'cause pressure builds diamonds, we want to be in a situation where, hey, I've done this 1,000 times. I did my speech, and I practiced in front of the mirror. Da da da da, da da da da. Hey, I'm sounding good. And then I went in front of my kids and my wife, I was like, "Oh gosh, got a little nervous." Then I get in front of Glenn Gould, "Oh my goodness, I'm a little more nervous." By the time I get to the ACG, where 2,500 people— can't say anymore, right? 2,500 people— where 2,500 people are there, I won't have a single ounce of nervousness because of my ability to practice, right? Over and over and over again. The problem with repetition is, how many of us bail after the first bit of failure? How many of us bail after the first bit of adversity? Edison was on that video. And depends who you ask, there's anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 tries to build that light bulb. 1,000 to 10,000. J.K. Rowling should be on that video. You know how many publishers she took her Harry Potter book to? I believe the number was 12 or 13. I'm pretty confident, but after 2 or 3 nos, I'd be like, "Dang it." After 6 or 7, I'm like, "Maybe not." Definitely after 9 or 10, I'd be looking to be a soccer coach or something else beside an author.

Right?

I mean, 12 times somebody said no. But practice, practice, practice, and do not accept failure. Maybe it shouldn't be repetition, maybe the answer should be persistence. Because we all repeat something, but very few of us really will persist. So that's one way to build self-confidence. Get out there, do what you want to do, and do not accept no.

Another technique that you can do physically, and that's to simply change your physiology. And when I say physiology, I'm talking about your posture. I'm talking about your head up. I'm talking about your head straight. Maintain eye contact. That automatically sends a signal to you of being more confident. Try it out. If you're slouching in your chair right now, if you're sitting on your couch like this, watching this video, take a moment, sit up, take a big breath. Breathing helps as well, a lot. You have 80,000 messages that transfer up your spinal cord into your limbic system, into your brain, that sends signals to your prefrontal cortex that allows you to make effective decisions. Now that's a miracle of machine. Problem is most people hunched over like this, working at their computer all day. They're not moving enough, then they go to— they sit in their car, then they come home, then they're watching TV again. It's ridiculous. Elevate your posture, my friend. Lift it up. Maintain eye contact. Put your head back. Roll your shoulders back and allow those signals to enter your brain so that you can make effective decisions and overall feel more confident. 'Cause how you feel, what? How you feel dictates who you are. It's all energy. It's all vibration in your emotion.

If you're gonna be successful in creating the life of your dreams, You have to believe that you are capable of making it happen. You have to believe that you have the right stuff and that you're able to pull it off. Now, whether you call it self-esteem, self-confidence, or self-assurance, it's a deep-seated belief that you have what it takes, the abilities, the inner resources, the talents, and the skills to create your desired results. Now, believing in yourself is simply an attitude. Believing in yourself is a choice. You have to choose to believe that you can do anything you set your mind to, anything at all, because in fact you can. It might help you to know that the latest brain research now indicates with enough positive self-talk and positive visualization combined with proper training, coaching, and practice, anyone can learn to do almost anything. Now, I've interviewed thousands of successful people, and almost every one of them has told me I was not the most gifted or the most talented person in my field, but I chose to believe that anything was possible. And because of that, I studied, I practiced, and I worked harder than the others. And that's how I got to where I am. You know, if Ruben Gonzalez, a 20-year-old living in Texas, hot Texas, can take up the luge, which is a winter sport, and become an Olympic athlete, if Bill Gates, who was a college dropout, can become a multi-billionaire and Stephen J. Cannell, who was a dyslexic student who failed 3 grades in school, can become a bestselling author and a television producer, then you too can accomplish anything if you'll simply believe it's possible. So make the decision right now to believe that you create all of your experiences because you do. Let's start creating the ones you want by believing you can. Sounds a little strange, but accepting this level of responsibility is uniquely and inevitably empowering. It means you can do, change, and become anything at all.

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 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 just trying 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 overcomplicate these things. We think we have to have, you know, some big long psychological story and buildup 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 gonna be confident. Just like we decide when we wake up. 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 gonna 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 gonna be confident. I'm just gonna allow that to come up. I'm gonna 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, and this was way back in college for me, I just thought, I want to be a confident a confident person. How's that 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 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 where you're going, that's confidence. It doesn't take a whole lot of magic. That's confidence.

