How To Build Unshakeable Confidence
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[00:00:00] Hey, what's up, my man? It's Sathya Sam here. Welcome to Unleash the Man Within. Thank you guys so much for listening. I hope you're having a fantastic day. Uh, before I jump into today's content on how you can build unshakable confidence, I want to make sure that you know, uh, we have a pretty big Instagram following.
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And this is a subject that I've been really interested in for a very long time. You know, I grew up relatively shy and unconfident. Somewhere around the ages of maybe seven, eight, nine years old, I started to find my confidence a lot more. Uh, I was very confident throughout, you know, high school, uh, with, you know, some dips here and there, uh, pretty confident in university, uh, you know, into my early careers was confident.
And when I was 27, kind of just lost all of it, lost my mojo, lost my identity, lost my sense of self and my confidence. Totally [00:02:00] shot and I feel like to be honest since then, you know, I'm 34 now. That's about seven years ago I have been slowly rebuilding confidence and I Miss feeling confident the way I used to feel.
I, I still don't think I'm quite back there, but I've been really paying attention to what makes somebody confident. Why did all this confidence that I basically had for, you know, the better part of 27 years of my life suddenly just crumble underneath me? And how do I make sure that never happens again?
And I want to share some of these findings with you, not just from my own experience. Personal introspection, but actually from serving my staff, paying attention to our clients, looking through some of the data with the clients we've worked with. And also, you know, I've become kind of a junkie on this, on this stuff, just personal development in general.
And I've learned from some really cool people over the years. And I'm excited to hopefully impart as much of that as possible to you in the next, call it eight to nine minutes. All right. So why don't we jump in? Let's [00:03:00] talk by first, maybe just establishing what is, um, Confidence. Um, because, you know, two people can be confident and one can look very different from the other.
So, we're not talking about, you know, you having perfect posture, your shoulders always relaxed, and you just kind of exude this confidence. I'm not really talking about that. I'm talking actually much more about the internal state. Of confidence where sure, maybe your posture could be improved or you could walk differently with a little more authority.
Like I'm not really into that kind of stuff. What I'm talking about is You have this deep sense that you know who you are and you're not going to apologize for it. Uh, you know, it's interesting, uh, when I think about the areas I'm confident in, uh, an example would be this, you know, podcasting, like I, I hit record and I just start talking.
This is not something I was always doing. It's not something I was always confident in, um, which, you know, again, actually kind of raises another question is, do you have to be good at something to be confident and vice versa? All that kind of stuff. [00:04:00] What I can tell you for sure though, is that the way I know that I'm confident in doing something is that my nerves, they might still be there, but I'm able to settle them.
So our working definition of confidence is the ability to do something without dysregulating. The ability to do something without dysregulating. And that actually opens up this definition quite a bit. Um, and I think ultimately we're all still going to think about the areas where we excel in the years where we've lost lots of experience and all that kind of stuff.
But it's kind of interesting to think that actually we could be confident in something. Just by staying regulated, it shows you how important your nervous system regulation really is. Now, as I talk about this, I want you to think about an area where maybe you're not confident that you would like to be confident in.
You know, so for me, something I'm trying to get a lot more confident in, this is gonna sound a little bit crazy, but it's actually just asserting my opinion in conversations. [00:05:00] And I don't, again, I don't know what happened. Like years ago, this was not an issue. But I'm, I'm finding that, you know, sometimes I have an opinion and I have something I want to say and I don't say it.
I kind of back down and I say, yeah, you know, that makes sense. And, um, you know, kind of keep the peace. It's like kind of classic middle child syndrome and I'm, I'm trying to, you know, grow into more confidence and asserting myself in, you know, these different moments in conversations. So. What happens is when I do think about sharing even not not even when I do share, but when I think about sharing I actually feel super dysregulated, you know, my palms get sweaty and I get a bit shaky and all of a sudden I'm not thinking as clearly, you know, and I'm tripping over my words a bit And so this is something that I again a clear indicator like okay There's work to be done here.
You know, there's, there's some dysregulation going on. Um, one thing we did a couple months ago is I surveyed my staff and I started to ask them, you know, what are areas that you are confident in, you know, and so they start to talk [00:06:00] about, you know, driving and raising their kids and cooking and, you know, systems and operations and, you know, all kinds of different things start to come up.
And then I start to ask, okay, well, what are areas that you're not confident in? And, you know, they start to list, uh, you know, driving, you know, that it came up kind of in both for some people. Uh, but you know, some for some people it was, you know, I'm not comfortable, uh, you know, speaking in front of people, or I'm not really comfortable writing, you know, written communication is, A real struggle or, you know, playing sports or there's all kinds of different stuff.
And what I ultimately asked them was, okay, in the areas where you are confident, what is it that allowed you to experience confidence in this area? Were you always confident? And nobody said they were confident right away. Nobody said, yeah, I was just naturally confident.
What they all said was very interesting is they had experience repeatedly. They had experienced repeatedly. So in other words, it was the regular [00:07:00] acts. It was regularly doing it that allowed someone to build confidence. You know, one of the areas that I've been very confident throughout most of my life and still am to this day is playing music.
