Brian Johnson on Seth Godin's The Practice: true confidence comes from showing up consistently and doing what you say you will do, not from believing you'll always succeed. It's earned self-trust built through a protocol you actually follow.
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another heroic plus one. Now that we've taken a little tour through Brian Tracy's great book no Excuses, it's time to return to Seth Godin's wisdom from his great book, the Practice. First, let's remind ourselves that the magic of the creative process is that there is no magic. I repeat again in bold, all caps. It's not quite all caps. Let's make it bold, bigger font. The magic of the creative process is that there is no magic. You want to optimize your life and actualize your heroic potential. Me too. There's no magic to it. In fact, the reality is that the process of being and becoming our best self is often so mundane and so unglamorous and so boring that we don't realize just how powerful it is. Seth's whole book is essentially 200 big ideas on that theme. And one of the most important distinctions he makes is all about how we build true confidence. We build true confidence by learning to trust ourselves, by committing to and then following through on our practice. Therefore, it's really all about, he says, practice confidence more than self confidence. Seth tells us, and I quote, Seth, trust is not self confidence. Trust is a commitment to the practice, a decision to lead and make change happen regardless of the bumps in the road. Because you know that engaging in the practice is better than hiding from it. He continues by saying, there are people in organizations in our lives that we trust. How did that happen? We develop trust over time. Our interactions lead to expectations and those expectations, repeated and supported, turn into trust. Andy says those organizations and people earn trust by coming through in difficult moments. They're not perfect. In fact, the way they deal with imperfection is precisely why we trust them. He continues by saying, we can do the same thing to and with ourselves. As we engage in the practice, we begin to trust the practice. Not that it will produce the desired outcome each time, but simply that it's our best available option. Plus, he says, trust earns you patience because once you trust yourself, you can stick with a practice that most people can't handle. And the practice is available to all of us now. I love the way Seth frames the source of true confidence. As we've discussed many, many times, the word confidence literally means intense trust. When we talk about self confidence, we're talking about intense trust in ourselves. Not, I repeat, a silly ungrounded confidence that we will succeed in everything we do, because we won't, but a deep, grounded, intense trust that it doesn't matter what happens because we know we have what it takes to respond to whatever comes our way. That is true self confidence. And there's only one way to build that type of marrow. Deep self confidence. We need to earn that trust. How? I repeat, by doing what we say we will do. Never perfectly, but more and more consistently. Especially when we don't feel like doing it. And how do we do that? By having a practice. Or as we like to say, we need to have a protocol. We need to know who we are and what we do when we're at our best. Then we need to be that best version of ourselves by doing those things all day, every day, especially today.
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