Confidence Needs to Be Earned

“Confidence to trust one’s body of work needs to be earned.

“Confidence, focus, trust—these are all psychological skills; they can be developed just like any ability.

“You can do it in sets and reps.

“We need to oversimplify psychology; there are two basic camps: the discovery component and the skills component.

“So the skills can be done in sets and reps.

“How do you train confidence, what are the sets and reps—it’s self-talk. That self-talk has to be anchored in something that’s real.”

Start From the Locus of Control

“Instead of relying on external—praise, compliment, such a temporary little thing—to dictate the internal—that’s weakness.

“The greatest thing we can do is to say, let’s go from the locus of control piece.

“Here’s a set of tools, know how to use all the tools, psychological skills, and principles available to you.

“Start somewhere so that you are actually in control of your state—you are able to buffer against what once was pressure, what once was consequential, and create more space, even more space; even more space by the thinking and the patterns that you work from; the thought patterns to create even more space so that you have more space to play. 

“And then, what actually in return takes place is that you have to work a little bit harder to get up to the edge.”

First Person Driver

“It’s a bit like a first person shooter or a first person driver; it feels like everything’s happening so fast.

“That’s what anxiety, that’s what survival, that’s what depression is.

“It’s like you are in it, you can’t see from a distance what the state actually is or what the experience is because you are so observed by the emotional components and the thought patterns that map with those emotional experiences.”

At the Edge of Your Space

“So the more space that we create the more we can kind of see what’s happening.

“And that space, where the edges to your words are the edges to that space, the edges of our capability, of our capacity—is where we meet ourselves, it’s where we greet the flow state, it’s where we express what we are truly capable of, and it’s where we learn what we need to refine. 

“Those that are really fundamentally orientating their life towards their potential or the collective potential of their tribe are spending more time there—that difficult, nauseatingly hard, stomach-turning, anxious, provoking state—they are spending more time there than the rest of the world.

“That’s the place to go get good at.”

Psychological Practices

“Everything else that leads you to get to that place more often, those are practices—psychological practices.

“Let me explain all of them; they’re not many: confident, calm, being able to focus in the present moment, trusting yourself, resiliency, optimism, locus of control, grit—

all of these together are the collective mindset that you have.

“These are all skills, you can practice them with sets and reps, and with those sets and reps you are more familiar with an ideal mindset for a particular environment.”