 Johnny, in the previous episode, we had the pleasure of speaking with Sugar Ray Leonard. It was an awesome final episode to the month of October. Yeah, and I hope everyone enjoyed that. You know, there's going to be times where we're going to be offered to do some special things like that. And we want to take those opportunities and give them to you all. And I think it also lightens up what we have going on here to also bring in somebody who is so confident in certain fields and that we get to hear their story and also get to play outside of our box that we've made for ourselves. And obviously, motivating going into the half marathon, which we completed over the weekend. Yes. Wow, what an experience. Definitely had the pleasure of hearing Sugar Ray Leonard in one year. And this month's guest of coming, David Goggins in the other ear, cheering us on, pushing us outside of our comfort zone. I know that both of them were in my ear at certain parts of that race and it was and I couldn't help but laugh and what a great month we had where we had got the opportunity to interview them both in the span of a week to elite athletes up to our own pushing ourselves physically. It just worked out so well. And I think the best part about it was having an opportunity now moving into the month of November to really focus on rebuilding confidence. As we've gone through the last few months, we've really focused on honing those social skills. This month, we're going to dive into the mindsets necessary to be successful in life. And a lot of us have found our confidence shaken for some reason. In those moments where we have some self doubt, we take on some criticism and now our confidence has taken a hit. How do we rebuild that? And confidence is our bread and butter here at the Art of Charm. Building confidence and social skills is the main reason that thousands of people have joined us in our coaching program over the last 12 years. And at the same time, we're often confronted with huge misunderstandings and myths around confidence and how we build what that confidence is. Lastly, we want to start the month of November and the theme of rebuilding confidence by addressing three specific myths we hear all the time in our bootcamps around confidence. And bear with us here because this episode is laden with a lot of scientific studies. As you know, listening to us, we love understanding the science behind why we do what we do and how we can use that to our advantage to become more successful both socially and in life in general. So you're going to hear some studies cutting edge, behavioral and social science that we're going to drop in this episode. So stay tuned. Get your notepads out. We are excited to dive into rebuilding confidence. And I just want to preface that as well with the idea is if you're listening to this and you think, well, I haven't had anything happen to me lately where I need to rebuild my confidence. Let's not get too high on ourselves. Understand that that it's coming, right? Those moments in life that you're going to get shaken up, they're going to they come for all of us and there is plenty of loss in everyone's future. And you need to be able to withstand some of those beatings that you're going to take that that they mentioned you're going to sustain just by living period, right? And it doesn't come. So not only rebuilding confidence, but this is about the how you're going to go about strengthening your confidence and getting ready for those moments that you will be shaken up. So this is for everybody. Absolutely. And I know that we over the last decade plus have gone through those moments, those gut checks, those, wow, got my feet knocked out from under me. How am I going to get back up, dust myself off? And we use this exact science to rebuild our own confidence personally. So we're going to be sharing some of those stories as well. But we're going to jump right into the very first myth when it comes to confidence. And that's the idea of feeling confident first. And when we talk about confidence, a word that hops to everyone's mind is self-esteem, the concept of having high self-esteem is so prevalent in the self-development field that many of us work on improving our self-esteem in the hope of creating all these other benefits in our lives. And we always see successful people as having high self-esteem. So immediately we're like, I need that. I just need to have more self-esteem and I can become successful. The idea here is if I build up my self-esteem, then I will naturally be successful. That is the first confidence myth we want to talk about today, because science does not back this up. No. And I know Johnny and I are both children of the self-esteem movement. Yes, we are. Johnny, you had some pep rallies around self-esteem in school. Absolutely. And I remember these fondly and we have a guest next week, Steven Hayes, who's going to dive into this in a very in-depth conversation. However, I just I do want to state that, yeah, we used to go to these pep rallies and they were like every two months. And I remember specifically asking, why are we doing this? And I remember it being centered around self-esteem and my teacher telling us how important it was for us to have high self-esteem. And, you know, in these studies, it shows that it has quite the opposite effect. And one of the other things is when you're being told this and as a as a as a kid, you haven't been through much in life where that sort of gets shaken, right? You're you're you're growing. There's a lot ahead of you. So I think for the most part, a lot of children feel really good. If they have a healthy home, they're excited. School can be fun. They have friends. They want to go play. And so they're not they haven't had too much mess with them. So when you get when you continue to be told that you need to have self-esteem and that you're doing these these pep rallies so that you can feel this way, you start to think, well, well, I feel good. My buddies feel good. Who who are we going to these pep rallies for? Right. Who doesn't feel good? Who doesn't? We got to pick on them. Yeah. So then you you start to see other children who you think, well, that kid, he needs self-esteem. And because we're doing these types of of activities for him and the likes of him, then he gets single and out, he gets targeted. And we all understand when it comes to bullying, the science has come back that it was never about having some abnormality that people can zero in on. It's that first you're socially left out or shy or behind the mark. So then whatever abnormalities that you do have, they become visible. They become visible. They become the primary focus of the of the bullying because the actuality of it is that all of us have some sort of abnormality that could be pointed out to be driven in. But the minute that a child becomes weakened or starts to separate out group is in the out group, then that abnormality becomes the target. And I think this is a classic case of science getting ahead of itself and realizing that correlation does not always equal causation. So this idea that successful people have high self-esteem, therefore we have to artificially inflate self-esteem, has led us down the wrong path. There's a very fascinating study done by Roy Bommister and his team that was published back in 2003. And you'll find the link in our show notes. The study is titled does high self-esteem cause better performance, interpersonal success, happiness or healthier lifestyles. Obviously, big lofty goals with inflating self-esteem. And in that study, the scientists came to the conclusion that they had not found any evidence to show that boosting self-esteem, for example, through therapeutic interventions or in school programs like Johnny's Pep rallies, leads to any benefits and can actually be counterproductive. They further concluded, our findings do not support the widespread efforts to boost self-esteem in the hope that it will by itself foster improved outcomes. Talk about a bombshell. Not only is it a bombshell, we have to understand that when you're in these environments growing up, this is all you know. So basically, this is, you know how you would have a tomato plant and you're going to tie it up to a stick so it grows straight. We've now just tied this up to a stick going sideways. And the longer we continue to nurture and water this plant, it's going to continue to go farther and farther sideways. That's what we have here. Yeah, it absolutely is. We had helicopter parents. Now we have lawnmower parents. We have participation trophies. No one can lose because no one wants to hit to their child self-esteem. Yeah. In actuality, that is the problem. Self-esteem has to take a couple knocks and you need to get emotional resiliency in order to survive in life. This is a long journey. So we're just sitting here artificially inflating self-esteem. We lead to all sorts of