Latest / Amazing Life Breakthrough / Ep 62 | Confidence Comes After You Step Forward

Transcript

Ep 62 | Confidence Comes After You Step Forward · Amazing Life Breakthrough

• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Has there been anything in your life that you have simply avoided?
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Or a better question, have you ever avoided doing something because you thought I'm just not that kind of person?
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you've told yourself I'm not a public speaker, I'm not creative, I could never get up in front of people, or simply I'd probably embarrass myself.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes we say those things for so long that they stop sounding like fears and start sounding like facts.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: But what if they aren't facts?
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: What if you simply haven't given yourself enough opportunities to find out what you're capable of?
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I learned something about that during my senior year in high school, and it came from one of the last places I ever expected, the stage.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Amazing Life Breakthrough.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Steve Klein, and today I want to talk about fear, confidence, preparation, and why sometimes you have to step forward before you feel ready.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'd never taken a drama class.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't a thespian, I hadn't acted in a school play before, and I certainly wasn't walking around high school thinking I was going to become an actor.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: But through a strange set of circumstances, I ended up with one of the lead roles in our senior class play.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: One of my good friends, Robert, was the senior class president.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: He knew me well, and apparently he saw some ability in me that I wasn't necessarily seeing in myself at the time.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: There weren't even traditional auditions.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: We basically sat around together with copies of the script and read through the different parts in a way that became the audition.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then it came to my first line.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: And this is where things got very interesting.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: I started reading the script very slowly, almost one word at a time, not because I didn't understand what I was reading, I did.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: But reading fluently out loud had always been difficult for me.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Looking back years later, I believe I was dealing with what was likely undiagnosed dyslexia, but back then there wasn't a name attached to it in my life.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: I just knew reading aloud could be hard.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: So there I was, surrounded by my classmates, reading this play in a way that probably sounded something like one word at ph time.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: And you know how you can feel a room change?
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: I could feel their confidence in me starting to go down.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: And as I noticed that, my own confidence started dropping right along with it.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: That is an uncomfortable place to be.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody necessarily has to say anything.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: You can read the faces, and suddenly you were thinking, maybe I don't belong here after all.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: But I didn't want to give up the opportunity.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: I knew something else about myself.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Reading the words cold might have been difficult, but memorizing them was something I could work around.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: I had memorized passages before, including Shakespeare, and I knew that if I could get those lines into my memory, I could speak them much more naturally.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: So that night I went home and got to work.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: I rewrote the lines by hand, used little drawings and visual cues besides certain words, and started memorizing the first scene.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Instead of trying to force myself to perform the same way everybody else was performing, I found a method that worked for me, and that is an important distinction.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes overcoming a weakness doesn't mean pretending the weakness isn't there, it means finding another way through it.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: The next day we started reading again, and this time when my lines came up they flowed.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: The words were already there.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: I could say them naturally with more confidence because I wasn't struggling to decode them at the same time, and suddenly the room felt different.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: My classmates could see the change and I could feel it myself.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: That was one of the first lessons this experience taught me.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: Preparation can create confidence where confidence didn't exist before.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: We often get that backward.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: We tell ourselves, when I feel confident, then I'll do it.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: But confidence frequently comes after you start preparing.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: You practice the presentation and then you feel better about giving it.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: You study for the interview and then you walk in with more confidence.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: You rehearse the speech, learn the skill, make the phone call, or take the class, and somewhere along the way you realize maybe I can actually do this.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: Confidence is often evidence you collect.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: You do something difficult once, and now you know you survived it.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: Then you do it again, and eventually the thing that once frightened you becomes something you know how to handle.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now, memorizing the lines didn't suddenly make me a great actor.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: I still had a lot to learn.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: Robert and another student who had more acting experience started coaching me.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: They showed me how to project my voice, how to move across the stage, how to bring more emotion into the character, and how to actually perform rather than simply repeat memorized words.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: And here's something else I'm grateful for.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: I was coachable.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't say, well, I've got the lines memorized, so leave me alone.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: I listened, I practiced, I tried what they suggested.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: That can make an enormous difference when you're stepping into something new.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes another person can see what you could become before you can see it yourself.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: Robert believed in me before I had much evidence to believe in myself.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I think most of us have probably had someone like that somewhere along the way.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: A parent, teacher, coach, coworker, friend, or mentor who looked at us and saw more possibility than we were seeing.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: If you have somebody like that in your life, don't dismiss their belief too quickly.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: They may be seeing something real.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Eventually, opening night arrived.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now the lines were memorized.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: We had rehearsed.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: I had been coached, and technically I was prepared.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: But guess what?
