Transferring Confidence

Hi and welcome to The Daily Dot, the daily edition of the Connect the Dots podcast. My name is Matt Raglan and in each episode I share a short lesson about how to be more focused and productive. I draw these lessons from personal experience, work with clients, modern psychology, and real-world application. Thank you for listening and if you enjoy The Daily Dot, please share it with a friend. Now here's today's lesson.

Transferring confidence. I can't. I don't. I never have. These are a few of the common ways we defeat our potential before even trying. It's one reason I stuck with my job for a year or maybe more before deciding I could quit and be a full-time creator. The deeper fear was that even if I made enough money, I couldn't spend it wisely, that I would waste it and make too many mistakes, leaving us in our early 40s worse off than we were in our 20s. Oh, and with kids. Basically, I wasn't confident in my ability to make money. My friend Jeff is like a therapist to me in many ways and also a really good friend, and he asked a great question: "Matt, when you miss a week of workouts or gain an extra 5 or 10 pounds over the holidays, does that bother you?" And I was like, "No, I'll just start working out again and I'll lose the weight. No big deal." Jeff responded and said, "Most people don't think like that. They think about their health and fitness the way that you think about money." You just need to think about money the way you think about exercising. It just might unlock something for you. This question changed my life. I saw the parallels in both how I could transfer my confidence in personal health to personal finance. I also recognized that I was being way too hard on myself when it came to money. I can always make more. Define one area of your life you're confident in your ability and expertise, no matter how small it seems to you. What can you transfer from that area of life to another? Where you don't feel as confident. The results might just unlock a dormant part of you that is the key to changing your life. The quote I want to share with you today is from the writer Sylvia Plath, and she said, "The worst enemy to creativity and productivity—" she didn't say productivity, I added that— "but the worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." And that comes from the writer Sylvia Plath. The question that I want you to ponder today is, what area of life do you have a lot of confidence in? And how can you transfer that confidence to an area filled with self-doubt and sabotage?

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