entitlement. And obviously, as the science is showing, it's counterproductive. Let's dig a little deeper into the study because they show that the efforts to boost self-esteem of pupils had no improvement on their academic performance. None whatsoever. You inflate self-esteem. That doesn't lead to good grades. Well, and once again, we talk about how wrong it is because now the child feels good that they don't need to get good grades. Well, I'm good. I have self-esteem. The grades, that doesn't matter. And now we have, you know, these very confident, dim-witted people. Over-competent idiots walking around. Here's another one. Job performance in adults seems sometimes to be related to self-esteem, but the direction of causality is actually not established. And it might be the other way around. Meaning, yes, when you start to perform well at work, your self-esteem gets a boost. It does not work the other way around. You get a self-esteem boost and all of a sudden you start leaning in at work. And self-esteem has not been shown to predict the quality or duration of relationships. So artificially enhancing self-esteem, focusing on pumping up and boosting self-esteem has been counterproductive. And let's just tie this self-esteem movement into a narcissistic tech world that promotes you being super and awesome and bad-ass and your curated Instagram that shows how amazing you are. And now you have the self-inflated esteem to go along with it. I mean, holy cow, we have a country full of blowhards. Sadly, we've put our focus and energy on the wrong things. And here's the end. The end of the evidence shows that living a successful life leads to high self-esteem. Shocker. Yeah. Right? We don't need science to tell us that. It's pretty obvious from the results. The problem is we've been trying to draw two big conclusions based on sheer high self-esteem and it's led us astray. Now, don't get us wrong. The science clearly shows that high self-esteem is a good thing. We want to have it artificially inflating it and not building the emotional resiliency that life needs for us to succeed has worked against us. And something you said earlier, confidence, core confidence. And there's a process to that. And I also want to say that let's we're making fun of all this. And I want to make sure that everyone who's listening is clear that we are not saying that we're above this. We've been caught into this trap as well. In fact, it is because of the trap we've caught ourselves into. I'm asking questions of what happened. Right. I was on the right track. I was feeling really good. And then you get to this point and you're like, well, wait a minute. How come I cannot bring into my life all these things that I want with how I've been going about it? Well, because you've been going out about it all wrong. And so you have to ask these questions, what is wrong? And then you start to find out that the story that you've been telling yourself, what you're going to get, we're going to get into in a bit, but also the procedures and how we went after those things were wrapped up in the self-esteem movement, which once again, it doesn't get us to where we need to go. Yeah. And everyone wants to celebrate the students with high self-esteem. I get it. I understand elevating them. But building resiliency, building emotional flexibility, that's where the magic truly happens. Because I know for me, when I finally had my comeuppance in graduate school and I finally got challenged and I was not the head of the pack. I was not elevated and celebrated like I was through my undergrad and even my high school career. That was a shock to the system. And I looked around and I didn't have the tools to handle it. You know, we get these letters all the time. In fact, there was one that had just came in this week about a young man who had to do a lot of questioning himself and everything that was going around him when he realized that he wasn't going to be able to play pro ball. Imagine that one. Once again, your whole entire life, you have gotten value and have been celebrated and you've gotten attention, approval and acceptance for this one thing. And then you that becomes your whole life. And now you can't pursue that any further. What are you going to do? Yeah, we've had professional baseball players, professional hockey players, professional basketball players all sitting on the couch at boot camp. What's what's up? And their career is now in shambles. And they're no longer celebrated for the one skill set that they put all of their value in. That's a tough place to be. Talk about taking a self-esteem hit. Listen, you were there. I was there. Some of the guys on the couch were there. And and this happens in everybody's life. This is not we're just not the people who've been picked out. This happens to everybody. Now, what happens when you get into that point? You can start drowning those feelings out and ignoring them through booze, drugs, right? A lot of people even Sugar Ray last week talked about that. You put yourself in a situation where people elevate you beyond where you even find value or think of yourself as valuable. And all of a sudden it leads you to some dark places. And some people just sweep these negative emotions under the rug. I can't listen to that. I got to block that person on social media. I don't want to hear that. And I will also say that let's say that you curb taking it through like numbing that feeling, medicating, right? So there's let's say you go to a different route. So shopping, video games, food, there is so many ways it will manifest itself in one way or another, unless you decide to ask the right questions, get answers that you are uncomfortable with and then lean into those answers, looking to rectify them. And of course, that's what we're talking about when we talk about rebuilding that confidence. And this is why our coaching programs all dig into this idea of the story action cycle. In fact, core confidence, our online group coaching program talks a lot about this so that we can start to understand the stories that drive our lives and we all have stories running in the back of our mind all day long, a narrative that we've built up. And sometimes these stories have been implanted and embedded from other people, strangers, teachers, coaches and their behaviors around us. We've assimilated into this story, this narrative that drives our behaviors. And sometimes we're not even aware of this story. We're not even it's happening subconsciously and thinking about it right now. How many of you even realize that there's a story driving your behaviors, leading you to listen to this podcast. So as we go through our day in the background of our mind, it's going through this story and it's basically our operating manual for living. It's how we run our day to day lives. And it is very effective because then we don't have to make constant decisions every single second of the day. Well, that that's exactly why we have it. If you are in if everything is on a conscious level, you're going to be worn out. You're going to be beat up. You're going to have mass anxiety because you have too many options ahead of you. That's why the story gets built. The story gets built on patterns that you see and you will even place those patterns where they don't belong in order for you to feel safe to move forward to move forward. And you can make decisions now subconsciously rather than consciously, because if you are making every decision of every moment of every day consciously, you would be a basket case. And this is why those people who tend to be super high on the intelligence bell curve tend to be neurotic. They tend to be a bit jumpy because they're aware of way too much. And of course, we know what that looks like to people who overanalyze the things, don't we? Just a little. Yeah. We've had a little bit of experience in that arena. Yes, we have. The problem starts to happen when we don't like part of that story. For example, we might be sitting in a business meeting and we need to voice some concerns. Yes. Our boss is now telling us something that we disagree with. So what happens? Our mind starts to go through that story that we've had. Well, when I sit in a business meeting, I never voice any concerns, so I need to just stay quiet. And that's what we do because that's our story. It's very hard to break from this story. Now, here we have a big problem because we can't just take that story, tear it up and overwrite it. No, well, there's there's so much that comes into play because not only do you have a story that people closest to you have a story about you, right? Because they have to put patterns to your behaviors so that they can feel safe with you and their life. And they start to get a little jumpy when you're not following their story. Absolutely. In fact, they can get angry. And this is what makes change difficult because not only do you have to