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: I was still nervous.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: That is another myth we need to get rid of.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Preparation does not always eliminate fear.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it simply gives you enough strength to move through it.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: I remember standing backstage knowing that in a few moments I was going to walk out in front of a crowd.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: Then I stepped onto that stage.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: At one point I looked out and caught a glimpse of my mom, my dad, and my sister sitting right there in the front row.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: And something about that moment struck me.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: They were watching me act.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: Me.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: The kid who had never taken drama, the kid who could barely get through that first script reading, and now I was standing under the lights, projecting my voice, delivering the lines, and doing the best job I knew how to do.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: Was it a perfect performance?
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: No, but perfection wasn't really the breakthrough.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: Doing it was.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: I stepped onto the stage, I finished, I received compliments afterward from my family and from the people I had worked with in the play.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: But the most significant thing I walked away with was something internal.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: My definition of myself had changed.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: Before that experience, I could have easily said, I'm not somebody who performs on stage.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Afterward, I couldn't say that anymore.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: I had the evidence I had done it, and that's what fear sometimes steals from us.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: Not only the opportunity itself, but the evidence of who we might become if we actually tried.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Think about something you've been avoiding.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you don't feel ready.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you're worried people will judge you.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps you're afraid you'll look foolish, stumble over your words, or discover you aren't as good as you hoped.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: All of that is possible.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: But another possibility exists too.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: You might discover that you're more capable than you thought.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: And you don't get that evidence by sitting on the sidelines, you get it by stepping in.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm not saying you should throw yourself into every fear without preparation.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Quite the opposite is true.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: If something scares you because you aren't prepared, prepare.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: Learn, practice, ask for help.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: Find someone who knows more than you do and let them coach you.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: Break the challenge into smaller pieces.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's exactly what I did with the script.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't magically fix my reading difficulty overnight.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: I developed a method that allowed me to work around the obstacle and prepare for the performance.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe your question shouldn't be, how do I stop being afraid?
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it should be, how can I prepare well enough that fear doesn't get to make the decision?
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: That question is much more useful.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: Because courage isn't waiting until all the butterflies in your stomach disappear.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes courage is walking onto the stage with the butterflies still there.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: Here's your challenge this week.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: Think of one thing you've been telling yourself you're not the kind of person to do.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: Write that sentence down.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not somebody who blank, then challenge it, maybe add one word yet.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not comfortable speaking in front of people yet.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not good at interviewing yet.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how to run a business yet.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not confident enough to take that class yet.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: Then identify one preparation step, not the whole journey.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: One step.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: Practice for 20 minutes, ask someone for coaching, learn the first skill, make one call, sign up for the class, or simply put yourself in the room where growth can start.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because confidence may not arrive before the opportunity.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes the opportunity is how confidence arrives.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: On Thursday, we're going to go deeper into that.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: We'll talk about why fear can feel so physically real, how preparation changes our relationship with fear, why being coachable can accelerate confidence, and how to stop waiting until you feel completely ready before you participate in your own life.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: But for today, remember this you don't have to feel fearless to step forward.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you step forward first and confidence catches up with you later.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: If this episode encouraged you, share it with someone who may be holding themselves back because they don't feel ready yet.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: And if you haven't already, follow or subscribe to Amazing Life Breakthrough so you don't miss future episodes.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: If you'd like to support the mission financially, you can make a small donation at AmazingLifebreakthrough.com.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: Every contribution helps us continue sharing messages that may give someone the breakthrough they need at exactly the right time.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for spending this time with me on Amazing Life Breakthrough.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: And remember to live life to the fullest.