Latest / The Data Shaman Podcast - Quant Mind, Shaman Soul / Season 3, Ep 1 - Confidence Is a Verb: Small Wins, Big Growth (Re-mastered)

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Season 3, Ep 1 - Confidence Is a Verb: Small Wins, Big Growth (Re-mastered) · The Data Shaman Podcast - Quant Mind, Shaman Soul

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Deta Sherman Podcast, and uh this episode and a couple of the ones that we follow are a bit of an experiment.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: I have read lots of books over the past uh year or so, and I wanted to talk about these books, but a monologue uh wouldn't work, so I decided instead to partner with an AI voice.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's question would be part of the conversation, and I would talk about those insights and those information that I found particularly useful, especially working with my clients or working with practice.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now I would hope this one, this one, please confidence.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: I want to open with a question that sounds simple but isn't.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: Jordan, would you send steak back?
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: Like at a restaurant?
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: At a restaurant, you ordered it medium rare, but it comes out grey.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Well done.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Clearly, not what you wanted.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: So do you send it back?
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: Honestly, depends on the day.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes I just eat the sad steak.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: So there is this survey, Jenny Wood ran it.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Thousands of people across dozens of countries, and about two-thirds of them said, Yes, I ask for what I want.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: I am a person who asked for what I want.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Two-thirds.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then she asked a much smaller, much more concrete question.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Would you send cold food back at the restaurant?
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: And the number collapsed to under a quarter.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: So most of the I ask for what I want people wouldn't even send back a steak.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, they wouldn't send back a steak.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: And that gap between the confidence we believe we have and the confidence we actually use when it costs us something, that gap is the whole subject of today.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Because here is my thesis, and it's going to annoy some people.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: Almost everything that you have been told about confidence is backwards.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: You have been told it's a feeling that you get confident and then you act.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: But I actually think it's the reverse.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: I think confidence is a verb.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: You act and then you get confidence.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: Confidence is a verb.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, let's earn that.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: This is the Misfit Executive.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Jordan.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm Daniele.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Today, confidence.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: What it actually is why you keep waiting for a feeling that isn't coming and what to do instead.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: Here we go.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: So let's name the myth directly.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Most people are running what I call the waiting room model of confidence.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: Once I feel ready, I'll ask for a raise.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: Once I feel confident, I'll pitch the idea.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: Once I feel like a leader, I'll lead.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: And they sit in the waiting room, and the feeling never gets cold.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: Because the feeling's not in the waiting room.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: It was never in the waiting room.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: There's a line Barry Davenport builds a whole book around in confidence hacks, and it is originally from Norman Vincent Peel.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Action is a great restorer and builder of confidence.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: Inaction is not only the result, but the cause of fear.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: Let's read it twice.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Action is a great restorer and builder of confidence.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: Inaction is the only is not only the result, but the cause of fear.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Inaction isn't just what fear produces.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: Inaction is what creates the fear in the first place.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: So the longer you wait to feel ready, the less ready you feel.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: The waiting manufactures the fear.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: Every day you don't make the call.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: The call gets bigger.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: You're not protecting yourself by waiting.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: You're feeling the thing that you're afraid of.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: And the fix is almost stupidly simple.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's not feeling confident that act.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's act in the smallest possible way and let the confidence show up afterwards as a byproduct.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: Give me the evidence though, because just do it is a poster, not a method.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: That is that is fair.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: So go to the motivation hacker, Nick Winter.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: He frames motivation as basically an equation.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: One big lever in it is expectancy, which is just your honest belief that you can succeed.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: And the way that you can raise expectancy is not by pep talk.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's by stacking wins so small you cannot fail.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: He calls it a success spiral.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that's exactly what I built for the clients.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: The success spiral up, basically where you can track your small increments every day.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: So the idea here is that you don't start with be confident at the board meeting.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: You actually start with a little win that is so tiny that is almost say embarrassing.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: And you bank it, and then another, and then another.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: And confidence is literally the accumulation of evidence that you follow through.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: So confidence is a bank balance, not a personality trait.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, it is a bank balance.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: And most people are trying to withdraw from an account they never deposited into.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: Here's where I want to push because there are people who are radiating confidence in every meeting, and it's got nothing to do with a bank balance.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: They're just loud and they get ahead.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: They do get ahead, unfortunately.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: And this is a bit the uncomfortable part.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Susan Kane lays out the research in quiet.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: We are terrible as humans at telling confidence apart from competence.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: Studies shows studies show that the person who talks first and talks the most in a group gets rated as the smartest, even when their ideas are no better, even when their actual test scores are no better.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: Fast talkers get rated as more competent, and there is basically zero correlation between the gift of having a wonderful voice or a wonderful or very good eloquence and the quality of your ideas.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely zero.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: But we rewarded anyway.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: So why does this matter for the listener?