change your own story, and your thoughts about how you're going to proceed about things. And you but then you have to also realize that it comes into play. We see it all the time of if I change my story, if I start behaving differently, well, then what's going to happen to the friends that I have? Well, and we talked about this, some will not be too thrilled about that. In fact, they're going to be a bit angry and they're going to ask a lot of questions. However, what you will find is you will separate the good friends that you have from the bad ones because your real friends who see these changes will start asking questions about why you're doing that. And when they see that it's allowing you to be successful and most importantly, happy in a positive manner, they will be there to encourage you. And also they will look to change their own story. Right. Now it is the story action cycle, meaning the story is running, the operating system, the manual is running, and then we take actions based on that story. If we want to rewrite our story, we have to break this cycle through action. And I know this personally for me getting into running. Yeah. For the very first time, Amy invited me to a Barry's bootcamp class. It must have been two plus years ago and involved running on a treadmill and lifting weights. Lifting weights, not a problem. My story said, AJ, you like lifting weights. Lifting weights is good for you. It's healthy behavior. But my personal story also said, AJ, you hate running. Yeah. And I had a lot of baggage around running. Running was a punishment in football. Yeah. I was the slowest one in the I was the slowest one on the team, which often led to me getting ridiculed. Right. Yeah. Running was not something I was found of. It was not something that I had in my story as this is something that AJ does. This is something that AJ enjoys. So I had built up this personal narrative that I hate running. Now, Amy drags me to Barry's bootcamp class and I hate running. Guess what? I hate Barry's bootcamp because of the running. I did not mind the lifting of weights, but I was like, this sucks. I don't like this class. I'm forced to run and, oh, by the way, everyone else in class is probably ridiculing me, right? This is the narrative that's going on in the back of my mind. Yeah. Now I kept going to Barry's bootcamp classes. I still disliked running, but I kept going. And slowly, but surely I saw my speeds tick up on the treadmill. I felt better and better after class. And then I just said to myself, well, what would be a challenge for someone who doesn't like running? What would be something that you're like, wow, I can't believe you did that. You said you hate running and half marathon popped into my mind. We dedicated time. We set goals one forty five for me, two hours for Johnny. We hit it hard in the training. I hated running during the training. Finally, when I my long run broke 10 miles, actually felt really good after it, started to feel the runners high, started to see my times creep down. All of a sudden, through all of those actions, the training, the long runs, the enjoyment that was associated with it, I started to change my own narrative. I actually enjoy running. I no longer hate running. I was able to break that cycle by taking a different action. So it's the story action cycle. A lot of us are unaware of the story. Now we've probably raised awareness around the story for you. We have to start thinking about ways that we can break that story action cycle by changing our actions first. Well, it always starts there because that's the one thing that you can bring to a conscious level. And if you can get some wins there, then you can go back and start to change the internal of that story. And I want to give large props to our trainer and who coached us through this, Chris Ty Walker. Because if it was, we were definitely we fought him a lot. Absolutely. And he had us mentally, emotionally and physically prepared for that marathon. And though I was getting worked up leading up to it, I just knew that that two hours that morning was going it was running and it was going to be painful. And there was going to be a lot of self talk and challenging ourselves. And I was ready for it. And I know you were ready for it. And though we were there was still some apprehension going into it, which we're going to talk about. But we were prepared for how we were going to deal with any of those questions that came up while we were doing that. And one fifty nine for Johnny one forty four for me. We both beat our goals going into it. I want to say I also had a piss break a mile six. So I could say there's a couple of all right. Could have shamed a little more time off there. And we'll give you credit on that. Yeah. When we take action, we start to rewrite that story. It's not the other way around, which is what this entire myth was about, right? It's not I need to feel confident first and then I'll start acting confidently. No, we need to start acting more confidently to start building that confidence to start changing that story. I need to start running. I need to start logging some miles before I can start to truly say, hey, I don't hate running. You know, and I think this is where people start to get a little bit nervous because people who are self aware don't like imposter syndrome. We hear this question a lot and I know that we'll be talking about it more in future episodes. And when you have to start acting outside the story that you have already written for yourself, it is going to feel weird and we talk about this. It's B over A. We've already have a program pathways that are built up, which we call decision A, right? It's the it's what we've always done, right? It's wired in our mind. That pathway has been firing for years. That is this story that we're talking about. That's the story. And now, all of a sudden, we realize that that story is no longer able to get us to where we need to go. We've come to that realization. So that means the story needs to be rewritten. So therefore, I must choose path B, which goes against the story. And now, though I feel awkward, it is new. I'm I'm acting at a conscious level because I have to bring it to a conscious level to make it that decision. And that's and because this is all new and there was apprehension and I've never done it before, it might not go well. In fact, it's going to be quite a mess. Yeah, it's going to be painful. I might still hate running. It's going to suck on the treadmill. But that's OK, because we're going to act first. And if you are able to celebrate the little small wins that say that choosing path B is going to is better than path A. We're going to shake it up. If we can see a few wins, then all of a sudden we can lean in that I'm doing the right thing. I've made the right decision. And those small wins allow you to know that you're moving in the right direction that all of a sudden slowly the story catches up now with the actions. Yeah. And listen, there were a number of moments when we started training for the half marathon, my first long run, six miles of the longest I'd ever run timing myself. You were excited that day. I was excited, nervous. And then I got my time and I was like, oh, my God, nine minutes a mile. How am I going to finish this half marathon? I thought six was the longest that I could possibly run. I felt awful. I go on social media. I'm seeing everyone else's half mile. I'm seeing everyone else's half marathon times and their splits. And I'm like, I'm not as fast as them. What am I doing? Why am I doing this? All of those things crept in. But slowly, but surely the time started creeping down. The run started getting longer. You started to feel a little bit better. You started to feel like, oh, OK, I'm seeing some improvement. Now, I certainly wasn't running 145 that next run, but that's the whole point. You start changing actions and slowly, but surely you rewrite that story. Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. I think that is the most beautiful way that has ever been articulated. How about letter by letter, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. That's that sounds that's beautifully put. And that's that that's how that works. That's how that story is getting the book getting together. And guess what? Over time, we start posting our times online. We start hearing from other people. Wow, you guys are running it. You guys are doing it. And they helped change our narrative. Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. To now I feel that I am a runner. If someone were to say you're not a runner, I would laugh. Sure. Six months ago, I'd agree with them. I'm not a runner. I hate running. That is how we start to build confidence. It is a complete myth to think that you have to feel confident in order to act confident, we got to act first. And then all of a sudden we're going to rewrite that story, break the story action cycle that's led us down a path of feeling less than lacking in confidence. The next myth that we want to talk about is this idea that some people just never fail. But before we get deeper into this, we need to address the other notion that ties into this myth, the idea that some people are born more confident than others. Now, there is research on this, the influence of genes on confidence. And it turns out that, yes, some people are born with more confidence than others. There is a very compelling study done by Robert Ploman, who's a behavioral geneticist at King's College in London. What Ploman did was he followed 15,000 sets of twins in the UK from birth to adulthood. What studying twins allowed him to do was look at the influence that our genes have on our personality. Ploman was studying both identical twins, those that have the same DNA and fraternal twins who only share part of their DNA. And what he and his team concluded after following all of these twins is that about 50 percent of our confidence is predetermined by our genes. That's arguably a lot. Yep. Now, scientists are still in debate about this. Some say it's less than that. They put the number around 25 percent. But basically science is saying that there is something to our genes influencing our confidence. So while scientists haven't settled the debate, we can conclude that we can conclude that confidence comes from both nature and nurture, not just a small part that's really in our genes. Well, I think that also goes with it being added to your parents. So if your parents understand, well, if it's genetically a long line of people in your history that understand how to walk into the unknown, ask questions and slowly develop and learn skills, that fear is predetermined. Right? Like so if my great-grandfather and my grandfather and my dad, they understand this. And of course, I'm being naturally taught this growing up that I'm going to have a good understanding about it. So I will fling myself into things a lot easier than other kids were who this wasn't in part of their background, wasn't in their DNA. And they certainly weren't exposed to it as children. Yeah, and I can definitely feel it from my own experience growing up, that there were some things that my family felt confident in doing and there are some things that they weren't confident in doing. And guess what? I happen to pick up on those patterns too, right? Some families tend to have academic confidence, some families tend to have athletic confidence. But here's the thing. We have to dispel this myth that you're either born with it or not because that becomes a convenient excuse not to improve yourself. Well, I think you should look at it in the manner of confidence being a nebulous term. You can't really grab onto it. And we're going to talk about this in a bit. But if it's a black box and you going out and learning new skills allows you to venture out into the black box, be a little bit more aware, paint more of that black box in. Well, that's slowly the confidence of that register that you get. But there's always going to be more unknown. It never ends. So all the only thing you can do is illuminate certain parts of this darkness at your end due time as you're going to go out and venture into it. Right. It's like those video games as a kid, right? You get the flashlight and then all of a sudden you're walking around the map and you're illuminating more of the map. And there become some areas of the map that are illuminated. And now you feel comfortable walking back through. I've killed those bosses. I've killed those ghosts. I know how to do this. I've been here before. But there's also going to be some other parts of the map where you got to walk in. You got to shine the flashlight on it. You got to figure some things out. So to wrap that up, it's no one is born with an illuminated black box. So there's going to be discovery for everybody. Some people will have a stronger flashlight. That's it. Their beam of light might illuminate more, but they're still discovering parts of the map just like you are. And it will be going on forever. There will always be parts that until they venture into those areas, they're going to be incredibly uncommon. And now here's the thing. And this is why we wanted to spell this myth, because social media has helped propagate it, that people don't fail. There are some people that are just successful at everything. Whether it was the high school quarterback who now got the great job after school, it just seems like he keeps winning. And over and over again, you see this, you feel this. Society propagates this idea. And then it becomes easy for you to assimilate into your story that, well, that's just not my lot in life. I'm not that lucky. I think we're getting to a part with this new technology where those things are starting to show a little bit better, where you can't hide only the, you can't show only the good stuff. The bad stuff is going to come out as well, because everybody has a camera. I mean, we can even see it with Elon Musk, right? He goes on Joe Rogan. And all of a sudden, everyone's screaming and hollering and billions of dollars are being lost and gained. And you know, we're getting to a place where it's going to be incredibly difficult to hide any of the bad stuff that you don't want people to find out about. And the longer you try to hide that, the more difficult it's going to be. Only to- The more painful it is on you as well. Yeah, the more painful it's going to be. So understanding that, of course, if you never fail, it's easy to have a lot of self-confidence, but that assumption may sound logical. It's just not realistic. You look at people that made a name for themselves, that have had a ton of success, and whether it's sports or business or even in history, and when you look at their story, all you see is that it also was full of failure. We read most biographies and autobiographies. You are going to find chapters around failure. You are going to find chapters around things in go as planned. I push through. I love listening to the podcast, How I Built This. They share countless stories of failure along their journey. That's what I- To every perfectionist I meet who has trouble in moving forward, I go, name your favorite artist. Now Google that and write sucks next to their name. Then you will- You will see everything you need to go, oh, okay, I can feel better about this. It's okay to fail. In fact, it's going to be failure, which is going to get me closer to my goals. And listen, there's one proven way to never fail, to never take a dent in your self-confidence, and that's to live life in your comfort zone. Yeah, and that doesn't sound fun. No, staying on the couch, never trying anything new. Who here would actually do this? In fact, that's why most of our alumni end up working with us in the coaching programs online or in person. They're sick of this safe comfort zone where they're not getting what they truly want out of life. What's difficult, and I was thinking about this the other evening, was there are certain episodes in my life where I have put myself out there or did something new or was trying something where the backlash that I had gotten from it socially was so, well, it hurt internally in that moment so much that it's permanently burned into my brain. And it's not permanently burned into my brain as a positive or what was that person's problem or anything positive. It is burned into my brain of this is why you never step out ever again. And these moments, even if I look back at them, I can logically see my way around them and see the fault. But how at 45 years old as of yesterday, how it's those moments are still burned into my brain. And anytime that I'm doing something new, I have flashes of those moments and I have to roll forward despite the emotional pull that they have when they pop up. Yeah. So that's an important point here. Those failures are still going to be there. We're not sweeping them under the rug. We're not turning ourselves into someone who is a shell of ourselves and who only looks at the positive and always dismisses the negative. But it's choosing to act even if you're feeling that discomfort. That's what we're talking about. Well, even at 45, if I see one of those people post something on Facebook, I still at this moment get angry and go, what is this asshole saying now? And it has 20 years removed, but it is still burned in. And there's still a feeling and a emotion attached to that name, that person, that face. It's quite funny how those things are etched in permanently. And listen, when we're exiting our comfort zone, there are two things that are guaranteed to happen. Number one, you are going to feel some anxiety. There's no getting around it. Your mind is wired for comfort. And when you are putting in a situation that it hasn't been before, it's going to express that discomfort