Confidence is the key to so many things. Confidence is so closely related, it's mistaken for arrogance. Muhammad Ali, one of my idols as a kid, probably my only idol as a kid, this guy was so confident in his ability It was mistaken as arrogance, but he was so sure, so confident he could not be beaten. I have experienced that type of confidence. When I told you I walked into a competition and I would ask, which one of you motherfuckers is coming in second? I meant that shit. I was totally, totally confident that who Whoever the fuck showed up was coming in second. How do you develop that type of confidence? Is through obsession. Obsession. You have to be obsessed with whatever you're trying to obtain in order to develop it. You're obsessed with Tiddlywinks. You're obsessed with hopscotch. Obsessed with pulling teeth, obsessed with trimming hedges, washing dishes, whatever the fuck you do. If you want to be thoroughly competent in it, you must become obsessed with it. Powerlifting was my passion, my obsession, and I developed through hard-ass fucking work. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that that next had not worked as hard as I had worked. I couldn't be matched in my desire, my want, my drive, my will. Those areas I could not be touched. It wasn't a human on the planet who could match me in those things. So having that confidence, total confidence in my ability, there's no way I could lose. It No, I convinced myself that I was invincible. Convince yourself that you cannot lose. Convince yourself that you are the best. Convince yourself, convince yourself that nobody can out-will you. Nobody can out-want you. Convince yourself of those things and you What happens? Confidence. Convince yourself that you can't be stopped.

For me, confidence comes down to two things. First is having done it before. If you've done something before, then it's a lot easier to do it again. But an easy segue from that is if you have done a smaller version of it, then you have a little bit more confidence. Where a lot of people have these big goals, and because it's such a big goal that they're here and they want to get here, it looks like such a big chasm. It's like such a big void that you have to cross that it's scary. You don't have a lot of confidence in yourself. But if you start here, you want to get to here, this may not be your next goal. This might be the ultimate goal, but not the next goal. Start here. Do that little step and then that little step and that little step. And every time you take a little step, it gives you confidence to go off and do the next step because that next step isn't as big and as scary as jumping all the way to the top. And you'll eventually get here, and when you look back, it wasn't this this big scary impossible thing because you built confidence every step along the way. The other thing that really helps me with confidence is remembering the mission and not wanting to live with regret. Anytime I'm afraid, anytime I don't feel confident, I imagine myself on my deathbed looking back on my life and thinking, am I going to regret this? This thing that I'm afraid of right now, am I going to regret this when I'm dying and say I should have taken that opportunity, I shouldn't have been I should have gone for it. And remembering that, giving that kind of context and perspective doesn't eliminate the fear, just helps it be put in better perspective and gives me the confidence to just push through. It's feeling that fear and doing it anyway. So that's my take. I'd love to know what you think about confidence. I'd love to know what you thought of this video. Did it help you? What did you learn from it? Leave it in the comments below and I will join in the discussion. I made this edition of Believe Life on confidence because Sandell Alipin asked me to. So if there's a topic you'd like me to cover in a future episode of Believe Life, leave it in the comments below and I'll see what I can do. Finally, I want to give a quick shout out to Tak San. Thank you so much for buying a copy of my book. Really means a lot to me. Thank you for that support. For those of you watching, if you want a chance at a shout out in a future video, make sure to pick up a copy of my book It would really mean a lot to me. And then send in your receipts so we can keep track and also send you the bonuses. Thank you guys so much for watching. Have an amazing day. Continue to believe, or whatever your one word is, and I'll see you soon.

Confidence is like a mental muscle. Like muscle, everyone is born with it, but not everyone flexes it. And if you want your muscles to grow stronger, you gotta exercise. So here are my exercising tips. Consciously think positive thoughts, especially during moments when you're feeling down. So take a deep breath and remind yourself that life is too short and you gotta make the best of it. Listen to music that will lift your mood. A good beat and sound has been proven to help people in a positive way. Music and sound has been known to help the growth the plants. That says a lot. You want to have a healthy habit of maintaining this mental muscle, but you also don't want to overdo it. Everything in moderation. Balance is key. It's good to remind yourself from time to time how worthy and how, you know, awesome you are, but you also want to leave room to grow and improve. I mean, we can all change and evolve for the better.