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: If loud wins, be loud.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we reward it constantly.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: We promote the confident over the competent because our brains literally can't separate the two in that moment.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: And Kane points to this brutal finding from Philip Techlock.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: He studied expert pundits, the confident ones, you know, on TV that are making predictions, and found the most famous, the most self-assured.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: And found that the most famous, the most self-assured ones were actually worse than chance at predicting outcomes.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: The confidence was inversely related to the accuracy.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: The stake test again.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: Looking confident versus sending the stake back.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: Two reasons.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: One, if you are the quiet leader, you need to hear that your discomfort with the performance.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: One, if you are a quiet leader, I need you to hear that your discomfort with the performance of confidence is not a deficiency.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: The data says your judgment may be better precisely because you're not high on your own uncertainty.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: Because you're not high on your own certainty.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: Don't quit the race because you're not the loudest in the room.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: Don't quit the race because you're not the loudest in the room.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: And two, if you're currently winning on perform confidence, be very careful.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: Because there is a difference between confidence that's backed by a punk balance of real evidence and experience, and confidence that's just volume.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: The market eventually finds out which one you've got.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: Usually at the worst possible time.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, Steelman the other side for me.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: Is there actually a case that believing you can do something physically changes whether you can?
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: Or is that just motivational poster stuff?
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: Perform confidence talks in the meeting.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: Real confidence sends the stake back.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: They're not the same muscle.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a generally wild case, and it is in the life of half a second.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: The sham knee surgery study, and this is absolutely fantastic.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: And not that I suggest that we should pretend to do surgeries, but listen to this.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: It was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: They took patients scheduled for knee surgery, and for some of them, the surgeons didn't die theater.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: Wheeled them in anesthesia, made the incision, and then they did nothing.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: Sold them back up, no actual procedure.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: And the fixed surgery group improved about as much as the people who got the real operation.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: And this is think about it is absolutely crazy.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: One of the sham patients went from barely walking to playing basketball because he believed he's been fixed.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: And the mirror image is the nocebo effect.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: People told the harmless substance is dangerous, will have real physical reactions to it.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: The belief isn't decorating the outcome.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: The belief is part of the mechanism.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's genuinely unsettling.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, it is unsettling, but it is a warning light with a bias, not a verdict.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's a brain just being conservative.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I want to be careful here because this is where it can get toxic.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying Jordan to ignore real exhaustion and grind yourself into the ground.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: Real depletion is real.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: Burnout is real.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: But there is a difference between my body is generally done and my brain is nervous and dressing it up as done.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: Confidence, partially, is learning to tell those two apart.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: And to not take the first warning light as a final word.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: And this you can experience this when you do sports.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: For example, you are maybe running and you're absolutely exhausted, you're so tired that you want to stop.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then all of a sudden, your favorite song comes on and it gives you energy.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: You go for another couple of minutes.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: And there is power in that.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: There is power in that belief.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: This is the part where I expect you to tell me to raise my self-esteem.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: Affirmations in the mirror.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: I am powerful.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: I wish I forgot to tell you the opposite, actually.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: And this yes, it sounds stronger, but self-esteem is conditional.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's I feel good about myself because I am winning.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: So the second you lose, it completely disappears.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: Right when you need it the most.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's fair weather confidence.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's like fair weather confidence.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: Self-compassion doesn't depend on the scoreboard.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's I can lose badly and still can be on my own side.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the thing that lets you get back and take the next risk.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: Real confidence isn't real confidence is not I'm sure I succeed.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: It is I'll be okay with myself even if I don't.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what frees you actually.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's what frees you to actually try it.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: This is the most important turn in this episode.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: Again, if I say so myself.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: But the research increasingly says self-esteem is not a thing.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: Self-compassion is.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: This is Kristin Neff's work, and it shows up in option B.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: They look at people going through really hard ruptures, divorce, major failure, losing a job.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: And the thing that predicted who bounced back wasn't how high the self-esteem was.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't optimism, it was self-compassion.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: The capacity to fail and not to turn on yourself.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, in other words, you have to in other words, self-compassion means self-acceptance.