in the form of anxiety. The second thing that's going to happen when we step outside of our comfort zone is we are going to fail. We are going to make mistakes. We did not hit every training run that Chris had outlined for us. No. In fact, there were some days where I was so beat up that having to go through that training that day, realizing how that I wasn't making it, put me in a place of feeling bad, but also here's the moment where I'm going to persevere. I'm going to reach a new place. This is going to be, this is where the development happens. And in all this, as much as I want to quit or I'm upset in this moment to persevere and only blast through that a week or two later, that is the biggest win. You want to talk about strengthening core confidence. There it is in that moment to persevere and get the win on the other side where failure was just happened. And here's the thing. In those moments, you're going to have that voice saying, you said you hate running, AJ, why are you doing this? You're going to have that voice of your high school football coach saying, you're the slowest guy on the team. What's wrong with you? You're also going to have those moments where you're like, but wait a second, that training run I did yesterday, I was phenomenal on. And two weeks ago, I ran further than I ever did before. That's what we're talking about. Taking action allows you to drown out some of the negative voices with new experiences that show to you that you should feel confident in this area. And over time, those voices are going to drown out all the negatives so that you feel even more comfortable moving forward. You know, we were laughing after the race. Man, I feel like I could have ran 15, 16, 17 miles. Why do we stop at 13.1? Yeah. Leading up to it, we were like, why does this thing have to be 13.1? It's very easy for you to swing both ways. If you are constantly pushing yourself outside of that comfort zone, those training runs were outside of our comfort zone. They were the longest distances we'd ever run. They were some of the most terrifying terrain we'd ever run. Hills and Beverly Hills going up and down side streets, dodging cars and traffic in Hollywood. Yeah, that was certainly the most difficult part for me in the training is running on Sunset or Hollywood Boulevard at 7 in the morning. There was quite scary and there was no way of putting in my ear pods and zoning out and just cruise it outside. I would have been wrecked. Now, let's talk about dealing with failure because if we're trying to build confidence, if we're trying to rebuild our confidence, then failure is going to be something that we have to surmount to start building things. Now, first off, we are not going to try to tell you to suppress the pain or pretend that failure doesn't happen. You're not going to hear that here. And science doesn't approve of that message either. You need to feel the pain of failure. You need to build the emotional flexibility and resilience to push beyond that pain. The second thing is, if you just took a blow to your confidence, well, yeah, there's going to be a healing process. You don't just bounce back. I'd love to run 10 miles today. My body's telling me, no, dude, not a good idea. You are going to have to heal up a bit. And lastly, you may feel a very strong urge to black out, block that out of your mind, not focus on that. Go to the other extreme, overindulgent self-pity. I can't believe I'm such a failure at everything and trying to turn that into your whole narrative and story. It may make sense in the moment, but it actually does not improve where you need to be. Putting your head in the sand and pretending that it didn't happen is not going to improve what happened after that failure. Yeah. And one of the things I want to talk about this is several different ways of looking at failure and diving into failure. For one, now that I understand the process and how it works and I know that failure is part of the learning process, when I have the choice to walk into the unknown wanting and willingly, I can commit to the process and I know what is going to happen. And so by committing to the process, I open myself up with a good sense of humor of how this is going to go. So I can laugh in the procedure and enjoy it for what it is because there are some of the best laughs, some of the best moments, the best inside jokes that you're going to build with your accountability in these moments. And we have many from this training. The other thing is when you have a healthy outlook about it and you understand how it works, then you can partake in overreaching, which is a difficult thing. You don't want to, if you don't understand how this works, overreaching and coming up short can destroy you, can work in the opposite way. However, if you understand how failure works, how the learning process works, you can subscribe to overreaching because to push yourself farther than you ever been before, knowing that coming up short very well may happen, but it pushes you farther than you would ever have been in. And the only time that I would suggest overreaching is when you fully understand how the learning process works and you're able to do that in a healthy manner. In fact, a lot of people, Bill Gates, is one who supports overreaching. In fact, this is a guy who was selling software that he didn't even have because he loved that idea of going for something so extreme. But you have to have a healthy attitude about it in order for that to work. Yeah, and this idea of either, oh my God, have a great sense of self-pity, or completely dismiss the failure, that is your brain trying to protect you from the pain, but it actually doesn't serve you. So throwing a self-pity party or pretending failure didn't happen is not a healthy way to learn that growth and learning process that Johnny was talking about in overreaching. Now, here's the other side of this, right? If our brain tells us that we're going to fail and embarrass ourselves and then we do it, it's going to hone in on that. I told you this would happen. Yep. Don't ever do that again. So this is not how growth happens and it's not how healing happens either. In order to be able to grow, we need to learn from the failure and to do that, we first need to process the failure. And in order to heal, we need to accept the blow to the ego and then accept the feeling and move on. And here's some simple ways that we can do this. Now, number one, we're big proponents of journaling. And even in this race training, we used an app called Strava, which was journaling. Yeah. It was tracking our results where we ran, what our splits were. And over time, it started showing us, hey, AJ, on that six mile run, you ran this one mile clip the fastest ever. Hey, AJ, you ran this one and a half mile turn, the second fastest ever. Oh, this was your slowest time on an uphill. In that journaling process, even in those days that I felt, man, my times weren't where I wanted them to be, I could look back and go, well, holy cow, that first time I ran, that was a nine minute mile. Yeah. So journaling allows you to, one, effectively process all of those thoughts and feelings and emotions that are inevitably going to come out of failure. And I think, I mean, to go along with that, when you opened up Strava and it showed your splits, that it say failed, it gave you numbers. It gave you data points. It didn't say failure. And you make with those numbers what you want to make with them. And we've said this many times. We don't use that term failure in class. In fact, we don't use it as people because we understand how bad that is. Now, there are times where we come up short and the only question then is, well, why did that happen and what are we going to do next time? Failure is out of the equation. It just doesn't exist. And people want to talk about social constructs. Well, that is the biggest one that you could put together. It's right there. I got a funny story. When we first moved to LA, we were trying to drum up business here in LA. We had strong following in New York. And we, at the time, we thought it was a genius marketing idea. We were going to put ads over urinals and local bars to try to get people to come check out our free course on how to talk to people. And talk about what I'd like to forget. Yeah, those ads failed miserably. Miserably. But we learned over urinal advertising, probably not the best place to find leads for our business. Yeah. Now, failure, if we looked at it solely as failure, well, a lot of us would be like, oh, got to quit. Got to pack up the business, stop the podcast, give up. You, over time, start to realize that you're learning, even when you're failing, and when you can change the lens on those actions and look for, well, what did I learn so that I don't repeat the failure, now you're actually growing. As Johnny said, when we're growing that tomato plant, if we have the stick