The mindset cheat sheet part two: confidence
Tools for productivity, confidence and happiness from over 50 books.
Brief Introduction
In part two of my three-part series on Mindset I will share the most common themes I have come across when researching confidence. As a reminder, this is a collection of learnings I have summarized after reading over 50 books from different fields such as mindfulness, neuroscience and sports psychology. If you missed part one on productivity, you can read it here. I urge you not to skip the section on Journaling as those exercises have made a huge difference in helping me build confidence.
As before, all the information is organized in bullet-point format with direct quotations from each author and a brief “practical steps” summary at the end of each category. The most often quoted authors include: Oliver Burkeman, Sam Harris, Gary Keller, James Clear, Josh Kaufman, Nat Zinsser, Nicole LePera, Tara Brach, Brad Stulberg, Adam Grant, Naval Ravikant, Michael Easter, Brad Stulberg, Tim Grover, Tim Pychyl.
Part two: Confidence
Growth mindset 🌱
Your skills and abilities are not fixed. They are something you can develop.
People believe that you either have confidence or you don’t but you develop confidence, or gain more, by practicing it.
You don't always need confidence - even when you're not good at something, you can still plunge in it wholeheartedly and stick to it.
Impostor syndrome says, “I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s only a matter of time until everyone finds out.” Growth mindset says, “I don’t know what I’m doing yet. It’s only a matter of time until I figure it out.”
Embrace the process: results aren't everything, indeed they better not be, because results always come later and later is always too late.
Confidence is the result of a consistently constructive thinking process that allows you to do two things: (1) retain and benefit from your successful experiences, and (2) release or restructure your less successful experiences.
Failure is painful but it doesn't define you.
Practical steps ✅
Trade “limiting beliefs” for affirming ones by doing the following:
Focus on positive things instead of concentrating on mistakes.
Treat yourself like your best friend instead of criticizing yourself.
Focus on the superpower that serves you best instead of pursuing ever-more external sources of improvement.
Use confidence as a base for competence instead of requiring excellence.
Trust in your abilities instead of worshipping a hero.
When something doesn’t go as you hoped it would, consider that moment a chance for learning. To turn any failure into a lesson, treat it as a one-time situation and an aberration.
When an internal voice threatens your confidence, call it out and tell it to shut up. Substitute that voice with affirming thoughts.
Motivation 🫠
Routine and habits over willpower and discipline.
Sharpen your response to stress - it’s inevitable. Develop a taste for having problems, because the state of having no problems is never going to arrive.
If you have a good plan you don’t have to actually believe in yourself all the time. This is the conundrum of motivation — it is not always there.
The holy grail of motivation and drive is when effort or friction becomes the reward itself.
When we're not motivated or procrastinating, the key to getting out of that pain is either waiting for your motivation to come back (most people do this by engaging in another activity like cleaning the house instead of finishing a project which gives them some sort of accomplishment feeling and also gets them very close to the deadline so then they rely on anxiety and adrenaline to push through and finish) OR doing something even harder/ more painful than that painful state to get out of that dopamine drop even quicker (cold shower, meditation, exercise).
Practical steps ✅
Make a vivid, concrete plan; what do you need to do? When will you do it? Where will you do it? How will you do it? Think about it in vivid detail.
Distract with something even harder than the task at hand and replenish dopamine with: cold water exposure, exercise, NSDR, getting enough sleep each night, viewing morning sunlight.
Just START 🏃🏻♀️
You really do not understand something until you’ve done it. START before you’re ready.
The biggest barriers to proceeding are self-doubt and paralysis by analysis. The best way to overcome them is to treat your first moves as experiments.
When you feel down, unmotivated, or apathetic, give yourself permission to feel those feelings but not dwell on them or take them as destiny. Instead, shift the focus to getting started with what you have planned in front of you, taking your feelings, whatever they may be, along for the ride.
The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret to getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks and then starting on the first one.
Our ability to achieve extraordinary results in the future lies in stringing together powerful moments, one after the other.
The strongest known force in daily motivation is a sense of progress. You can’t always find motivation by staring harder at the thing that isn’t working. Sometimes you can build momentum by taking a detour to a new destination.
Embrace radical incrementalism - cultivate the patience to tolerate the fact that you probably won't produce very much on an individual day, with the result that you will produce much more over the long term.
Practical steps ✅
Just START
Journaling & practical exercises ✍🏻
Daily journal prompts:
How I slept
Grateful for
Fears and resentments
Watch out for
Strive for
What I would change
What I will focus on today
Journal prompts for overcoming self-doubt:
Why do I think I can't do it?
Is that reason true?
If it is true, how can I work on that?
To strengthen your confidence, remember your successes, not your failures:
Exercise 1: write a top-ten list of success moments that energized and encouraged you in the past.
Exercise 2: daily “E-S-P” - think about an episode during the day when you made your best “effort.” What kind of “success” did you experience at that moment and what kind of “progress” did you make?
Exercise 3: “Immediate Progress Review” (IPR) consider the best part of what you just did before you move onto another activity.
Think constructive, present tense thoughts about current and desired performance:
Create an affirming statement about something you do well now, phrasing it in the first person, in the present tense, and with positive, precise and powerful language
Write more affirmations in a notebook every evening to close your day with potent, positive thoughts.
Develop a “pregame routine” to prepare you for a challenge:
Conduct a “mental inventory” to assess what skills you bring to the task. Check your journal entries to gauge your confidence level.
Make an analysis of the performance ahead. What is the task at hand? What could be any opposing factors? Make yourself familiar with the setting.
“Cue your conviction”with a catchy phrase that creates positive energy in the present.
“Breathe your body” by inhaling deeply two or three times.
“Attach your attention” by focusing on the task at hand.
Stay tuned for part three - Happiness, coming next week. In the meantime, drop me a line or a DM and let me know if you found this post useful.