312: How Confidence is The Key: How You Can Get It, Build It and Keep It, with Dr. Nate Zinsser

You know, whether you're on an athletic team or you're in a salesforce or you're in a symphony orchestra, boy, you better be honest about what you think about yourself. Because what you think about yourself and what you think about all the things that happen day by day by day, that's what constitutes your confidence.

Hello everyone, this is Kathy Caprino and welcome to my podcast, Finding Brave. I've created this show for everyone who longs to create something bold and brave in their life. To rise up, speak up and stand up for who they are and to reach their highest and biggest visions. Each week I'll be speaking with inspiring guests from all walks of business, leadership, entertainment, the creative arts and the entrepreneurial world. And they'll be sharing their intimate stories of Finding Brave and offer their best strategies for building your most rewarding, joyful and meaningful life, business and career. Hey friends, Kathy here. Are you ready for a powerful breakthrough in how you're working and what you're achieving in your career? Let's make that happen. Starting now. You may know me as a podcast host or a writer, but a core part of my work is coaching mid to high level professionals to achieve more confidence, impact, fulfillment and reward and to bring their boldest and bravest visions to life. In my career and leadership breakthrough one on one coaching program, we work together across six deep dive sessions to help you experience true breakthrough to a more rewarding career. I've had the honor of coaching over 20,000 professionals across six continents and before that I worked as a therapist and before that I was a corporate VP managing multi million dollar budgets and global initiatives. I bring all of that experience to our work, helping you create a career and life that reflects who you truly are and who you're ready to become. Want to join me? Visit Kathy Caprino.com CareerBreakthrough and check it out. I'd love to help you make the shifts you're ready for. Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of Finding Brave. Kathy Caprino here. And once again I am beyond excited to learn from a master in a topic that I tend to teach a lot and so I cannot wait to learn and grow and stretch in my own understanding of confidence. And we are talking about how confidence is key and how you can get it, build it and keep it. You know, the keep it part I think I am most interested in because I get it and then every once in a while I lose it. So thank you Nate Zinserber for taking the time in the middle of your book launch. I am so grateful so grateful to you. Thank you for being here.

Kathy. It's a pleasure. Delighted to have you be aboard. Delighted to connect with your listeners.

Thank you. Thank you so much. All right people, I am going to read this some of Nate's bio because it is so inspiring. It goes on longer than this and you can read it on the show notes. But I want to tell you who we're listening to today. Dr. Nate Zinsser is an expert in the psychology of human performance who consults for individuals and organizations. Excuse me. Seeking a competitive edge. Nate's latest book, the Confident A Battle Tested Guide for Unshakable performance hits shelves January 2022 and has been endorsed by many people, but also by two time super bowl champion and MVP Eli Manning and best selling authors Jon Krakauer and Steven Pressfield and U.S. olympic Bobsled head coach Mike Cohn. Holy crow. Nate was a regular consultant to the Philadelphia Flyers and the New York Giants for 12 seasons and has been a keynote speaker for so many companies that you've heard of. General Electric, Facebook, McDonald's, Staples, Major League Baseball, NBA and so many more. And a consultant for the FBI Academy, the US Army World Class Athlete Program, including mentoring four Olympic medalists, the US Army Recruiting Command and the US Army Marksmanship Unit. Wow, there is so much more here including personally conducting over 17,000 individual training sessions for cadets all around athletic, academic and military performance. And you know, this was an interesting fact. I had no idea of that. You helped launch the highly successful magazine Sports Illustrated for Kids and was presented in American Library association award for his 1991 children's book Dear Doctor A Kid's Guide to Handling Sports Problems. Wow. I guess you're pretty busy every single day of your life. It seems there's a lot going on here, isn't there?

Yes, indeed, Kathy. I will try to live up to my hype. Thanks for the intro.

All right. Confidence. You know folks, when I'm about to interview someone, I have a prep form and I ask what are the top three bullets you really want folks to take away? The key takeaways. And I don't always read them, but I have to read this. Number one, confidence has relatively little to do what happens to you. It's a function of how you think. Number two, it's very situation specific, but you can develop it for any situation you care for. And confident performers think differently from the average person. So I'm dying to know, first of all, Nate, how did you get into this?

Oh, we have to jump into the wayback machine for that One. Kathy. I had the curious experience of attending a small boys private country day School, grade six through grade 12. And at this school there was always constant talk and constant enthusiasm about a particular sports team.

Our soccer team, your school soccer team.