pointing straight up to the sun and we can guide it through, hey, what's the lesson here? What's the lesson? Stay on course. It's going to grow and it's going to flower and it's going to give us great tomatoes. But if our stick is shooting out sideways, not getting any closer to the sunlight, well, you're going to have a pretty crummy harvest of tomatoes. Yeah. And it's only going to continue going that way. And the other thing about over the urinal advertising, now, I'm sure that there are many people listening to this who, their immediate thoughts of hearing that went, well, I could have told you guys that. Yeah. And plenty of people have told us other things over the years about how to run the business. But here's the thing. If you don't do it, you just don't know for sure. That is now x'd out. But if you get into that mode where, well, I could have told you that. Well, then that sort of, that will pop up that phrase in a lot of things if you've leaned into it. And all of a sudden that becomes your mantra. Well, I could have told you that. That's in the back of your head. Well, it was right this time. So it's got to be right this time. No, it's not at all. It's not how it works. And until it has been tested, it is in the air. And every, this is why every thought and idea is up for scrutiny. I'm sorry. And it doesn't matter who said it. Unless they've given you the data and say, well, listen, I've already done that. This is why I could have told you that. And here's the data. Okay. Now you got me. Right now I'm listening. Now I'm listening. And that's what we're talking about. Journaling is capturing that data. Yep. Journaling is an opportunity for you to take an account. How did I think and feel in this moment? Well, that run sucked. I still think running sucks. Okay. What are the positives I can take out of that? Well, AJ, you ran six miles. That's the farthest you've ever run. Okay. Where do I need to work? Well, those are nine minute splits. That's not going to get us to our 145 marathon. That's not going to get us to our 145 half marathon. Okay. Now I can work to improve. That's the power of journaling. You have an outlet for your emotions and feelings. You have an opportunity to look at the data in a meaningful way, take the lesson, process the loss, and move on. Now the second thing we can do here is spending time with our loved ones. Right? Yeah. In those moments of failure, find your support group. Find your Wolfpack. Find your teammates. Find the people who are going to be happy to bring you up. And listen, we know it's difficult to showcase failure. I know for ourselves here, as the business has had its lumps over the years, it's been difficult to say, hey, things aren't working. Yeah, things aren't going the way we want. Hey, we aren't getting the results we're after. It can be very tough. Your ego's definitely bruised. But guess what? When you're surrounded by people who care about you, they can allow you to see some things that maybe you weren't looking at. Maybe you weren't shining your flashlight on. I know in those moments where we've had some pretty colossal failures, it's been my friends and loved ones who've said, yeah, but you've been doing this for so long. Yeah, but this other thing you tried, it did work. Keep going. Those have been crucial moments for us to power through that failure. What's funny about all of this, and the last tip that we're going to share actually comes from Dr. Sean Stevenson, a good buddy of ours, asks yourself this. What's so funny about this? When you look at failure through the lens of humor, when you look back at failure through the lens of comedy, yes, maybe it's not going to be easy, but what you're doing here is you're going to take that same experience and shift your focus from the negative into a more positive emotion. And who knows, you might actually get a good laugh out of it. I think this is also why so many movies that showcase dark humor are so funny to a lot of us, because though it's cringy to watch, we're able to laugh at it because we've been in those situations and it puts us to a place where we don't want to have to go back to. But however, being able to laugh at it from that lens is the first step of you gaining from it. Now, the third myth that we wanted to bunk today is the idea that confidence is just a feeling. Yes, I know what you're thinking. What do you mean? Of course, confidence is a feeling. Well, we all want to feel confident and we think that once we feel confident, everything's going to be easy. And of course, we as coaches get this every time people asking us how they can finally feel more confident. But let's delve into the etymology of confidence. The idea that confidence is a feeling is rooted in pop culture. Man, how poisonous is pop culture? It's utterly destructive. It really does. It poisons the mind. In fact, Russ Harris talks about the fact that this notion of confidence as a feeling has come into our Western culture only a few decades ago. And Dr. Stephen Hayes is going to talk about this next week as well. The original meaning of confidence, however, is quite different. A hundred years ago, if you would ask people what confidence means, they'd have said, well, trusting yourself to do what matters. And we just have to look at the roots of the word confidence to see this. Confidence comes from the Latin confidieri. And this translates to with trust. Now, when we look at the roots of words, we can now start to see that if we trust ourselves to do what matters. Well, of course, that's coming from a place of confidence. The most confident people on the planet, they do the actions of confidence. Yes. They do something with trust and with knowledge knowing that doing so is important. Well, what other word do we know that has con in the middle in the beginning of it? Right? Con man. What is he doing? Right? Gaining your trust. With trust, he's getting your trust to take action. Now, we are guilty of this too. We always talk about feeling more confident just because this is how the word has been used in our culture. But we certainly believe that it's important to make this distinction. In reality, confidence is nothing more and nothing less than taking action and doing what matters. I know that in our core confidence group, our video based group coaching program, the first exercise that our coach, Michael, does with the group is to ask the question, what would you do if you had unlimited confidence? And that's a wonderful question. I mean, what would you do? Think about that for a minute. Sure. Would you run a marathon? Would you jump out of a plane? Would you approach that attractive person? Would you run into the networking event and run the room? What would you do if you had unlimited confidence? And what comes to this, of course, is a long list of things like we just talked about. We can go to the party. We could talk to more people. We can go outside. We can have more deep connections with people. We can take on new challenges, mental, physical. If we are confident, we need to act with trust. Act with trust. Trust in yourselves and take action. And that is where I love the skyscraper analogy that you have, Johnny. Yeah. I've talked about this before and we discuss it in class. And this is where the difference is. So we talk about how you shouldn't view it as a feeling and that's the way pop culture has us viewing it. Great. Fine. Then how should I view it? Well, this is it, right? So we talk about confidence as if it's a structure because we talk about building confidence. Let's do what we can to maintain our confidence. Let's go out and put it together. And so we're going to talk about it as if it's a structure. So if we're going to talk about it as if it's a structure, then we should view it as a structure. Now, anything that we build takes time. And we're going to use the twin towers here. This is a nice, visceral visual. So we, how long has it taken? How long is it? How long did it take to build those towers? Obviously that took years to put those things together and your confidence is no difference. It takes years and building it. Everything that you do is going to help maintain it and build it. But we also understand how easily we can bring those towers down. We've seen that happen. And in fact, your confidence, much like those towers, can be brought down very easily. And here's the thing. When we think about these structures, right? We don't just build a structure and go, oh, that structure is going to be around for a thousand years. Exactly. We have a team of staff members who are replacing the windows, changing the floors, keeping that structure upright. Well, yeah, let's look at that. What if we were to build those towers and never ever touch them again? What is going to happen? Nature in and itself. Destroys. Destroys. And it's going to, those towers are going to deteriorate. They're going to be overgrown. They're