Confidence 101: How to Create Indestructible Trust in Yourself (Intro)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living 101 Masterclass Series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting about Confidence 101, how to create indestructible trust in yourself. We've covered a lot of topics so far in this series, from creating the greatest year of your life and to Masterpiece Days, Habits, conquering, procrastination, love 101. All of those subjects have one thing in common. You. The question is, do you trust yourself? Do you have a deep level of confidence in your ability to optimize and actualize? That is huge. Now there are a lot of different ways to define and talk about confidence. We're going to start with the Latin root of the word con fidere. Con fidere. With trust, with deep trust or with intense trust. In what? In yourself. That's ultimately what it's all about. Do you trust yourself? And there are two different levels that we can explore this on. Kind of the high level or macro or meta level of you trusting yourself to deal with any challenge life throws at you. And the micro level is in a specific moment, do you have confidence? Right. Or in a specific domain or aspect of your life. So there's again, there's kind of the moment to moment, different aspects. Then there's the high level. We're gonna talk about both, but I'm gonna focus on this high level. I wanna cultivate that indestructible, inconquerable trust in yourself. So ultimately you can meet life's challenges with that deep, fierce trust in yourself, knowing you are incomparable. That's what we want to achieve. That's what this class is all about and why I'm so fired up. We have 10 big ideas. As always, let's take a quick look at them on a high level and then we'll drill into each more deeply. Our first big idea is self efficacy. This is essentially science speak for a form of confidence. Your knowing that you can create whatever you want to create in your life. Essentially. Albert Bandura talks about this. There are four elements to self efficacy. We're going to talk about each of them. I'm excited about that. The second big idea, the science of hope. Confident people are future oriented. They have a deep sense of what their goals are. They have a sense of agency. They believe they can achieve them. And they're willing to take multiple pathways. Three aspects of hope. Again, there's a science to hope. It's fascinating. We're going to unpack each of those. The third big idea, Identity, actions and feelings. Too often as we discuss in a range of these classes, people are driven by their feelings. How do I feel? We need to switch that to who do I want to be? Your identity should drive your actions, which should drive your feelings. We're going to talk about that and help you create a vision of your ideal self in five years and be that today consistently. Great way to build trust in yourself. Our fourth big idea is to activate yourself. If you want to boil water so you can make some tea, getting it to 200 degrees isn't going to do the trick. 210 won't do the trick. 211 degrees won't do the trick. You need to boil the water 212 degrees. You can't make very good tea with tepid water. You're not going to have a high level of trust and energy and vitality unless you're willing to activate yourself. Activation energy is the idea. A chemical reaction will not occur until an activation point is reached. We're going to talk about that and how you need to reach it in your life and, and how to go about doing that. The fifth big idea is the Stockdale Paradox. The Stockdale Paradox. James Stockdale shared a story with Jim Collins, which he shared in his book Good to Great. James Stockdale was the senior ranking officer in the prisoner of war camps in Vietnam. He said that paradoxically, the people who survived had two things. One, they believed they would get out and two, they knew it would be hard. Those who didn't thought it would be easy. We're going to talk about how we need to embrace obstacles. Not have a naive optimism, but a functional, practical, strong optimism. The sixth big idea, the antifragile sticker. We talk about antifragility a fair amount. We're going to go into depth on this, some strategies to apply it and you need to identify are you putting a fragile sticker on yourself, a robust sticker or an antifragile sticker. Again, when life challenges you, do you break? Do you withstand yourself for a while or do you actually get stronger? We want to get stronger. That's at the heart of true confidence. The seventh big idea is rehearse, let it rip and reload. This is actually part of a future class we'll teach on peak performance. How to perform at your best when it matters most. But if we want to have confidence in those day to day experiences, we we want to rehearse our ideal performance, then let it rip, get out of our heads and then reload where we analyze what happened afterwards. Most powerfully. The eighth big idea is desere, simplify, finish and repeat. You need to make decisions if you want to have a high level of trust and confidence. You can't vacillate. You need to know that those decisions aren't sacrifices, they're decisions. You have a clear goal. They. Then you simplify the battlefield as Mark Devine describes it, and you focus and you finish the next task and then you repeat getting the compound benefits over time. We'll unpack that. The ninth big idea is stop signs, sirens, and panic buttons. You need to see the stop signs in your life. You need to stop overthinking things, stop ruminating, stop social comparison while you panic. Pay attention to the sirens in your life. We're gonna have fun looking at another way to analyze Kryptonite. The sirens that are seducing you, we're gonna identify those and then the panic buttons. You need to quit hitting the panic button when something goes wrong in your life. We're gonna talk about John Glenn, the first US Astronaut to go into space. His heartbeat Never went over 100 beats per minute in space. NASA trains its astronauts not to push panic buttons. We need to avoid the panic buttons if we want to cultivate our confidence. The 10th Big Idea Solutions are us. If you want to cultivate an extremely high level of trust in yourself, you need to quit complaining, quit criticizing, and quit blaming. Take 100% responsibility. Quit focusing on problems and focus on solutions relentlessly. We'll talk about that. And then the 11th bonus idea is the confidence gym. Confidence can be created. You need to hit the gym. We'll talk about you creating your ideal confidence workout, and I'm excited to jump in.