The school soccer team, and this school soccer team, it's very, very good year after year after year after year. But it was the only team in the school that was good year after year after year. And even though you could put half the members of the soccer team onto the basketball court or onto the tennis court or onto lacrosse field, those teams were never as good as the soccer team. So there was something happening. Obviously it didn't have anything to do with athletic talent. It had something to do with, I later studied this, but it had something to do with a shared expectation, a shared belief that this master coach of this school's soccer program, a fellow by the name of Miller Bellari, there was something in the way that he communicated with players, something in the way that he got players to believe that even if they were just marginally athletic, if they devoted the time to work their skills, if they took a soccer camp or so in the summer. Oh, and this, by the way, was back in the days when boys typically played three sports. A fall sport, a winter sport and a spring sport, much different from the degree of specialization that we have today. But Coach Bellari was really good at communicating a vision and expectation of success. And the whole school bought into it and the whole state bought into it. And I later learned that this is something called a self fulfilling prophecy, a expectancy effect. It was this belief that, hey, we're good, we do the right things, we are good. And no other team in the school had that expectation. And I'd never played soccer at this particular school, so I wasn't the direct beneficiary of it, but I was an indirect beneficiary of it. And I'll never forget when I was in the ninth grade, sitting at lunch one day telling a bunch of my classmates how we really had a great opportunity to build a much better wrestling team over the next few years. Once a few guys in my class who seemed to have some ability got a little experience, got a little seasoning, and I was explaining this to some other people at the table and a guy looked at me from across the table and said, nate, shut up. You'll never be any good guys at this school don't wrestle. Well, we're good in soccer sometimes, we're good in swimming, sometimes we're good in tennis, but we've never Been good at wrestling and we never will. And I just sort of sat back in my chair and said, wow, I don't see any crystal ball in front of this dude. Where does he, where is he getting this intelligence? And he was just a victim of a certain self fulfilling prophecy that he had bought into. Now the fact of the matter is that the wrestling program at the time, we were pretty much a doormat. But I'm delighted to say that two years later, at the conclusion of my junior year, our wrestling team had its first winning season in a long, long time. And in my senior year it had another winning season. And I don't think it was so much because we were all that physically gifted. It was just as much a function of the fact that we did not buy into that negative self fulfilling prophecy.

Well, this is amazing. Now wait, you were, you said, I'll be the coach. You decided you would coach the wrestling team or how did you instill that in the coach of the wrestling team?

I, well, I don't know if I influenced the coach of the wrestling team so much. I just refused to buy into that self limiting belief myself. That, and I guess I talked enough to Kevin Brady and Tommy Kendall and a few other guys in my class and they kind of got the idea, hey, we could be good too. So we made this break from a shared belief system that was operating throughout this particular organization. And that's always been a metaphor for me. That's always been a moment that I try to share with people. Whether you're on an athletic team or you're in a salesforce or you're in.

A.

A symphony orchestra, boy, you better be honest about what you think about yourself. Because what you think about yourself and what you think about all the things that happen day by day by day, that's what constitutes your confidence.

I want you here for 10 hours. Can I dig in with you?

Dig away.

I have a million questions. First of all, I couldn't agree with you more in terms of what I see in coaching executives and professional women. And I'm going to give you all a secret. One of the things that creates breakthrough for these people is because I say to them that they are amazing. I am not BSing. I'm looking at what they've said, they've done. Everyone is amazing. Everyone has something. And some people have many things that make them fantastically different. And because I can see that with my clients and I say it and they believe me because I've worked with over 20,000 people in six continents, instantly something shifts in them. I can see that. So I know that what you're saying works. But here's my question. So I was a former therapist, so of course, some of these questions are therapeutically. They're deep.

That's okay.

I know you're ready for it with everything you've ever done. I believe that there's a lot that goes into confidence, that if we are not aware of it, we can't shape it. I believe if I'm understanding you, anyone can change their level of confidence. Yes. But I believe we must be aware of some things, like our pessimistic mind, like our negativity that we were given. Many of our ideas and beliefs were given to us by the culture of the family. So I have a question for you. The fact that you looked at this coach in grade six and made an observation already sets you apart from millions of people. But do you think. Go with me here, that you had an innate sense of confidence that maybe was instilled by your family, that you would even say, I watched this guy. I think there's something different here. I think we can have an amazing wrestling team. Was there something that is inside of you that made that an easier leap than for the guy sitting in front of you going, what are you talking about?

I'm not sure there was. You know, I was not a precociously athletic kid in any sense of the word. You know?

Yeah, I don't mean about sports. I mean that you just thought, why not? Why can't I be successful? Why can't the team be successful? That one leap is a big leap for millions of people. So what do you think may helped you make that leap?