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: You accept yourself for who you are.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: You accept yourself in any kind of scenario.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: That reframes everything.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: The confident person isn't the one who's sure they'll win.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: It is the one who's not afraid of how they'll treat themselves if they lose.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's the one who's not afraid of how they'll treat themselves if they lose.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a related tool in option B, I give client constantly.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's called Merrick Seligman's three Ps.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: When something goes wrong, the three things that keep you down are personalization, it's my fault.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: It'll be like this forever.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: Sandberg, after her husband died, was coached by Adam Grant to literally ban three words from her vocabulary never, always and sorry.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: Because those words are the three P's in disguise.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: Never and always are permanence and pervasiveness.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry is so much overused.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's a permanent personalization, making yourself the problem.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, Jenny Wood has a tiny tactical version of that in Wild Courage.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: Go into your sand folder and count how many times you wrote sorry this week.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: And cut it in half.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure now with Claude you can do it so easily.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, I'm late.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry I'm late can become thanks for your patience.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: It is the same information, but a completely different perspective with yourself.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: Give me something I can use before I walk into a high stakes room.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: Something concrete.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, this one is from the book What We Value.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Values Affirmation.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: Before a situation where you're going to be evaluated or criticized the high stakes rule, you spend a couple of minutes reconnecting with your core values.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: What actually matters to you who you are beyond this meeting.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: And in the research, people who did that beforehand were measurably less defensive when the criticism landed.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: And most importantly, more likely to actually act on it afterward.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because at the end of the day, criticism is part of life.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: The question is what are you gonna do about it?
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: And if you connect with your own values, you are gonna be in such a better place to act.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: How does that work?
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: Feels almost too soft.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, it does work.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, it does work.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because defensiveness comes from threat.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: When your whole sense of worth is writing on this meeting, every piece of pushback is an attack on your identity, on who you are as a person.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: So you are more up and you can't hear anything.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: But if you just reminded yourself that your worth rests on something bigger, something more stable, like your family, your principles, the kind of person you're trying to be, then the criticism is just information about one meeting.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: It can touch the core.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the detail I love.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: It works best with self-transcendent values.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: Speak word, but it means things that are beyond yourself, like the people you care about.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: Those come the threat response more than self-focused ones like status or being seen as smart.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: And timing matters?
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well, as with everything, timing is everything with this one.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: It has to be before or right as the threat lands.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: Once you're ready defensive, the shields are up and it's far too late.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: Foc herself.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: The author of this book says that she flounces photos of her family before a hard meeting.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: Just a couple of minutes.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's a whole intervention.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a mantra about how great you are.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's a reconnection to why you're okay, regardless of how this goes.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_01: That's the self-compassion idea again, just operationalized.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: Let's talk about the perfectionists, because a lot of high performers aren't low confidence in the obvious way.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: They're terrified of failing.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: So they just never put themselves in a position to fail.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: Possibly, yes.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: This is my favorite line of all these books that I've been reading, and it's from Albert Ellis, who, by the way, is not some guru.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: He basically found an entire cognitive behavioral tradition.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: And the book is called How to Keep People from Pushing Your Buttons.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: And the line is simple.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: If you're hitting the bullseye every single time, you're standing too close to the target.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: And this is such a tremendous truth.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you don't fail, if in your life you're doing something wrong, you do something too easy.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: You should push yourself a little bit more, stretch yourself a little bit more.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: Failure is a part of life.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: Failure is a part of progress.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: And we just need to be okay with that.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's good.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it is so good.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: A hundred percent success rate is not a sign of excellence.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's a sign that you've set the target so close, aim so low that you've made failure impossible.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: And in doing that, you've made growth impossible too.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: Halisi's whole point is that the real cost of fearing failure isn't the failures.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's on the things you never even attempt.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: He points at Edison's failings hundreds and hundreds of times on the light bulb.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: The failures weren't the tax.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: They were the path to progress.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: They were the path to success.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a confidence move in deliberately breaking the rules too, isn't there?