Hey, Grant Cardone here talking to you today about some self-confidence. Where do you get your self-confidence? You can't buy it at the store, folks. Can't dress it up. Can't eat it. You can't buy it. You can't even manufacture it yourself. You have to go build self-confidence. This is a topic that's near and dear to my heart, okay, because I remember being 25 years old, scared to death of people. 29 years old, started my speaking career. Terrified of the people I had to go to. Didn't call on anybody for a year because I was literally frozen in fear. And one day somebody said something to me, "Dude, you need to handle your self-confidence issue." So I went and bought a suit, and I didn't feel any better. I went and bought a car, didn't feel any better about myself. I mean, I felt a little better for a second. Look, self-confidence is the only outfit you can't buy. This is an inside job. You gotta study, you gotta learn, you gotta practice, and you have to, you have to do the hard things. Self-confidence comes from repeating experiences that are difficult, same place courage comes from, you know. The guy that does something that's courageous is given the title of being courageous. It's not because he went and war courageous, it's because he went and did something. Look, if you You want to build self-confidence, you can listen to the subliminal tapes. It's not going to work. You can go do hypnotism. It's freaking ridiculous. You need to be more aware, more alert, and you need to do more. Some of the ideas that people are throwing at you guys right now to build your self-confidence— you're going to eat different and feel better, you're going to do this and feel— look, you need to get in front of people, do the things you're scared to do to get the self-confidence you want to have, period. It's not on It's not at Bloomingdale's, Macy's, it's not at Toyota, it's not on the radio, dude. It's an inside job. I can't help you with it. You gotta take what I'm giving you in these blurbs, blabs, streams, scopes, cats, whatever you're calling it, the posts, the streams, the Instagrams. Hey man, I need to take that and start applying it in my life. Otherwise you're gonna find yourself feeling worse and worse and worser about yourself. About yourself. You want to go walk on fire? Go do it. Is that going to build your self-confidence? I doubt it. Okay, I doubt it, man. Go spend 8 grand on a weekend. That will not improve your self-confidence. The only thing I know for sure that will change your sense of self is the actions you take getting in front of other people. Other people. People you don't know. People you're scared to talk to. You're sitting there trembling. Do your pitch. Until you don't tremble anymore. Self-confidence, an inside job. It's not a suit you put on. It's not a car you drive. This is not something you buy. This is something you develop.

We all have a self-talk tape that plays in our head. Anybody go shopping and put on a pair of pants this week? If you're a woman, the first thing that always comes, damn, I look fat in these pants. And if you're a man, it's the opposite. Oh God, I have no muscle. I'm so flabby, right? We all We all have this tape that plays in our head. As a student, if they asked me the question, it was like, "Oh gee, please don't, please professor, don't pick me, I don't know the answer, I don't pick." I looked down, right? If you're in the, when I, let me tell you something, and the VP of Business Admin is here, so I shouldn't repeat this, but when they hired me as an athletic director, I sat in an architect's meeting, and I am about as dumb as a post when it comes to anything to do with numbers and angles. And they're like, "The fundibulator valve of the architectural," They're, they're, they're, "What do you think, Dr. Joseph?" "Uh, let me look into that for you and get back to you." Right? I was sitting there, "Oh God, God, don't, please don't ask me, please don't ask me." We all have this negative self-talk that goes in our head. Guess what? There's enough people that are telling us we can't do it, that we're not good enough. Why do we want to tell ourselves that? We know for a fact that thoughts influence actions. We saw it there with the video Sheldon, Dr. Levy showed, right? We know that our thoughts influence actions. Why do we want to say that negative self-talk to ourselves? We need to get our own self-affirmations. Muhammad Ali, what was his self-affirmation? "I am the greatest." Who else is going to tell you? There need to be quiet moments in your bedroom quiet moments when you're brushing your teeth, that we need to reaffirm, "I am the captain of my ship and the master of my fate." That is my affirmation. I came from a school of 1,000 people. I lived in a town of 1,000 people for 15 years. There's no reason that I should be in charge of an athletic department building Maple Leaf Gardens. But I am the captain of my ship and the master of my fate. If I don't say it, If I don't believe it, no one else will. How do you build self-confidence? Get away from the people who will tear you down. There's enough of that. Muhammad Ali, "I am the greatest. There is no one better than me." It's a difference between hubris and ego and false pride. It's just reminding yourself in quiet, silent moments. I put it down on a list. It's right beside my mirror. Letter, right, about all the things that make me who I am. Because I make enough mistakes, and the newspapers will recognize it, and people around me will recognize it, and they'll tear me down. And pretty soon I'll begin to believe it. There was a time when my confidence was really low. There was a time when I took this job, when I came from Iowa, I don't know if I could do it. I had to bring out my self-confidence letter. A letter I wrote to myself when I was feeling good. Ivan, congratulations on getting your PhD before 40. Congrat— I am 40 under. Congratulations on winning a national championship. Good job on raising 3 good kids and marrying the right woman. I wrote a letter to myself. It was my own brag sheet, my own letter about the things I was proud of. Because there are moments, and we'll all experience them in our career, in our life, and our job hunting, and our relationships, when we are not feeling good about who and what and where we are. And I had to bring out that letter and read it time and time again for a period of about 2 weeks to weather me through that storm. It was important. Stop the self-talk, the negative self-talk. If you'll watch, you'll see some athletes, they'll have a little bandage or a little brand around them. Lance Armstrong is a perfect one. What's his self-affirmation? Livestrong isn't a brand, it was to remind him of who he was. "Live strong." Then it became a brand. He would move that from one arm to the next arm when doubt and fear came into his mind. "Livestrong, put it on there, let's go." We'll all have it. Replace it.