going to start to slowly collapse. So you already have nature in and itself looking to take out those towers. And I can tell you that your confidence, if you just do something here and there to build it and then don't touch it again, it will slowly start to deteriorate. So you have that working against you, right? Now, what would be metaphorical planes in the side of your structural confidence? How about losing your job? You think that will mess with you? How about a relationship collapsing on itself and some, a trusting partner had. Taking advantage of you. Taking advantage of you. That would be a metaphorical plane into the side of that confidence. And these are things much like nature in itself that at some point in time is going to happen. You're going to have these, this loss, these things that are going to happen. Now, if you remember the towers, those planes hitting them wasn't the very first time that they've ever been attacked. Right. There's been other times. There was a. A bombing beneath in the basement. Yeah. There was a van rule in the fertilizer being parked under in the basement in the parking garage and that didn't take those towers out. Why didn't it take those towers out? Because those towers were built to withstand that and your confidence much in the same manner is going to need to be able to be built to withstand attacks like that, to withstand the loss that is in and inevitably coming your way just in life in and itself. So the way I see it and the way we look at it here at the Art of Charm is you have two choices every day that you wake up. You can either contribute to the forces that are looking to tear down your confidence or you can actively participate in forces that are looking to strengthen and build your confidence. And when you look at it in that manner, that is a very easy choice. And so what am I going to do? And not only that, I can plan my day, my week, my month and my year and actively looking for opportunities to strengthen my confidence, to strengthen that structural confidence. And that's very important. And what are those things that we're going to be doing? Well, that is going to be taking more opportunities to walk in the unknown with the flashlight and illuminating places that I've never been. And that is going to unlock that and that's going to strengthen it up. So when inevitably that loss comes your way, you will be able to withstand it. Your towers won't come down. Yes, you've taken a hit. Yes, you've sustained some damage, but it's not going to destroy you. Right. And if we think about confidence in three factors, and this is our cake equation, love using acronyms. This is taken directly from our bootcamp course. On day one, we talk about how to actually break down confidence into something that is not a feeling. Yes. And it's something that we can actively work on, as Johnny said, day in and day out. And when we think about this cake equation, the C in cake is confidence, it breaks into three factors, attitude, knowledge and experience. And if you focus diligently on improving your attitude, gaining knowledge and gaining experience in life, you are actively building that tower of confidence. Now, there are going to be many opportunities where your confidence is going to be shaken. Yes. And in those moments, you can look through this same lens and say, okay, was my attitude in the right place? Did I have enough knowledge going in? Or maybe I needed some more experience. And in all of those situations, whether it was a physical challenge, a mental challenge, an emotional challenge, I've come back to the same three factors. Was my mindset right? Did I have enough knowledge? Did I have enough experience? And when it comes to building confidence on race day, last weekend, why did we feel so confident? Well, number one, because our coach, Chris, focused on having the right attitude. Yes. Focusing on the right things, realizing that if we got in 10, 11 miles in distance, we could get to a place of 13.1. It's possible. The second thing is the knowledge of what to do on race day, right? This is the stuff you guys can expect. This is what is going to happen. This is how to prepare yourself. Well, and two weeks prior, we even went on a five mile race just to get a taste of what it was going to be, the energy and what was going on, so that we would be able to pace ourselves and not get wrapped up in what was going. Right, because let's be honest, the energy runs, you're on your own. Yep. You're not in a crowd. You're not competing with other people, jockeying, trying to catch someone else. You're running on your own. And lastly, that experience, all those miles logged leading up to race day. Well, those three things came in to factor in our confidence on Sunday. On Sunday morning, I knew, based on my training, my knowledge of the course, and my attitude going in, that I was going to have a successful race. You know, for myself, on the five mile race, I got swept up in getting ahead, getting away from people. I had a bunch of adrenaline going. I even forgot my watch, so I wasn't able to put Strava on and realized how easy it was for me to get influenced and manipulated to race ahead, only to get caught up in my first mile being at 720. And at that moment realizing, I can't keep this up, not at 40 years old. And of course, I was winded. And granted, yeah, I was able to do the five mile. We were well prepared for that. But that allowed me to know that on race day, in those corrals amongst all of those people who were amped up and fired up, that I was gonna, how I was gonna go about it. I had a strategy and it was won over from those two weeks earlier. Now, when you think about confidence with trust, it starts with your attitude. Do you trust that you're gonna be able to accomplish your goals? Do you trust in yourself? That attitude is the ability to stay positive even in the face of temporary setbacks or adversity. Positivity is gonna open you up. Negativity obviously is gonna shut you down. You know, it was funny. I was just doing a Facebook live with our, on the family page leading up to the race. And there was a few people that were going to be there cheering us on. And I let them in to know that in moments where I was gonna question myself and I was having difficulty, which, and when you're doing something like that, it's gonna be there, that in those moments, I was gonna start smiling as best and as loud and proud as I possibly could. And if you saw me smiling in those moments, you know that I'm having an internal dialogue and I'm trying to have some fun with it. And that was my plan. And of course, in those moments, knowing what I was going to do when I've had those moments and I did put on that big smile, then the only thing I could do was laugh about the process that I was going in, which made that funny. Absolutely. And when we look at the three factors, attitude, knowledge, experience, attitude is often the hardest for us to improve. I agree. Especially when we're lacking in confidence. So let's talk about the other two factors. Knowledge, I feel at this day and age right now, you're listening to us on a podcast. You have access to more knowledge than ever in history. Well, everything sounds like you have it. So when it comes to lagging confidence, knowledge tends not to be as big of a factor for most people. They've spent some time and energy there. Well, it definitely helps to go in over prepared. Understanding what's ahead of you. I know for myself on race day, if I had no idea what to anticipate, I would have lacked a lot of confidence lacing it up and taking off. Well, there is a small part of that of not being so prepared that I think that if you are a little bit arrogant, well, a little bit ignorant about things and you don't know any better, it can help. I can certainly say that as an entrepreneurial, as an entrepreneur, that I was able to accomplish some of those things because I just didn't know any better and that helped. And I definitely think that sometimes I feel that over analyzing the situation or getting this knowledge can actually, can definitely hurt at times. Well, that's the thing. Because it's the easiest of the three components for us to get. We tend to spend the most time there. It's easy. It's easy for me to go online and watch YouTube videos and read books and listen to podcasts. I mean, there are countless clients who've come through the boot camp, sat on the couch and told us what, Johnny, I read all the books. I read all the books. I watched all the videos. I listened to every single one of your podcasts. I still can't approach that person. I still don't know what to say. I run out of things to say. My mind goes blank. And that is going to bring us to experience. But before we get to that point, the other one is what happens if I get here? What happens if I get to this point? This is where everyone that I've read about has trouble. Well, why don't