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned something about sneakers.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, it is the red sneakers effect.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: Some hardware researchers, Belletta, Gino, and Keenan, found that when somebody deliberately breaks a convention.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: For example, you wear red sneakers to a black tie event, observers often rate them as higher status and more competent.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: Because the unspoken logic is breaking the rule is risky.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: So this person must be powerful enough to get away with it.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: However, this is not a pass to wear a wrinkled and eel sitting suit.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: Because that doesn't say confident rule break.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: It just says I didn't try.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a permission to make one deliberate.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a permission to make one deliberate own unconventional choice.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: And let it signal that you're secure enough not to need the costume.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: And funny enough, that is why, for example, when I was working in Banky, I was still wearing earrings.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: That is why I was still showing my tattoos.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: It shows competence.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: It shows that you are willing to take risks.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: Calculated nonconformity.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: Well, satellite that sounds a bit diminutive, but that's correct.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: So you just need to choose what is the right sneakers to you.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: We've covered a lot.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: Belief, self-compassion, values, aiming higher.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: But in the actual moment, the raise conversation, the pitch, the sending the stake back.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: What happens is I hesitate, and the hesitation wins.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: How do I beat that?
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Mel Robin's whole thing, and it started in Stop Saying You're Fine before it became so huge franchise.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: It is the five-second window.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: The insight is that there is a tiny gap between the impulse to act and the brain machinery for talking you out of it.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: And it's very fast.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: A handful of Seconds.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: And if you move within about five seconds of the impulse, you just go.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't, your brain floods the zone with reason, realizations.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: Later, not now, you're not ready.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: And the impulse dies.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna give you now an example of an interview with Estevo, the person who is a member of the movie franchise, Jack Us.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: What he said is that before every stunt, he just promised himself that it comes to three and he does it.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: And funny enough, this is exactly what Bill Robinson is saying.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: Do not let your brain talk you out of it because he is very good at that.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: So the enemy isn't fear, exactly, it's the delay.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: The delay is where confidence goes to die.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: She ties it to this idea of activation energy, the big initial push it takes to start everything.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: The hesitation is your brain inventing activation costs that are not real.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: And Winter, in the motivation hacker, has the most vivid devotion of beating it, the rejection therapy.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: He and some friends spend an hour deliberately trying to get rejected by strangers.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: Asking for absurd things.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: Asking for absurd things.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: Can I free ice cream?
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: Will you tell me a secret?
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: And this happens on purpose.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: And this happens on purpose.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: One, a shocking number of people said yes.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: All the walls that we build around ourselves are mostly imaginary.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: And two, he could feel in real time his brain inventing reasons why, oh, this time doesn't count.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: Why shouldn't ask the next person?
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: When he realized it's the exact same reflex that kill which he realized is the exact same reflex that kills most people, the rationalization machine.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: And when you flood it deliberately or low stakes, you build some tolerance.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: Rejection stops being a catastrophe and becomes just weather.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: And this is a topic that comes up often in the famous book The Game by Neil Strauss, which says if you want to ask out a girl, the best things to do is just to force yourself to talk to 10 girls in one hour.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: No matter the rejection, no matter what's going on, that's your KPI.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: You just hit it, and the next day is gonna be so much easier.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: And the next day is gonna be even easier.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: And little by little you will be.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: And little by little you will not be any more afraid of anyone.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: So confidence in the moment is basically notice the impulse and move before the committee in your head convenes.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: That is quite funny because I just picture a Woody Allen movie where there is like a steering committee in your brain deciding whether what you're going to do is rational or not.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: Three things people can actually do this week.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: Go.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: Good question.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: One, the deposit.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: Pick a promise to yourself so small is almost funny.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: And keep it every day.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: You're not building a habit.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: You're making deposits into the confidence account.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: Confidence is a bank balance before it's ever a feeling.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: It is a thing you do badly until it just gets less bad.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's a verb.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: Let's start using it like that.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_01: Confidence isn't a feeling you wait for.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_01: That's the episode.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: Send it to the person you know who's brilliant and still waiting to feel ready.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: Tell them the feeling's not coming, and that's the good news.