Uh, you know, I, I started playing the piano when I was three, four, five years old, I would hear little jingles in commercials on TV and then I would walk over to the keyboard and I would start to play it. I just kind of had that neck. And it's interesting. I was not confident then as a kid. In fact, I remember the first 4567 years that I played always thinking like, am I doing this right?
And is there a better way to do this? And I always kind of had this, uh, these questions in the back of my head. But somewhere along the way, things shifted. And, um, I'm going to talk about the three things that shift your confidence more than anything else. And I'll tell you all three, three, three things started to accumulate and then compound.
And now there's, there's so many things I can do with the piano that I just don't even think about, you know, and a lot of things that I would have been afraid [00:08:00] to do. years past. So let's, let's get into these three things. Okay. The first thing that people do that are confident in a specific area is they practice it.
Doesn't matter how talented you are. You have to practice it. There's the practice makes perfect thing. Don't love that saying, but practice definitely breeds confidence. We know that for sure. So the, the more that you practice the thing that you want to be confident in, the better you get it. Now, what does this mean?
This means you have to take some risks. Uh, you know, going back to the piano playing example, I remember one day I was practicing a song, I was going to play it in church and I was, I heard this little thing in my head and I tried to figure out how to make it, you know, work on the piano. And, um, and I asked my dad, because my dad's very musical and he kind of mentored me early on when I was learning the piano.
I said, Dad, can I play this part? Like, is this right? Does this make sense? And he said, yeah, that sounds awesome. You know, make sure you like do that. You know, it sounds really good. Um, and that for me was kind of like a risk. I had to take [00:09:00] a risk because it didn't, it wasn't normal. It wasn't what I was taught.
It was sort of outside of the bounds that were painted for me. Um, and I had to be willing to take that risk to try something different. And you're going to have to do that too. If you want to practice and you want to get better at something, you're gonna have to try things different ways. You're, you have to be willing to put yourself out there.
So the first thing is practice. Okay. Uh, the second thing. Is that we want to get social input. All right. This is incredibly important. We are social creatures and we don't like to tell ourselves we don't care what other people think about us and it doesn't matter what other people's opinions are. Look, if you're trying to build confidence in an area, what other people think matters and that is okay to an extent.
Obviously we want to make sure that we keep it in proper perspective. But what I specifically mean is rather than a looking for people who just affirm you and say, you're awesome, man, you can do whatever you want. What we actually want to look for is people that are willing to give us honest feedback.
Okay. Honest feedback [00:10:00] is incredibly powerful for confidence building. With it, you can move mountains without it. You always settle for mediocrity. All right. I don't, I can't tell you how many people I've seen. Uh, you know, even going back to the musician part, tons of musicians who are so gifted, um, they'll practice, but they practice the same things over and over again because they're too afraid to ask for other people to give them input.
And because they're not willing to get input from other people, they're not getting stretched. They're not getting challenged. They're not growing and their confidence is very limited. So they're confident in a very small subset of things. But they could actually be a lot more confident if they were willing to just, you know, get some social input.
It really goes a long way. So repetition receiving social input or receiving feedback goes a long way. The third thing, okay, for confidence building, very, very important. And the third thing for building unshakable confidence is compassionate self talk. Okay. Compassionate self talk. Now, what do I mean by that? What I mean is we're not going to go tell the world how great we are.
We're going to let the [00:11:00] world tell us how great we are by compassionately talking to ourselves. So this means when you fail. You don't beat yourself up and say, man, you suck. And what's wrong with you and you're a worthless piece of whatever. No, what we're going to do is we're going to use a lot of compassion.
Hey man, well done. You tried something new. That was awesome. That was tough. We're going to get better at it. And this sounds ridiculous. You might think like, Sathya, you're trying to breed a group of lunatics here, man. Like, what are you talking about? The way we talk to ourselves shapes the way we view ourselves and a lot of you listening lack confidence because of how you're talking to yourself.
Somebody maybe said something and you ran with it and you made this huge tree branch of thoughts and ideas and beliefs about how bad you are at something or you know how stupid you look when you did whatever and instead of compassionately self talking You You now just beat in why you should not be confident in this area.
So we want to be [00:12:00] compassionate in our self talk at all times. And it's hard to do, but it's very powerful and very effective when done right. And look, you're not, I'm not asking you to flip a switch and all of a sudden you're just super positive and whatever. I'm asking you to improve like 1 percent this week.
Just talk a little bit nicer to yourself. A little bit more this week and then do it a little bit more the week after. And if you keep doing that, like I said, all these three, three things, the social input, repeatedly doing the activity, and then obviously conglomerating that with compassionate self talk, that is going to help your confidence skyrocket like nobody's business.
So look, that's everything for today, guys. Thanks so much for listening. If you want more great tips and insights, make sure you follow me on Instagram, Sophia, me, Sam, and make sure you're subscribed to this podcast wherever you listen or if you're watching on YouTube. In the meantime, God bless you guys.
Have a great day. Talk soon. [00:13:00] [00:14:00]