you worry about that when you get there? Rather than not even trying, right? Because you're worried about this point where a lot of other people had trouble. You have even gone off the couch. Why are we worrying about that? So that brings us to experience. Right. An experience is the one that is difficult to get, but actually can help you change your attitude, can help you take this knowledge and make it actionable. When we actually go out and run, not just watch running videos on YouTube and get all pumped up for the race, but when we actually log the miles, we're doing the hard stuff that builds confidence come race day. Now, when you think of all of those areas of your life where you feel really confident and most of us listening to this, it's probably in our career. Well, we have these three factors firing on all cylinders. You went to school. You studied your balls off. You worked really hard. You got all the experience and the apprenticeship and the residency when you were making peanuts and you worked under someone and you gained all of that valuable experience. And through those two things, you started to change your attitude. You started to believe that this is possible. I can do this. You know, to go back to what something you were saying about watching all the videos, the day before the race, you watched a couple race documentaries to get amped up, to motivate you, to pump it up. Now, that was the day before the race. That wasn't before you decided to train for this race to learn all about running and what you need to do. No, you dove into it to get the experience so that when you are able to, when it does become the day before race day, you can watch these videos to amp yourself up, to motivate rather than to give you too much knowledge to where now you're going to have anxiety over things that you don't know about. And I understand that knowledge around race day and watching the documentaries, that helps with mindset. There was some interesting mindset stuff there. It also showed me other people's experience. But it certainly did not simulate what was actually going to happen. On race day. No. And I think that's where a lot of us get hung up. We get hung up on the easiest step of gaining knowledge, watching other people do it, reading everything we can, doing that Google deep dive and clicking around and going on subreddits. But we tend not to put focus on getting the real world experience and really focusing on changing that attitude. And when we hire a coach, well what does a coach do? A coach articulates for you an action plan to get the experience and then a good coach will hone in on your attitude and mindset through that experience. There were some weeks where we got overconfident and Chris was like, you guys ain't seen nothing yet? Yeah. And then there were other weeks where we're like, I don't know how we're going to finish this race, dude. This sucks. And he's like, you guys got it. You have more in the tank. And that's what a coach can bring out. A coach is going to do a reality check on your attitude. A coach is going to focus in on the crucial knowledge that you need to have, right? When we are in a situation like we are today where we can just consume knowledge from any source, trusted or not trusted, well, it can become analysis paralysis. We can have too much information for our own good. We can be pointed in the wrong direction because we took all of that knowledge into consideration. You know, how many movies, there's one that comes up specifically, which is Heartbreak Ridge. It's a Clint Eastwood movie where he was, I can't remember the fight that they were going into, but here was this old, older, grizzled veteran who was going into the boot camp and training his cadets. If I use the wrong terminology, my apologies. And there was, the movie was about his fight with the learned scholars of military and all the red tape, and basically it was this fight of, if you weren't there, you can't tell me what to do. And I think there was a lot more of this bureaucracy that came in as now as this knowledge comes out where making these decisions from 20,000 miles away is not going to help when you're in it. Absolutely, right? Every movie we've talked about over the years comes back to that you can have as good of a plan as you want, and everything goes out the window when you get punched in the face. I could just imagine, right? So here I am, I'm on mile 10, right? And previously, that was as far as both of us had run. So here I am walking into the unknown and I'm nervous. You know what I'm going to call? I'm going to get on my iWatch here, my Apple Watch. I'm going to call my mom and see what she's got to say, right? Mom, listen, I'm just bossed mile 10, and I'm not quite sure how I'm going to make this happen. And my mom could tell me, well, listen, I know you, and you're going to get it done. Great, thanks, mom. And I'm off to finish the other three. It doesn't work. Right. I wish it worked that way. Absolutely. So knowledge is easy for us to accumulate, but often we overlook those other two factors in building confidence. Changing our mindset, starting to believe that things are possible is a step in the right direction towards feeling confident, towards acting with trust in ourselves, but ultimately experiences where that rubber hits the road. And that's why in the boot cap setting, we focus on these three areas. We distill down the best knowledge around socializing, but also shifting those attitudes. And we focus on experience. Everything in the boot camp is experiential. It's immersive so that you're not just passively taking notes from me and Johnny. You could do that listening to the show. Yes. We take you out in Los Angeles to get the experience to build that confidence. Now, when we think about confidence in this manner, it actually becomes something that we can have a plan to build. We can have a plan to work towards, right? It's not some fleeting emotion. Oh, I wish I felt more confident. Oh, I'm going to think my way into acting. It doesn't work that way. Absolutely. And upon listening to this, you should feel, well, it shows that you have two choices here, right? Am I going to get up tomorrow and start actively working on these things, or am I going to watch another video about things I'd like to do? And next week, we're going to have Dr. Steven Hazon, one of the founding fathers of acceptance commitment therapy. Act, which is all about building this self-confidence that we're all chasing. And it's going to be really fun to have a great conversation because we've built a lot of the bootcamp principles around act and its ability to not only change your mindset, but change your life. And when we talk about building confidence, that does change your life. When you can start trusting in yourself to take those actions, living outside of your comfort zone, well, that's where life truly happens. I never six months ago would have imagined I would have completed 13.1 miles with my best friend, Johnny, and my girlfriend, Amy. We crushed our time. We had a great time doing it. And now we're ready for that next challenge. The next one. We've already been kicking around some ideas. And we haven't we haven't inked anything yet, but I think within a week here or two, we'll figure that out. But we've got some good ones up there. We would love to hear from you. Yeah. What would you do if you had unlimited confidence in what's stopping you from taking those actions? Let us know. We're always excited to hear from you all. You can email us at questions at theartofcharm.com. We're going to be taking your questions on building confidence this entire month or through social media on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter at the Art of Charm, or you can always send us a voice message and we might just play it on a future episode. Also do us a favor and write us a review and iTunes or your favorite podcast app. It would mean the world to us. In conclusion, these were three myths about confidence that we wanted to debunk today to help you start rebuilding your confidence. Number one, artificially boosting your self-esteem in order to become more successful in life is not supported by science. Instead, do it the other way around. You need to start taking action. If you do that consistently, then you will rewrite that story that you've been telling yourself about who you are. Yes, confidence is to a certain degree genetic, but no matter how confident or successful someone is, there's just no way to go through life without failing. And that's a good thing because it allows us to grow. And lastly, the myth that confidence is just a feeling. This is something that Western culture has been pushing for the last few decades, but instead, it's a quality of action that you bring into everything you do. It's the idea of trusting yourself to do what really matters. And in the end, that's all that counts.