I may have had a little encouragement, you know, from mom and dad, but I don't recall moments in my earlier childhood where I received, you know, a series of messages that really encouraged me to believe in myself. I had to. I had to work at that. I had to work at that. I mean, I'll tell you this, and some of. Some of your listeners might be able to relate. Once upon a time. I don't know if it's still the case, but once upon a time, if you were to buy a box of Wheaties at the grocery store, on the back of the Wheaties box would be a short biography of an American success story, typically an athlete.

Right.

And I remember reading a couple of those, and I'm saying, yeah, okay, maybe that's what it takes. And so I started working a little bit harder.

You wanted to be. You wanted that level.

Oh, I wanted that level for sure. You are absolutely spot on in that messages and from authority figures, cultural forces really have an impact in formulating our system of beliefs and our whole approach to growth and success and progress. I devote a whole chapter in the book to an articulation of, you know, I refer to them as the seven deadly sins. Seven messages, seven commonly held beliefs, and then the seven saving graces. Some alternatives for those that seem to be the kinds of things that confident, successful people choose to endorse rather than any one of the seven deadly sins.

And we hear those.

Oh, sure, we can. We can go into all kinds of detail for that.

And everyone, you've got to check out this book, you know, already when we're recording here, it's already, you know, in top three lists, Sports psychology, success. It's incredible. But, yeah, you know what? When I. When you talk, half of my mind goes flying off and thinking of things. But I remember my mother used to say, you can do whatever you want to do. It was a mantra. And I believed it. I believed it. But what are these?

I'm glad you. I'm glad you chose to buy into that because there was probably an opportunity for you to say, nah, mom doesn't know what she's talking about. No, Mom's not really all that, you.

Know, mom doesn't know about the business world or mom doesn't know.

Mom doesn't know what it's like to be me.

Oh, wow. All right.

I think just as important to the message that you received, it was, again, as you point out, something about you, a little bit of willingness to endorse that message, to take that message in.

Yeah.

So, you know, those kinds of things are super important. I'll dial up some of my seven deadly sins.

I would love that.

I want to get him in order for you. So. So I'm dialing them up here.

Wonderful. And I want anyone who's a parent, you know, I spent time as a marriage and family therapist, and I want to say, not, I don't mean to be a downer or doom and gloom, but how we relate to our children every single day. The words that come out of our mouth, how we respond when they have failure, will make or break your child.

Really, really, really true. Okay, okay, let me hear limiting belief number one. Remember your failures and mistakes because those memories motivate you to improve. A lot of people think that's the case.

Oh, this is not the case. What you're about to read. These are deadly sins.

Yeah. These are the seven. These are the seven Deadly sins. Remember your failures and mistakes because those memories motivate you to improve. Deadly sin number two, always be your own harshest critic who wasn't encouraged to take oneself seriously in the pursuit of their personal success. You know, deadly sin number three goes right along with it. Always be logical and think carefully about what you're doing. Okay? Now a certain degree of self awareness is crucial, but to be locked into logic, if this, then that, if this, then that, that can be tremendously self limiting. Here's deadly sin number four. Always be on the lookout for more knowledge and more information and more practice opportunities. The idea that you can never have enough. If there's one thing that's important for confidence at the moment of truth, it's your willingness to look at what you have in your tank, in your reservoir, in your, as I put it, mental bank account and say, okay, I'm enough. I may not be complete, I'm still a work in progress, but right now I'm enough. As opposed to constantly thinking, oh, I wish I had more. Oh, I wish I had more. I wish I had studied this, et cetera, et cetera.

Oh my gosh, that one brings tears to my eyes. So obviously I needed to hear that one.

Okay, well, we got a solution for that one.

Okay, good, keep going.

Here one, here's deadly sin number five. You better be really good at something before you become confident about it.

Oh, boy.

Number six. Worship the gods. The experts know what's best and the winners have earned your respect, you know, and that always puts you in a place of, you know, second best, you know.

Wow.

I've always gotten the kick out of the phrase, if you have a hero, the best you can ever be is second place. And a lot of people put themselves.

What a downer of a statement. Yeah, why try if I'm always just going to be looking at, up at, you know, from the feet of the hero.

That's right. Okay, but you think, you think about how powerful a message that often is. And here's number seven, a ball above all else. Thou shalt not screw up. Also known as the team or the individual that makes the fewest mistakes wins.

Oh, wow.

Don't screw up. Don't mess up.

Okay, so first of all, let me just state that this. These are proliferated 10 billion times around our universe every day.

Absolutely.

Wouldn't you agree? Like in the subtlest. And I'm thinking of my kids on their sports team. I played tennis competitively, went to the States. I think I heard all of these.

Of course, you have. I will never forget when I began my doctoral studies at the University of Virginia in sports psychology, and I first had the opportunity.